*CFP* "AUDIENCIAS Y NUEVAS FORMAS DE EMISIÓN: LINEAL, BAJO DEMANDA, STREAMING Y/O SOCIAL", VOL. 14 Nº 1, REVISTA MEDITERRÁNEA DE COMUNICACIÓN

La multiplicación de las pantallas donde se pueden consumir todo tipo de contenidos ha complicado la forma para medir el éxito y el impacto de cualquier tipo de obra audiovisual o campaña de comunicación estratégica (publicidad, RR.PP.). Este call for paper está abierto a cualquier investigación que intente medir, cuantificar o comparar la medición de la nueva era digital ante la que nos enfrentamos. ¿Volverá a recuperar la televisión del salón la hegemonía? ¿Se quedará el teléfono móvil con la mayoría de cuota de consumo audiovisual como ya ha hecho con la navegación web frente a otros dispositivos? ¿Cómo están afectando las nuevas ventajas de distribución a los consumos y el comportamiento de los públicos? Nos encontramos ante un contexto cambiante donde se agradecen investigaciones que abran nuevas líneas que ayuden a esclarecer el futuro de las audiencias en el mundo de las campañas y el entretenimiento.

 

Tématicas de investigación:

• El nuevo concepto de audiencia. ¿Qué constituye una audiencia hoy? ¿Cuáles son sus características e intereses?

*CFP* "FROM CINEMA CULTURE TO CINEMA MEMORY", THREE-DAY CONFERENCE

‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’

6 - 9 April, 2022

Lancaster University, UK

 

‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’ is a three-day conference that invites speakers to discuss a range of themes relating to cinema culture and cinema memory. The conference will mark the climax of a 3-year AHRC-funded project, ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond’ (CMDA). The project gathers together a range of material relating to cinema memory in a comprehensive digital archive, a vast amount of which has been made available to view freely online for the first time. Information on this project can be found here. The relationship between cinema culture and cinema memory is explored in ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory: a Conceptual and Methodological trajectory’ (Kuhn, upcoming)

Key themes to explored at the conference are:

*CFP* "NATIONHOOD, IDENTITY, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION", BOOKS BEYOND BOUNDARIES CONFERENCE

Books Beyond Boundaries Conference: Nationhood, Identity, and Speculative Fiction

15th-16th January 2021,

Ulster University, Belfast Campus

 

'Culture is the context within which we need to situate the self, for it is only by virtue of the interpretations, orientations and values provided by culture that we can formulate our identities, say ‘who we are’, and ‘where we are coming from’ (Benhabib, 2000:18)

From C.S. Lewis to James Shaw, Northern Irish and Irish fiction is best known for its imagined histories, futures, and alternate realities. However, speculative fiction from writers of colour and ethnic minorities have been notably absent from the literary canon. While the island of Ireland has continued to grow more culturally diverse in the twenty-first century, there has been little engagement with how the cultural identity of Northern Ireland and Ireland has been transformed through immigration.

*CFP* "THE WORKS OF SHONDA RHIMES", SCREEN STORYTELLING EDITED VOLUME

This edited volume on the works of Shonda Rhimes will be the first book in a new series to be published by Bloomsbury Academic. Seeking 250-word abstracts for previously unpublished essays on television series created by Rhimes. Final essays will be 3,000-3,500 words, written for an audience of student readers, and will be due in the Spring of 2022.

The Screen Storytelling series is designed for students, professors, and enthusiastic consumers of film, television, and new media who seek information about contemporary and historically significant screenwriters that is both accessible and critically rigorous. The intention with this new series is to bring much-deserved attention to screen and television writers who have developed noteworthy films and television series of significant aesthetic or cultural achievement, critical acclaim, or commercial success, and to offer close readings of the films and series from the perspective of story, screenwriting craft, audience reception, and cultural impact. Each volume will explore the works of a single screen storyteller. The series will place a strong focus on examining works by screenwriters often left out of classroom syllabi, including women, writers of color, LGBTQ writers, and international writers. (Note: The Works of Jane Anderson is slated as the second volume in the series.)

 

The Works of Shonda Rhimes

*CFP* "COSTUME AND FAIRY TALES", SPECIAL ISSUE, STUDIES IN COSTUME & PERFORMANCE JOURNAL

Costume plays an important part both in traditional fairy tales and in their adaptations in diverse media forms, especially in performing arts such as theatre, ballet, opera, and musical, but also in other media such as film, visual art, manga, theme parks, video games, and digital and social media. Clothes worn by characters in fairy tales function according to the internal narrative logic that constitutes and organizes the story-world, defining and transforming the wearers’ identities and social contexts. In this sense, fairy-tale clothes can be regarded as costume, defined as the kind of clothes that bear significance, within a staged, performed moment for an audience, ranging from traditional theatre to live art, through spoken, movement based, or sung performance. The ubiquitous persistence of fairy tales in popular cultures across the globe renders them a means to express social, cultural and psychological anxieties, evoking ethical dimensions of individual and collective struggles. As such, the way characters are embodied through their clothes bears significant narrative and performative potential in layering of meanings in performance making.

Equally, iconic fairy tale characters may float away from their narrative roles and be found to be expressing key themes in contemporary performance-based artistic practices. For example, Korean-born photographer Chan-Hyo Bae in his Existing in Costume series (2006-) casts himself in the roles of princesses in European fairy tales such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty by wearing authentic dresses worn by ruling-class women in eighteenth-century England, thereby foregrounding the physical and metaphorical tension between the male Asian body and those kinds of historical costumes which evidence the Eurocentric colonial norms still dominant in today’s globalized culture.

*CFP* "BLACK AND QUEER, MUSIC ON SCREEN", SPECIAL ISSUE, LIQUID BLACKNESS: JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND BLACK STUDIES

This special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies proposes to work on Black Queer expression in audiovisual musics cutting across histories of the avant-garde, popular audiovisuality, and frameworks both transnational and critically transhistorical. The goal of the issue is to set up the framework for a survey of Black and Queer musicality in audiovisual media so as to suggest “non-contemporaneous” dialogues between and across historical registers and media platforms, so that the critical expressive power of non-conforming persons of color become a given rather than an alibi, an absence, or a projection.

From early sound cinema to the present, queer or gender non-conforming black artists have voiced a complex series of claims, propositions, demands, and desires, from the introduction of sound to the cinematic screen to the introduction of social media video in networked digital cultures. Black feminist and queer scholarship has often engaged with the meanings and powers expressed in these works, or in musical artists indebted to them or referencing them, from Angela Davis’ reading of transformations of historical memory in Smith’s St. Louis Blues (Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms), to Lindon Barrett’s study of Billie Holiday (Blackness and Value), to Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of errancy in relation to woman-identified women singers in the early years of recording (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments), and Daphne Brooks’ recent reading of black women’s use of arrangement, sonic curation, and blackness as technology (Liner Notes for the Revolution) in articulating a politics of being and becoming. 

*CFP* "CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SECOND WIFE", BOOK CHAPTER

This slightly revised call is for abstracts for a scholarly, international edited collection entitled, Cultural Representations of the Second Wife: Literature, Stage, and Screen.

Currently I am seeking a number of academics and professionals in the field who might like to send me an abstract for consideration for inclusion in the book.

Due to effects of the covid-19 pandemic 2020-21, and the strain this has placed on people and businesses (including academics and universities world-wide), the deadline for abstracts for this project has been extended.

The aim of this scholarly edited collection is to reveal how the personal expectations and actual experiences of the second wife may differ from the social and cultural expectations and realities of the role of the second wife; and how the second wife may be perceived in the popular and social culture of various cultures, in screen, stage, and literary productions and pop culture narratives.

In any culture, religious and cultural beliefs are inseparable, and intrinsic one to the other, and are important to the marriage customs and laws of that particular culture or society.

*CFP* "BROADCASTING IN (DE)COLONIAL SETTINGS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF RADIO & AUDIO MEDIA

The emergence of radio introduced profound changes in public communication, changing patterns of information dissemination at local, national and international levels. In the case of the Imperial nations this role was extended overseas with radio becoming the most important medium for uniting the home countries with the expats living in the far reaches of the empires, though not unproblematically.

A growing body of literature on the history of imperial and colonial broadcasting, as well as of sound, have been contributing to the understanding of the role of radio technologies, broadcasting and music in the 20th century in forging audible and sonorous empires. However, the ways in which different imperial countries used radio to create a sense of nation and colonial identities among those living in different geographies remains an open question. On the other hand, in the last decades works dealing with the media during decolonization have called attention to the significant role played by the audio medium in promoting independence from colonial powers and giving visibility to forms of culture that would become part of national identities of the new-born countries. What research has also revealed is that much is still to be understood about the relation between radio and decolonization practices and processes. Thus, this special issue seeks to publish manuscripts dealing with how broadcasting was incorporated and appropriated within different colonial and decolonial settings.

Hence, papers dealing with the following topics will be highly appreciated (non-exhaustive list):

*CFP* "DESARROLLOS CONTEMPORÁNEOS SOBRE MEDIOS, CULTURA Y SOCIEDAD: ARGENTINA Y AMÉRICA LATINA", CONGRESO MESO 2021

MESO invita a la contribución de artículos inéditos para la conferencia “Desarrollos Contemporáneos Sobre Medios, Cultura y Sociedad: Argentina y América Latina”. La conferencia, organizada por el Centro de Estudios sobre Medios y Sociedad en Argentina, tendrá lugar los días viernes 26 y sábado 27 de noviembre de 2021. La modalidad de esta edición será híbrida.

Este será el séptimo Congreso Anual que MESO organiza con el propósito de intercambiar conocimiento de investigación sobre las interacciones entre medios, cultura y sociedad. Para ver más información sobre los Congresos anteriores puede visitar nuestro sitio web. Contamos con el auspicio del Center for Global Culture and Communication de Northwestern University y del Center for Latinx Digital Media.

Se solicitan artículos que contribuyan a la discusión sobre medios, cultura y sociedad de manera empírica, teórica o metodológica, y que amplíen el conocimiento sobre esta temática en el ámbito nacional y regional. Los artículos podrán referirse a distintos aspectos de la comunicación, los medios y los bienes y servicios culturales expresados a través del periodismo, el entretenimiento–cine, teatro, televisión, música, etc.– la publicidad y el marketing, las relaciones públicas, las redes sociales, y los videojuegos, entre otros.

*CFP* "POSTHUMANISM AT THE MARGINS: ON FILM, MEDIA, AND NEW WAYS OF BEING", SPECIAL ISSUE, SYNOPTIQUE: JOURNAL OF MOVING IMAGE STUDIES

The term posthumanism has, throughout its relatively short lifespan, swelled to encompass any number of definitions and permutations, ranging from a descriptor for a technological afterlife of the “human” to a critical look at ways of being within a wider ecology. The immediate quandary that any scholar of the posthuman faces is the wrangling of a proper definition for such an expansive yet timely topic. It is precisely this ambiguity that we hope to engage with in this issue of Synoptique, as the amorphous idea of the posthuman offers us the chance to re-examine the “human.”

Traditionally, posthumanism has remained “committed to a specific order of rationality, one rooted in the epistemological locus of the West” (Jackson 2013, 671). By building upon such legacies of radical perspectives that decentre traditional Western humanist paradigms, such as deanthropocentrism, decoloniality, feminist, and Queer lenses, we aim to place posthumanism in conversation with film and media studies, with the goal of highlighting the historically marginalized perspectives central to this intersection. We believe that film and other new media are uniquely situated to address these sets of questions due to the breadth of disciplines they intersect with, as well as their positions between the technological and the cultural. We invite submissions to consider how different forms of media may challenge, transform, and transcend traditional paradigms of the posthuman; we especially invite submissions of alternative media such as video essays, zines, or other art pieces.

*CFP* "COMMUNICATION MAINTENANCE IN LONGUE DURÉE", A PAPER-BASED WORKSHOP

In the last decades, more and more scholars have claimed for an inclusion of maintenance among the key topics and key questions of technology (Edgerton 2007, Jackson 2014, Russell and Vinsel 2018, Henke and Sims 2020,). Communication and media studies have just partially included in their methodological and analytical tools reflections on maintenance (see Balbi and Leggero 2020; Weber and Krebs 2021) and this paper-based workshop aims to advance in this aspect adding another fundamental yet underestimated layer in communication and maintenance research: the longue durée.

Maintenance of communication infrastructures, for example, is a long-term process lasting for decades or even centuries. On the one hand, roads, networks and cables are constantly maintained to keep them functioning but, on the other, to understand their strategic relevance is important to adopt a longue durée perspective (Braudel 1958), since those channels of communication have often political, economic, and socio-cultural relevance. Sometimes, maintenance has a strong effect not only in preserving communication infrastructures, but also in modifying or even dismantling them. In long terms, communications can be radically changed because of maintenance and transformed into something totally different from what was originally to be maintained.

*CFP* “DIPLOMACIA PÚBLICA: NARRATIVAS ESTRATÉGICAS PARA UN MUNDO EN CAMBIO", NÚMERO ESPECIAL, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY JOURNAL

El estudio de la diplomacia pública es resultado de la inexorable vinculación que existe entre las relaciones internacionales y la comunicación global. Estados Unidos, Rusia, China, Turquía, Brasil o la propia Unión Europea compiten por posicionarse en el orden mundial, la proyección de valores y la legitimidad de la acción exterior. Tras una edad dorada de la diplomacia pública (1990-2010), la propaganda, la injerencia en los procesos electorales y la desinstitucionalización de la práctica diplomática han afectado el modo de conducir la acción exterior. La sobreexposición presidencial, los tuits (en nuestra opinión, el tuit es la unidad de medida, pero podemos escribir “las redes sociales”, que es más amplio) y el lenguaje de las emociones son argumentos de peso en la construcción de la agenda de relaciones internacionales por encima de los acuerdos multilaterales. La comunicación de los gobiernos, el saber diplomático, la reconstrucción del proyecto político europeo, los valores del liderazgo chino o el legado del trumpismo han modificado el manejo de la diplomacia. De origen norteamericano y con eco europeo, la diplomacia pública hoy aparece entre las prioridades de gobiernos, ciudades, instituciones internacionales y actores privados, que aspiran a vertebrar la comunicación, la representación ciudadana y el reconocimiento internacional. Por este motivo, es pertinente revisar los avances en la disciplina de modo que se construya un mejor corpus teórico acorde con la realidad de la globalización post-covid. El cambio climático, las migraciones, la salud pública global, la perspectiva de género o la gestión de la memoria constituyen nuevas fuentes de valor para la comunicación internacional de los países y los actores globales.

*CFP* "POPULARIZING STEM: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN 21ST-CENTURY US POPULAR CULTURE", THE POPMEC ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE 2021

"Popularizing STEM: Science and Technology in 21st-Century US Popular Culture"

The PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies

15-19 November 2021 (mixed format conference)

 

We are particularly interested in presentations that seek to engage with questions of intersectional discrimination in STEM representations in popular culture, spanning from cultural products aimed at dissemination and debate on STEM to texts such as films, TV series, comics and graphic novels, genre fiction, video games, new media narratives.

Deadline for submission: August 1, 2021. 

Submit your abstract proposal (~ 300 words) at popmec.stem@gmail.com as an attachment, including name, affiliation if any, and contact email. Depending on the proposals and participants’ response, an editorial project might originate from the conference.

*CFP* "THE FRACTURED STATES OF AMERICA", 6 ISSUE, JAM IT!: JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

The quest to define the true essence of US identity dates back to colonial times, long before the nation itself was formally established. Yet, scholars traditionally situate the first explicit investigation into what constitutes an American citizen in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The third of the titular letters, aptly named “What is an American,” offers a list of features that de Crèvecœur considered quintessential to Americanness: industry, freedom, individualism, equality, assimilation. All these elements converged in what later became known as American exceptionalism, a doctrine that undergirded (and, to an extent, still undergirds) most, if not all, of US foreign policy.

De Crevecoeur’s essay also introduced the concept of the ‘melting pot’ to describe the yearned-for-homogeneity of a nation aspiring to merge the different cultures informing it, rather than to preserve their differences. Ever since, the United States has strived to present a solid front against the rest of the world, returning time and time again to the defining features of its citizens, and to what sets them apart from their European counterparts. Yet, over the past few decades, it has become evident that internal divisions and differences are increasing, rather than decreasing. While the national narrative of the United States insists on advocating the exceptionality of its people, it is also continuously confronted by the hard truth of their lived experiences (Sieber 2005; Hodgson 2009; Grandin 2019; Spragg 2019).

*CFP* "MEDIATING KINSHIP, REPRESENTATION AND DIFFERENCE", PALGRAVE BOOK SERIES

This book series brings together analyses of familial and kin relationships with emerging and new technologies which allow for the creation, maintenance and expansion of family. We use the term “family” as a working truth with a wide range of meanings in an attempt to address the feelings of family belonging across all aspects of social location: ability, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, body size, social class and beyond. This book series aims to explore phenomena located at the intersection of technologies including those which allow for family creation, migration, communication, reunion and the family as a site of difference. The individual volumes in this series will offer insightful analyses of these phenomena in media, social media, literature, popular culture and corporeal settings.

Possible book topics include:

• the use of technology and migration and family composition and disjunction; the ways that technologies may both push and pull kin together/apart 
• the range of technology use across literal and figurative space including intersections of geography, race, age, poverty, gender and beyond 

*CFP* "CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HULU'S 'CASTLE ROCK'", HULU SERIES

The Hulu series Castle Rock (2018 – 2019) occupies a unique textual space that both builds upon and transcends traditional notions of adaptation in its approach to Stephen King’s canon, engaging with the significance of place, intersecting narratives, and multiple worlds. As stated in the opening credits, Castle Rock is ‘based on characters and settings by Stephen King’, but it uses those established elements to create something original, telling new stories, building on iconic characters and creating compelling tales for new ones, situated within one of King’s signature Maine towns. Through this positioning, Castle Rock is able to reimagine and expand upon King’s work, world, characters and interconnections, participating in acts of both adaptation and creation, reflecting on King’s influence on the larger landscapes of horror and popular culture.

We are seeking proposals that critically analyze Castle Rock from a range of theoretical perspectives, including but not limited to:

• Castle Rock as adaptation of King 
• Castle Rock’s connection to other adaptations of King’s work

*CFP* "SCIENCE FICTION: ACTIVISM AND RESISTANCE", VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Science Fiction: Activism and Resistance

Virtual Conference

9-11 September 2021

London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC)

 

In an age when Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Decolonise the Curriculum, Refugees Welcome, and movements for global solidarity with oppressed populations have become part of mainstream discourse, it is vital to re-examine the relationship between activism, resistance and the mass imagination vis-a-vis science fiction. As a genre dedicated to imagining alternatives, science fiction is an inherently radical space which allows for diverse explorations of dissent. It is, also, a space that has been rightfully critiqued for its historic inequities favouring white cishet men (as recently addressed by Jeanette Ng during the 2019 Hugo Awards among others). There needs to be reckoning with how precarious bodies engage in activism and resistance in the context of their material realities and restrictions. Therefore, we must deny universalising a single experience as “radical enough” and instead acknowledge how communities in the margins – queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, BIPOC, immigrants and refugees, religious minorities, indigenous populations, casualised workers, the homeless and unemployed – have specific ways of subverting and undermining the system, as well as specific stakes and reasons to do so. It is imperative to not only revisit how science fiction has been a space for activism and resistance, but also resist and challenge the genre’s shortcomings.

*CFP* "BROADCASTING IN (DE)COLONIAL SETTINGS", JOURNAL OF RADIO & AUDIO MEDIA SYMPOSIUM

The emergence of radio introduced profound changes in public communication, changing patterns of information dissemination at local, national and international levels. In the case of the Imperial nations this role was extended overseas with radio becoming the most important medium for uniting the home countries with the expats living in the far reaches of the empires, though not unproblematically.

A growing body of literature on the history of imperial and colonial broadcasting, as well as of sound, have been contributing to the understanding of the role of radio technologies, broadcasting and music in the 20th century in forging audible and sonorous empires. However, the ways in which different imperial countries used radio to create a sense of nation and colonial identities among those living in different geographies remains an open question. On the other hand, in the last decades works dealing with the media during decolonization have called attention to the significant role played by the audio medium in promoting independence from colonial powers and giving visibility to forms of culture that would become part of national identities of the new-born countries. What research has also revealed is that much is still to be understood about the relation between radio and decolonization practices and processes. Thus, this special issue seeks to publish manuscripts dealing with how broadcasting was incorporated and appropriated within different colonial and decolonial settings.

*CFP* "I RECOGNIZE MY HONEY BY THE WALK", SPECIAL ISSUE, CORPUS MUNDI E-JOURNAL

In the year 2020, humanity suddenly faced a serious challenge that threatened its existence. It turned out that the modern world is not yet ready for serious biological challenges. Many people had to reconsider their views on their existence, their ways of survival, and a lot of other things. Many countries have moved to an isolated existence, closing themselves off from others. In some places, foreigners found themselves in a terrible position of pariahs, being perceived as a biological threat. And since this menace has not gone away, and since in addition to the biological danger it has created many psychological and cultural dysfunctions in society, our journal Corpus Mundi has decided to refer to an old problem rooted in the fear of the unknown – the problem of zombies.

That’s why the e-journal Corpus Mundi is planning to publish a special issue in 2021, tentatively titled “I Recognize my Honey by the Walk”.

This issue will be devoted to a whole range of very different problems related to the concepts we conventionally denote as “zombies”.

*CFP* "BLACK AND QUEER, MUSIC ON SCREEN", SPECIAL ISSUE, LIQUID BLACKNESS JOURNAL

This special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies proposes to work on Black Queer expression in audiovisual musics cutting across histories of the avant-garde, popular audiovisuality, and frameworks both transnational and critically transhistorical. The goal of the issue is to set up the framework for a survey of Black and Queer musicality in audiovisual media so as to suggest “non-contemporaneous” dialogues between and across historical registers and media platforms, so that the critical expressive power of non-conforming persons of color become a given rather than an alibi, an absence, or a projection.

From early sound cinema to the present, queer or gender non-conforming black artists have voiced a complex series of claims, propositions, demands, and desires, from the introduction of sound to the cinematic screen to the introduction of social media video in networked digital cultures. Black feminist and queer scholarship has often engaged with the meanings and powers expressed in these works, or in musical artists indebted to them or referencing them, from Angela Davis’ reading of transformations of historical memory in Smith’s St. Louis Blues (Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms), to Lindon Barrett’s study of Billie Holiday (Blackness and Value), to Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of errancy in relation to woman-identified women singers in the early years of recording (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments), and Daphne Brooks’ recent reading of black women’s use of arrangement, sonic curation, and blackness as technology (Liner Notes for the Revolution) in articulating a politics of being and becoming.