*CFP* "NATIONALISM AND MEDIA", 31ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM

31st Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN)

5-7 April 2022 in Antwerp (Belgium)

Nationalism and media

 

For as long as nationalist movements have existed, ideological pamphlets, historical novels that constructed a romantic national past to visual arts and hashtags such as #maga on Twitter have instrumentalised media. Next to disseminating explicit nationalist messages, media (printed press and visual arts included) also play a role for nationalism by making national symbols and discourses part of everyday life. By continuously providing representations of the nation and by presenting the world as a world of nations, media help to naturalise nationalism.

Since Karl Deutsch’s Nationalism and social communication (1953/1966), many studies of nationalism and national movements have pointed at the role of media. Most famously, in Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson emphasized the importance of ‘print capitalism’ in the emergence of modern nations. The growing distribution of newspapers, magazines, books and other print media facilitated language standardisation and literacy and through that to the development of a collective consciousness and the formation of an imagined community.

*CFP* "IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS IN FILM", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FILM STUDIES

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made.

Cinema as a whole has historically offered a rich setting for understanding cultural interaction, however it functions within certain political and ideological limits. It offers fascinating source material for an examination of what, in the modern world, we understand as "otherness", the cinematic "Other" being constructed in terms of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

This conference aims to consider film studies from a variety of critical, theoretical, and analytical approaches and to focus on how "self-other" relations are represented.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

*CFP* "SUICIDE AND POPULAR CULTURE", BOOK CHAPTER

According to the World Health Organization, more than 700,000 people die by suicide every year; one in 100 global deaths is by suicide. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 45,000 deaths by suicide (14.2 per 100,000) for the year 2020, representing a 30 percent increase over a 20-year period. Suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death in the U.S., and among persons between the ages of 10 to 34, it is the second leading cause. Women are more likely than men to attempt suicide, but men are three to four times more likely than women to die by suicide. In short, suicide is an intractable public and global health issue that has shown few signs of abating. The growing salience of suicide in popular culture is unsurprising in light of these worrisome trends.

Representations of suicide and suicidality abound in popular culture. More recent examples include young adult literature like Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why and Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places, on which the Netflix original series and movie, respectively, were based; narrative videogames like Life is Strange, The Suicide of Rachel Foster, and Indigo Prophecy; Charles Forsman’s graphic novel, I Am Not Okay with This (also the basis of a Netflix series); the ABC TV series, A Million Little Things; Eric Steel’s documentary film, The Bridge; and media coverage of and tributes to celebrity suicides like Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Mindy McCready, and Chester Bennington. As many of these representations illustrate, suicide is not reducible to a singular cause, but lies at the juncture of myriad intersecting forces. 

*CFP* "EPISTEMIC CONTESTATIONS IN THE HYBRID MEDIA ENVIRONMENT", SPECIAL ISSUE, POPULAR COMMUNICATION: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND CULTURE

The aim of this special issue is to explore how a multiplicity of competing epistemologies interact and compete in the “post-Truth” marketplace of ideas in online popular communication. We invite contributions to a special issue on the intersections of popular communication, disinformation, and misinformation. We are especially interested in how popular communication can challenge and even upend traditional and inherited belief systems and knowledge regimes in religion, politics, fandom, and other institutions.

As traditional ideologies and other thought regimes collapse and new ones arise, recent scholarship has examined the contributions of digitalization and datafication of popular communication that contest older communitarian worldviews (e.g. Fuller, 2020). The internet has augmented collective understandings of the world but also undermined a broader sense of belonging, while enabling a new scope of contestation over “epistemic capital” (Robertson, 2016, 2021). In popular communication, especially, the social construction of meaning and worldviews is more manipulable than ever through disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.

*CFP* "TEACHING (WITH) POPULAR MUSIC", SPECIAL ISSUE, TEACHING MEDIA QUARTERLY

Teaching Media Quarterly is happy to share the latest call for lesson plan submissions on “Teaching (with) Popular Music" with you and please share widely!

“We both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance.” This is what Ray B. Browne was told upon being rejected from a journal in the first issue of Popular Music and Society fifty years ago. This prejudice still exists in the academy and has been perpetuated in the curriculums across a number of disciplines. However, with plenty of academic monographs and a good amount of dedicated peer-reviewed journals today, popular music is now a prolific field for critical and interdisciplinary inquiries. 

Popular music scholarship explores musical (sub)cultures, music in visual and digital media, music as propaganda, music as activism, and more. Thus, music is a ripe avenue through which media scholars contend with issues of power, identity, nationalism, environmentalism, (de)coloniality, globalization, and social justice. For media instructors, then, teaching a critical perspective on popular music can address many of the multisensory and transdisciplinary dimensions of media literacy.

*CFP* "RACISM, NATIONALISM AND XENOFOBIA", 4TH INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

 "Racism, Nationalism and Xenofobia"

4th International Interdisciplinary Conference

InMind Support

26 - 27 July 2021 (Online)

We invite researchers representing various academic disciplines: history, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, law, literary studies, theatre studies, film studies, fine arts, design, memory studies, migration studies, consciousness studies, dream studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, medical sciences, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, cognitive sciences et al.

​Different forms of presentations are encouraged, including case studies, theoretical investigations, problem-oriented arguments, and comparative analyses.

*CFP* "ADOPTION, KINSHIP, CULTURE: ENGAGING THE PAST, IMAGINING THE FUTURE", ASAC 2021 EIGHTH BIENNIAL VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Adoption, Kinship, Culture: Engaging the Past, Imagining the Future

ASAC 2021 Eighth Biennial Virtual Conference

Gatherings for Q&A on Zoom: Oct. 15, 10am-7pm EST

 

Adoption, Kinship, Culture: Engaging the Past, Imagining the Future, hosted by The Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC), considers crossing boundaries, changing discourses, and new kinship formations to imagine the futures of adoption. This conference investigates what adoption, foster care, kinship, and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) might look like in the coming decades. What discourses, representations, practices, policies, and laws will change and which will stay the same, and why? Who and what will lead the way? As we speculate about the futures of adoption, we cannot ignore the innumerable pasts and the complexities of our present moment. Thus, we also ask, how has the past informed, anticipated, or rejected the future? What will be the effects of the past on our future kinships?

*CFP* "THE ANATOMY OF CINEMATIC IDENTITIES", INTERNATIONAL 2021 ONLINE CONFERENCE ON FILM STUDIES

International Conference on Film Studies

The Anatomy of Cinematic Identities

31st July-1st August, 2021

International Conference on Film Studies, Online

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made.

Cinema as a whole has historically offered a rich setting for understanding cultural interaction, however it functions within certain political and ideological limits. It offers fascinating source material for an examination of what, in the modern world, we understand as "otherness", the cinematic "Other" being constructed in terms of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

*CFP* "CENTERING WOMEN ON POST-2010 CHINESE TV" AND "GLOBAL TV IMAGES OF FEMALE MASCULINITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, COMMUNICATION, CULTURE &

Since the beginning of China’s self-modernizing process and the birth of Chinese feminist movements in the first decade of 20th century, women’s bodies and desires have frequently been marshalled in service of male-dominated nationalistic and (post-)socialist discourses of China and Chineseness. The ideological-political mobilization of female gender, sexuality, and subjectivity has considerably transformed and complicated contemporary Chinese televisual representations of women. In the 21st century, Chinese cyberspace, along with its flourishing creative and media industries, has witnessed an unexpected “boom in women-oriented literature and culture” (Sun & Yang, 2019, p. 28). Notably, the rise of local media and literature produced by and/or for women, along with flows of feminist and LGBTQ movements within and beyond China in the new millennium, first nurtured the cyber literature genre of “matriarchal fiction.” Such fiction is often “set in a society ruled by women … [and] describes a woman’s ascent to power in the public arena, or her success at establishing and heading a happy domicile including one or more male sexual partners” (Feng, 2013, p. 85). This matriarchal narrative maneuver later led to the widely popular “big heroine dramas” of Chinese TV in the past decade, the narratives of which focus on the life trajectories, professional obstacles, familial relationships, and romantic lives of female protagonists living in either the contemporary era or a temporally and spatially remote world (Sun & Yang, 2019, pp. 26-28). At the same time, a growing number of reality shows, talk TV shows, dating programs, and lifestyle shows in the post-2010 years have addressed themes related to women’s sociocultural roles in both professional and private milieus, such as parenting skills, same-sex friendships and homosociality, and marital-familial issues in contemporary China characterized by cosmopolitanism, post-feminism, digitization, (post-)globalization, and deterritorialization.

*CFP* "MUSIC AND NATIONALISM", 3RD GLOBAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

Music and Nationalism

3rd Global Interdisciplinary Conference

Online

June 12, 2021

 

Music is commonly regarded as a universal language, and yet it is also through music that the fiercest of nationalistic sentiments and inspirations for protest and rebellion have been expressed.

As a unifying force, music has frequently been used in the quest to establish a national identity as well as to emphasise social and political beliefs and promote particular agendas. But in doing so, music also establishes ‘others’ who do not belong to the collective. In light of political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson’s characterisation of nationalism as an imagined community, it is hardly surprising that music, with its extraordinary power over the human imagination, should play such an integral part in the way nationalism is constructed and understood.

*CFP* "THEORIZING ZOOMBIISM II: UNDEAD AGAIN", INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

Theorizing Zombiism II: Undead Again, Interdisciplinary Conference

29-31 July, 2021

University of Gothenburg

 

The zombie as an allegory for cultural, social, and scientific analysis spans almost every discipline including humanities, biology, mathematics, anthropology, economics, and political science. This range of use for the zombie narrative is a clear indication of its adaptability and viability as a distinct framework for critical theory. Theorizing Zombiism 2: Undead again will thus serve as a timely and much-needed platform for the development of international and interdisciplinary relationships between researchers, educators, practitioners and other interested parties.

Note that we are hoping that the majority of the events at this conference can take place in a live, synchronous format. Having said that, we will also take advantage of alternative formats for participation and presentations, including (but not limited to) synchronous digital presentations, recorded presentations and virtual social events.

*CFP* "COLOUR CONTRAST: CHROMATIC CONNECTIONS IN CINEMA", ISSUE 17, COMPARATIVE CINEMA JOURNAL

The analysis of colour as a key component of cinema has particularly animated film studies scholarship in recent years, with interest in colour encompassing among other dimensions its connections with aesthetics, affect, history and politics. Research in this area has ranged across more than a century of the medium’s existence: from the manifold possibilities of colour in the silent era in Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe’s Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (2019), to the most recent digital developments as captured in Carolyn Kane’s Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art and Aesthetics after Code (2014), colour is a property of the film image that has remained a constant even as it has undergone dramatic changes over time.

While colour has been mined by a number of scholars for its specific national, industrial and technological potentials, the 17th issue of Comparative Cinema invites contributors to approach colour for its comparative possibilities, broadly conceived. The perspective of comparison encourages contemplation at the level of close analysis, but also gestures towards larger cultural-historical questions. Sergei Eisenstein (1957) once argued that specific hues do not have absolute correspondences with isolated values or meanings, but that the significance of a particular colour is relational, ‘dependent only upon the general system of imagery’ in a given film. But beyond the systemic relations of colours within a film, the importance of colour as an element on screen might also be viewed in comparison with colour outside of cinema altogether, in other media or in terms of the sundry ideological uses to which it has been put.

*CFP* "NEW MEDIA AND NATIONAL IDENTITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE ARAB AND MUSLIM MEDIA RESEARCH JOURNAL

The advent of satellite TV and social media networks have transformed the long assumed approaches of identity construction and production. Global TV and virtual media spaces have allowed audiences to become more active in the realisation of their identity as an existential foundation. Amidst this sophisticated development, mediascapes have proven effective tools in the formation of the self via a self-gratification process.

Furthermore, the articulation of a common national identity has nowadays assumed diverse sources. National identity as suggested by severalscholars is becoming a fluid and changing concept. In the core of its formationare expressions of language, culture, ideology, history and memory. The internet is probably becoming the most influential platform for such expression. Contrary to previous generations who used to be brought up through family values, education systems and religious teachings, nowadays satellite TV and online environmentsarguably seem the most influential spaces of interactions about identity and opinion formation.

*CFP* "TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS: GLOBAL LITERATURE AND CINEMA", CAMERA STYLO 4 CONFERENCE

Camera Stylo 4 Conference 

Transnational Screens: Global Literature and Cinema

14th-16th July, 2021

Sydney University and Online

Evolving global screen environments in the last decade have triggered fundamental changes to the phenomena previously understood as the “transnational,” as content creators articulate new forces that connect and at times separate people and institutions across national and cultural borders. As such, transnational film, television and miscellaneous screen content have better recognised the decline in national sovereignty as a regulatory influence on global coexistence. 

 

The transnational as a critical concept has evolved to lens the economic, aesthetic and socio-political effects of globalisation, incorporating theoretical works from fields such as postcolonialism, consumerism, border studies and postnationalism.

 

*CFP* "AMERICANS IN VIENNA: 1945-1955", THE CENTER FOR AUSTRIAN AND GERMAN STUDIES 2021 ONLINE CONFERENCE

Americans in Vienna: 1945-1955 Conference

27th-28th April, 2021

Online (Zoom)

 

The Center for Austrian and German Studies (CAGS) at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies are inviting submissions for an April 27-28 2021 (online) conference, focusing on the varied presence of Americans in Vienna during the first decade after the Second World War. Papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Austrian-American History. The occupation and administration of Austria after the Second World War by the armies of the Allied victors and the division of Vienna into four zones of occupation paralleled arrangements in Germany. But although we know a lot about Cold-War espionage, monetary reforms or the workings of military administration in postwar Berlin, accounts centered on Vienna seem invariably drawn to Orson Welles and The Third Man, while the approaches of older scholarship, such as the edited volume Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung 1945-1955 (Böhlau, 1998), deserve a fresh look. Arguably, Vienna not only fueled foreign imagination more than Berlin at the time, but its quadripartite division and Austria’s successful financial reforms informed the Allied practices that followed on foot in Germany.

*CFP* "MUSLIMS IN INDIAN CINEMA", EDITED VOLUME

Critical articles on the representation of Muslims/Islam in Indian films are invited from research scholars/faculty members for the upcoming volume "Muslims in Indian Cinema" to be edited by Md Sarfaraj Nawab and Asrin Khatun.

Cinema is one of the most popular mediums to connect a huge audience under the same roof. In India, folks have a secured emotion, love and dedication for movie-going. Beside entertainment, films have catered to the sense of a connectedness between people across states in India. Presentation of myriad cultures has always been an important motif in Indian cinema considering the diverse nature of lifestyles, faiths or existence of the people. And the consumption of an alien culture by a comparatively large concourse can possibly be imagined only through the silver-screen. Thus, cinema in India plays an important role in the presentation of certain culture, sect or faith. People feed on such presentations and shape their views about the subject. By keeping all these factors in mind, it is important now to address the Muslim Question in Indian cinema in such a time as this when a new and changing notion of India is on the rise. Where do we present the Muslims in the New India vis-à-vis their presence in the past? 

*CFP* "GENDERING DECOLONIZATIONS: WAYS OF SEEING AND KNOWING", SPRING/SUMMER 2021 ISSUE, REVISTA DE COMUNICAÇÃO E LINGUAGENS

The article submission process for the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, “Gendering decolonizations: ways of seeing and knowing”, edited by Maria do Carmo Piçarra (ICNOVA – NOVA FCSH), Ana Cristina Pereira (CES – U. Coimbra) and Inês Beleza Barreiros (independent scholar), is open until January 15th 2021.

In the context of the internationalism that was the backbone of liberation struggles worldwide, women used images – mostly photography and film – as a weapon. In a certain way, this political engaged praxis was a sort of response to the use of images by political, scientific, and economic propaganda, which very much sustained the colonial order and ideology.

In Portuguese-speaking countries, among the women who photographed or made films for political purposes, the names of Augusta Conchiglia, Margaret Dickinson, Ingela Romare, Sarah Maldoror and Suzanne Lipinska stand out. The filmed materials – and not just the ones women authored – were given meaning by film editors Jacqueline Meppiel, Cristiana Tullio-Altan or Josefina Crato (the only woman among the four young Guineans sent, by Amílcar Cabral himself, to Cuba to study cinema).

*CFP* "ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT", GOTHIC ENCOUNTERS WITH ENCHANTMENT AND THE FAERIE REALM IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

‘Ill met by moonlight’

Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realm in literature and culture

University of Hertfordshire

8‒10 April 2021

The Open Graves, Open Minds (OGOM) Project was launched in 2010 with the Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture conference. We have subsequently hosted symposia on Bram Stoker and John William Polidori, unearthing depictions of the vampire in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifting creatures and other supernatural beings and their worlds. The Company of Wolves, our ground-breaking werewolf and feral humans conference, took place in 2015. This was followed by The Urban Weird, a folkloric collaboration with Supernatural Cities in 2017. The OGOM Project now extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical. 

*CFP* "NARRATIVES OF COVID-19 IN CHINA AND THE WORLD: TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY AND NATIONS", INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP

Narratives of COVID-19 in China and the World: Technology, Society, and Nations

Center on Digital Culture and Society, University of Pennsylvania

March 26th, 2021

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe and poses multiple crises to nations and humanity, our previous assumptions of community, mobility, personhood, and even society itself are called into question. Widespread border closure and travel disruptions have rendered conventional forms of sociality difficult. Lockdown, social distancing and work-from-home orders have affected different social groups in vastly different ways, with clear adverse impact on women, racial minorities, and the working poor. Pandemic narratives proliferate on social media and news networks. Individuals in different world regions articulate different if not conflictual meanings of self, community, justice, and the nation in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political elites in some nations propagate narratives of virus nationalism and populism and violently exclude and stigmatize certain social groups.

*CFP* "QUEER TV CHINA", EDITED COLLECTION

Contemporary China largely remains a hetero-patriarchal-structured society. Nevertheless, certain media and public spaces—though limited and compromised—are available for the negotiated survival and expressions of its gender, sexual, and sociocultural minorities (Bao 2018, 2020; Engebretsen 2014; Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015; Ho 2010; Kam 2013; Rofel 2007). This is especially evident in today’s Chinese televisual world and its related fannish space (Bai and Song 2015; Gong and Yang 2017; Yang and Bao 2012; Lavin, Yang, and Zhao 2017). Since the beginning of the 2010s, diverse communities, creative practices, and digital tools have flourished in both the mainstream media and online spaces of the Sinosphere. These have worked together to facilitate trans-geocultural and cross-linguistic flows of TV information and local TV production and adaptation (Yang 2009, 2014; Zhao 2018b). Today’s Chinese TV screens are replete with images of norm-defying gendered, sexualized, and/or eroticized performances, sentiments, and embodiments. For example, over the past two decades, there has been a surge in the number of tomboyish female and effeminate male TV stars. Meanwhile, many popular Chinese TV shows have featured cross-gender performances, homosociality, LGBTQ-identified personalities and participants, and even have explicitly addressed topics, such as gay marriage and queer rights.