*CFP* "THE AESTHETICS OF CREATIVE ACTIVISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM

As both a field of study and form of practice, creative activism seeks to understand how artistic forms can serve the ends of activist interventions.

 

To date, most emphasis has been on the activism component, drawing on theories of social movement formation, participatory action, and community organising. While there has been passing mention of aesthetics (relying heavily upon Rancière) the ‘creative’ term in creative activism remains woefully undertheorized. There are some scholars who have asked important questions about affect and effect, but overall, creative activism is ripe for deeper research into and theorisation of its aesthetic forms. Key questions include how creative activism differs from other activism, what makes it creative, and how (whether) the artistic components function effectively to achieve or enhance social change.

The Editors welcome submissions on any philosophically informed exploration of artistic forms as activist interventions, including, but not limited to:

• Ethics and morality in and of artistic activism

*CFP* "SOCIOSEMIOTIC CRITIQUE. A LOTMANIAN PERSPECTIVE", ISSUE 5 (2022), SOCIAL SEMIOTIC JOURNAL

In 2022 – the centenary of the birth of Juri Lotman – we invite you to focus on the potentiality of his semiotic theory (including ideas of as personality, translation, creolization, autocommunication, self-description, semiosphere) to critique power structures and ideological processes in semiosic phenomena.

We invite contributors to prepare an analytical essay focusing on a specific case study of a semiotic artefact or type of artefact, demonstrating how Lotmanian theory can fuel a critique of the limitations on, and variations in, the ways in which the semiotic resources/practices in question may perpetuate biases, imbalance or legitimize and maintain kinds of power interests.

At this stage, we solicit not papers but a proposal of between 1000 and 1500 words length, with bibliographic references included. On this basis, we will select 8 proposals, to be developed in an essay of 7/8000 words (bibliography included).

Proposals should be sent to: (annamaria.lorusso@unibo.it) and (franciscu.sedda@gmail.com).

Deadline CfP: 30 October 2021

*CFP* CALL FOR PROPOSALS, CRITICAL COMPANIONS TO POPULAR DIRECTORS SERIES

The series covers many directors who have not been studied previously in academic publications and whose works nonetheless are highly renowned nowadays. The intent of the series is to offer interesting and illuminating interpretations of the various directors’ films that will be accessible to both scholars of the academic community and critically-minded fans of the directors’ works. Each volume combines discussions of a director’s oeuvre from a broad range of disciplines and methodologies, thus offering the reader a variegated and compelling picture of the directors’ works. In this sense, the volumes will be of interest (and will be instructive) for students and scholars engaged in subjects as different as film studies, literature, philosophy, popular culture studies, religion and others. We welcome proposals for both monographs and edited collections that offer interdisciplinary analyses, focusing on the complete oeuvre of one contemporary director per volume.

Proposals may include (but are certainly not limited to) the following directors:

• Woody Allen; 
• Luc Besson; 
• Katryn Bigelow; 

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, MEDIA LAW & POLICY MLPSC SCHOLARS CONFERENCE

Media Law & Policy

MLPSC Scholars Conference

13-14 January 2022 (online)

 

We invite you to submit an abstract for the Media Law & Policy Scholars Conference (MLPSC 2021), which will take place online on January 13 & 14, 2022.

MLPSC is not like other big conferences you may normally attend. It is an interdisciplinary, paper workshop. The goal is to provide advice and support for works-in-progress – to deepen their intellectual and theoretical impact. We interpret media law and policy broadly, welcoming scholars from around the world who study free speech, free press, access to information, intellectual property, data privacy, emerging technologies and other related law and policy issues from a variety of theoretical perspectives and methodologies. Our goal is to include scholars and practitioners from law, journalism & communication, philosophy, political science, information systems, sociology, history, business and myriad other disciplines.

*CFP* "FANTASY AND THE FANTASTIC", SPECIAL ISSUE, MAPPING THE IMPOSSIBLE JOURNAL

We welcome submissions from undergraduate and postgraduate students (and from those who have graduated within the last year) from any higher education institution. We publish articles on any aspect of fantasy and the fantastic and any work within this transmedial genre. Increasingly, students from more established disciplines (including, but not limited to, Literature Studies, Game Studies, Film and Television Studies, Media Studies, Philosophy and Theology) elect to write essays on a fantasy related topic that intersects with their primary discipline.

Robert Maslen defines Fantasy as that which ‘focuses instead on what certainly did not happen and never could, foregrounding the impossibility of what it represents.’ While this is only one definition of how fantasy works, and certainly not definitive, we find ‘representing impossibility’ to be a useful starting point when approaching fantasy, the fantastic, and the techniques of wider speculative fiction. However, we would like to note that this is only a starting point. We are open to papers that explore all different kinds of interpretations and definitions of fantasy across disciplines and across media.

Our second issue, to be published in March 2022, will be a general issue. Submissions for this issue are currently open.

*CFP* "GESTALT FILMOLOGY. INSIGHTS ON FORM AND EMBODIMENT IN THE FILM EXPERIENCE", SPECIAL ISSUE 38, CINÉMA&CIE JOURNAL

An incipient neurofilmological turn in film and media studies promises to reframe the study of the film experience into a post-cognitive episteme that stresses the idea that the perception of visual and acoustic stimuli implies the activation of embodied forms of simulation. According to the “embodied simulation” hypothesis, the significance of the film experience emerges from the interactive mutuality of an agent (or organism) and environment, and perception evokes internal forms of action that support an empathic understanding of the character’s gestures, intentions, and emotions. These dynamics can be extended to the film’s low-level features (e.g. cinematography, camera movements, editing) and allow one to rethink the aesthetics of the film experience in the light of multimodal sensory perception.

Although the theoretical references of the embodied and enactive approach are patent (e.g. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and James Gibson’s ecology of perception), the endless appearance of new ideas risks losing one’s bearings in the traditional commitments of the field. For example: the internal re-production of the observed movements, the empathetic nature of the film-spectator relationship, and the understanding of the external world through imitation recall the principle of isomorphism – one of the central (and debated) ideas of Gestalt psychology; the so called body-mind problem and the enactivist claim that the body in as inseparable part – if not the very origin – of perception and cognition, remind one of the gestaltist fundamental claim that the human subject is able to organize local features into a larger and coherent whole; the centrality of the organism-environment coupling recalls Gestalt figure-ground reversibility and Kurt Lewin’s field theory. A number of theories proposed that are influenced by Gibson’s ecological theory but open to brain research do not countenance that such an approach would be contrary to his theorization.

*CFP* "LOS NOMBRES DEL MIEDO", SEMINARIOS MATADERO ESTUDIOS CRÍTICOS

“Los nombres del miedo” (Matadero Estudios Críticos) es un programa en forma de ciclo de conferencias y conversaciones, comisariado por Inés Plasencia y Víctor Mora con la colaboración de Patricia Raijenstein en Intermediae Matadero. El programa se inaugura con una llamada a participar, a través de un Call for papers/projects. Llamada a proyectos artísticos y de investigación destinado a la reflexión teórica y a la presentación de proyectos artísticos. Se ofrece como un lugar de encuentro en el que pensar formas de nombrar y renombrar el miedo desde posicionamientos críticos, posibilitando un ejercicio tanto de diagnóstico como de reapropiación colectiva. Proyectos que entiendan el aprendizaje como resultado de la colaboración y la práctica, en proceso o finalizados.

A quién va dirigido: La convocatoria está dirigida a todas las personas que se sientan interpeladas por la idea de pensar desde la práctica, especialmente desde los ámbitos de la creación artística (artes plásticas, literatura, música, cine, dramaturgia, danza, performance, mediación y educación…) y su investigación (bellas artes, historia del arte, teoría del arte, artes escénicas, humanidades…), así como otros lugares afines como la antropología, la comunicación, la sociología o la filosofía, entre otras, a través de investigaciones relacionadas con las prácticas artísticas, el sonido, la literatura y el cuerpo y/o la imagen.

*CFP* "THE SENSE OF AN ENDING AND THE IMAGINATION OF THE END: APOCALYPSE, DISASTER AND MESSIANIC TIME", Nº 11 (2022) ISSUE, COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA

Colloquia Humanistica is the interdisciplinary journal of humanities of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Our aim is to introduce a variety of perspectives in discussing contemporary issues. We would like to propose a unique space that allows an intensive intellectual debate and a dynamic exchange of thoughts between researchers of different perspectives in humanities and social sciences. Colloquia Humanistica kindly invites submissions of manuscripts that address the topic:

The sense of an ending and the imagination of the end: apocalypse, disaster and messianic time

Deleuze calls the New Testament’s Apocalypse “the book of Zombies” highlighting not only its connection with death but the influence on the contemporaneity. Apocalyptical visions go beyond Christian eschatology and permeate our present imagination. Not as much with the already bygone symbolism or the terror of bloody carnage, as with the vague sense of an ending, fuelled by historical conditions – the Holocaust, nuclear crisis, or more contemporary global threats of viral pandemic or climate change.

*CFP* "MEMORY, TRAUMA AND RECOVERY", INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE (ONLINE)

Memory, Trauma and Recovery

International Interdisciplinary Conference (Online)

16-17 September 2021

 

To remember means sometimes: to experience again. That is the case of trauma. However, recovery from trauma is also based on memory. So the question is not how to forget about bad memories, but how to remember and not suffer. During this conference we would like to concentrate on the phenomena of trauma and recovery, to look at how memory is involved in the traumatic experience and the recovery process and explore among other questions what we remember and forget, what causes suffering and how to deal with it.

We are interested in all aspects of traumatic experiences, in their individual and collective dimensions, in the past and in the present-day world. We would like to examine the role of memory in both falling into trauma and overcoming it. 

*CFP* "MASKS AND HUMAN CONNECTIONS", EDITED VOLUME

We are editing a book of chapters about the relationship between the use of masks and the problematics of identity preservation and development. The book has its origins in an interdisciplinary project built under the hedge of our Research Unit at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal. As editors of this volume, we are accepting contributions with special emphasis on broad research areas.

This is an interdisciplinary project that is claiming for contributions from different areas. Philosophy, for example, has since long questioned the concepts of identity and alterity in a wide array of intellectual and social contexts. Psychology and behavioral research also addresses the mask as a theme that includes emotions and feelings, familiar quests and personality problems, as well as burnout, imposter syndrome or bipolar disorders. Literary Studies, as addressing the exploitation of the broad and allegorical symbolism of the mask, are frequently relating it to issues of the greatest aesthetic and anthropological relevance, such as cartography of classical myths, identity(s), profiles of literary heroes and other literary "exempla".

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, SECOND ISSUE, QUALITATIVE HEALTH COMMUNICATION

Qualitative Health Communication (QHC), is a new, no-fee, open access online journal dedicated to publishing articles employing qualitative methods to investigate, improve and innovate health communication.

We are calling for submissions to QHC’s second issue (to be published in July 2022) and subsequent issues via the journal's website. Detailed instructions for authors can also be found on the website. This is a general call for submission not tied to a special issue topic. All submissions within scope of QHC are welcome. Submission from researchers at any stage of their career is encouraged. All submissions will be peer-reviewed: initial screening in-house followed by external peer-review. There are no article submission or processing fees. Accepted articles will be available online free of charge.

The first issue of Qualitative Health Communication (QHC) will be published in January 2022 featuring contributions by renowned health communication researchers. Topics include COVID-19 communication, communication in antenatal group consultations, paediatric palliative care, surgeon-patient consultations, communication in patient information leaflets and forensic assessment reports and co-construction of experiential knowledge.

*CFP* "STANLEY CAVELL: A RETROSPRECTIVE", CONFERENCE

Stanley Cavell: A Retrospective 

Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan

September 23-24, 2021

 

Two years have passed since his death, and Stanley Cavell’s figure keeps growing in stature for philosophy, the humanities and the humanistic social sciences of our time. Courses and conferences devoted to his work have been and are being held regularly in universities all over the globe, while the amount of scholarly work on him shows no sign of diminishing. It is not only that few recent thinkers can count within their oeuvre masterworks of the importance of The Claim of Reason and The World Viewed. It is not even just the breadth of his research interests – encompassing topics as varied as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Shakespeare, film, democracy, education and literature, to name just a few – that makes Cavell’s production so significant. It is his capacity to delve deeply into the technical debates of academic philosophy and humanities whilst, at the same time, attaining a truly distinctive voice. His prominence is due not only to his work as a scholar, but also as a writer and intellectual. For such reasons, Cavell invites us to problematize and reinvent philosophy in a manner important to our academic institutions as well as our society at large.

*CFP* "THE COMEDY OF RICKY GERVAIS: CRITICAL ESSAYS", EDITED ANTHOLOGY

For over twenty years, Ricky Gervais has entertained audiences with a brand of comedy all his own. The groundbreaking sitcom The Office pioneered the mockumentary genre and has influenced countless programs. Subsequent projects have continued to propel comedy into new directions, forms, and platforms.

The editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Comedy of Ricky Gervais: Critical Essays, is currently soliciting chapters that analyze any aspect of Gervais’ career: as comedian, as actor, and as writer-director.  Essays may examine a single work by Gervais or take a comparative, thematic approach. This work is wide-reaching and hopes to survey as much of Gervais’ work as possible.  This includes the television programs The Office, Extras, The Ricky Gervais Show, An Idiot Abroad, Life’s Too Short, Derek, and Afterlife; films, including The Invention of Lying, Cemetery Junction, Special Correspondents, and David Brent: Life on the Road; and his stand-up comedy specials, including Animals, Science and Humanity. Although this collection focuses film, television, and stand-up comedy, the editor also seeks original essays that address Gervais’ music, Flanimals book series, radio shows / podcasts, and social media presence.

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, NEXT GENERAL ISSUE, COLLOQUY JOURNAL

Colloquy is an open access journal published twice annually by postgraduate students in the Literary and Cultural Studies Graduate Research Program at Monash University.

We publish articles from across the theoretical humanities, including literary and cultural studies, critical theory, continental philosophy, film and television studies, communication and media studies, and performance studies. We also publish translations, creative writing and book reviews. All work, except for book reviews, is double-blind peer reviewed.

We are currently looking for submissions for our general issue, to be published in mid-2021. The deadline for submissions will be the 30th of April and authors will be notified as soon as possible about the outcome of their submission.

Our submission policies can be found here and our editorial team can be contacted using the following email address: arts-colloquy@monash.edu

The latest issue of Colloquy, a general issue, was published in December 2020: issue 39.

*CFP* "ANIMALITY AND TEXTUALITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, WORD AND TEXT JOURNAL

In “But as for me, who am I (following)?”, the second section of The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida contextualises his interest in a certain passage in Plato’s Phaedrus as a systematic interest in what he calls “the animality of writing”. Derrida diagnoses in the traditional anthropocentric opposition between the (human) ability to respond and mere animal reaction an echo of the ancient denunciations of writing as language that cannot reply back – opaque and mindless. In fact, as he demonstrates in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, the histories of the condemnation of writing and of the devaluation of animality are intertwined and feed off each other. Both are characterised as a deviation from the source of truth – speech and/or the soul – carried out by a certain embodiment.

In the current state of the increasingly institutionalised field of Animal Studies, the same opaqueness that was held against both animality and writing has been defended as a productive nexus in which to think about animals and their relationship to text. For example, Anat Pick’s concept of the creaturely, characterised by its focus on embodiment, has proved influential in conceptualising both animal and human being.

*CFP* "100 YEARS OF PAULO FREIRE", VOL. 26, Nº 2, COMUNICAÇÃO & EDUCAÇÃO SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL

In 2021, the centenary of the education philosopher, communication theorist, and public man, Paulo Freire, is being celebrated by thousands of researchers and promoters of a transformative education, all over the world.

For his universally recognized contribution, the scientific journal Comunicação & Educação will publish the Dossier “100 years of Paulo Freire”, a special edition, which should circulate at the end of this year. Paulo Freire (1921-1997), born in Recife, Pernambuco, is the most cited Brazilian intellectual reference all over the world. His extensive work is marked by a deep commitment to an emancipatory philosophy of the popular strata, through Education. The Brazilian educator is also a fundamental reference for the theories of communication in Latin America. This influence is recognized by leading researchers in the area, notably in Latin American cultural studies and community, popular and alternative communication. His pedagogy based on practice and dialog has been applied to projects in the countryside and in the city around the world. Freire continues to inspire and guide the practice of liberating pedagogy in various institutions and social movements, in formal and informal education. His praxis in the communication and education interface became the basis of thought that contributed to the emergence and consolidation of educommunication, as a concept and practice. 

*CFP* "PHARMACOLOGIES OF MEDIA", SPECIAL ISSUE, MEDIA THEORY JOURNAL

Are media doing us more harm than good? This question has shadowed accounts of new technologies for millennia, from the advent of writing right through to the emergence of social media. Beginning with Plato’s reflections on writing’s effects on memory, and under the influence of work by philosophers like Jacques Derrida (1981) and Bernard Stiegler (2011), media scholars often explore this question using the concept of the pharmakon.

In its Platonic sense, the pharmakon is both a remedy and a poison, or something that can both heal and harm. To describe media as pharmacological is to acknowledge that they can have both positive and negative effects. But this concept is difficult to disentangle from its medical origins. The pharmakon is a substance, a drug or a medicine, that might be intoxicating or beneficial. Like drugs, this double capacity is not inherently value-laden, or good and/or bad, but is a function of how the media operate. Like drugs, this capacity informs how media operate on, extend, or curtail our capacity to sense, think, or act. But here the analogy falls apart. Media and drugs address different domains of the body and have distinct cultures. If this analogy can only stretch so far, what are we to make of the concept of the pharmakon today?

*CFP* "REFOCUS: THE FILMS OF ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY", ESSAY COLLECTION

We are currently soliciting 250-500 word abstracts for essays to be included in an essay collection on Alejandro Jodorowsky to be published as part of the University of Edinburgh ReFocus series, which examines international directors (series editors: Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer, and Gary D. Rhodes). As the first comprehensive anthology focusing on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s career, this collection seeks to deepen our understanding of Jodorowsky as a filmmaker and artist.

 

Essays may focus on:

• Jodorowsky-directed features: Fando y Lis (1968), El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973), Tusk (1980), Santa Sangre (1989), The Rainbow Thief (1990), The Dance of Reality (2013), Endless Poetry (2016), and Psychomagic, A Healing Art (2019), including also unfinished work and the legendary status of his unrealized Dune adaptation. 

*CFP* "PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS ON MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY", THEMATIC ISSUE, JOURNAL ATHENA: PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Journal Athena: Philosophical Studies invites to submit the articles for the thematic issue Philosophical Reflections on Media and Technology.

Media and technology are important topics in contemporary philosophical reflections. They were discussed in the works of renowned thinkers, such as B. Latour, D. Harraway, B. Stiegler, F. Kittler – to name only a few – their insights have shaped the way we live and think in our highly technologized world.

However, recent technological developments and the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence urge us to think further about the impact of media on culture and humans, and formulate bolder hypotheses concerning the modes of technological existence and agency. Moreover, the new media and the smart technologies invite us to reconceptualize the classical philosophical questions and define the new ontological, epistemological, and ethical aspects of media and technology.

*CFP* "SILENCIO AUDIOVISUAL", NÚMERO 4, JOURNAL OF SOUND, SILENCE, IMAGE AND TECHNOLOGY

La revista científica Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT) nace en el seno del grupo de investigación homónimo (SSIT), vinculado al centro universitario del TecnoCampus, adscrito a la Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). La vocación de esta publicación es recoger el debate académico y la investigación científica sobre la relación del sonido -ampliamente considerado- en un contexto audiovisual. La relación sonido-imagen es el núcleo de la publicación. El interés de JoSSIT es, entonces, el sonido, la música y el silencio, sus propiedades y características ontológicas en relación a un fenómeno comunicativo y su inserción técnica, narrativa, comunicativa y social en un producto audiovisual. Para este cuarto número de la revista, tendremos en cuenta artículos sobre la relación entre silencio, imagen y el audiovisual.

El silencio es una materia expresiva y significativa y, al mismo tiempo, una forma de comunicar que está arraigada en todas las culturas humanas y épocas, aunque cada cultura y tiempo histórico tiene sus propias prácticas y sentido del silencio. Esta universalidad se muestra también en el audiovisual. Todos los trabajos audiovisuales incluyen el silencio, en menor o mayor grado, como un elemento inevitable de la expresión humana. Y la mayoría de las veces, este silencio audiovisual en las películas contribuye con un tipo de significado especial que ningún otro código puede transmitir a la audiencia.