*CFP* "MEDIATING MOTHER-ACTIVISM", BOOK CHAPTER

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in exploring motherhood and mothering as political and emotional resources for digital activism. Although the intertwinement of mothering and politics predates the digital context, feminist debates around the politicization of mothering, from protests against state killings and disappearances, via the role of the mother in nation-building, to advocacy for right wing populisms, need addressing all the more urgently as we endeavour to understand the ways in which mothering is not only mediatised, but agentively deployed across social media platforms. The political role and significance of the mother, the uneasy relation between motherhood as gendered identity and mothering as daily practice, continue to be contentious issues for feminists (Rich 1976, DiQuinzio 1999, Gumbs, Martens and Williams 2016, Naber 2021). Mother-activists have historically constructed public issues from their personal experiences of suffering and loss within family structures (Reiger 2000), utilizing the symbolic power of motherhood in order to motivate others to join their causes (Logsdon Conradsen 2011). Notwithstanding, campaigns such those of the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been cast as ‘trapped by a bad script’ (Taylor 1997), that is as reproducing the same narratives of familialism and heteropatriarchal bloodline that underpin the narrative of the state. Conversely, many feminist scholars have argued that the political mobilisation of the trope of the mother has the potential to challenge the ‘official’ frameworks of national, ethnic or other group loyalty and to undermine or to radically reframe these very narratives (Kim 2020, Athanasiou 2017, Carreon and Moghadam 2015). For example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have raised the slogan ‘One child, all the children’ (Sosa 2014), taking the campaign beyond limits of blood kinship.

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, COMEDY IN CRISIS CONFERENCE

Comedy in Crisis Conference

Mixed Bill: Comedy and Gender Research Network

Birmingham City University, 14th and 15th January 2022

 

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, comedy (and social uses of humour) have become increasingly vital as a method of coping with adversity on both a local and global scale. Shared laughter can provide a temporary relief from the anxieties that continue to dominate a socially distanced existence, and thus bring people together whilst physically apart. In this context temporary humour communities have become increasingly significant. This conference will creatively explore how comedy (both in terms of content and industrial practices related to live and mediated forms) adapts and engages with times of crisis.

Although we anticipate a significant amount of discussion will look to recent events related to the pandemic, we also actively seek presentations engaging with wider conceptions of personal, social, political and environmental crises. We therefore invite abstracts for presentations, performances and creative responses on the following topics. 

*CFP* "COMEDY IN CRISIS", MIXED BILL: COMEDY AND GENDER RESEARCH NETWORK CONFERENCE

Comedy in Crisis Conference

Mixed Bill: Comedy and Gender Research Network

Birmingham City University, 14th and 15th January 2022

 

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, comedy (and social uses of humour) have become increasingly vital as a method of coping with adversity on both a local and global scale. Shared laughter can provide a temporary relief from the anxieties that continue to dominate a socially distanced existence, and thus bring people together whilst physically apart. In this context temporary humour communities have become increasingly significant. This conference will creatively explore how comedy (both in terms of content and industrial practices related to live and mediated forms) adapts and engages with times of crisis.

Although we anticipate a significant amount of discussion will look to recent events related to the pandemic, we also actively seek presentations engaging with wider conceptions of personal, social, political and environmental crises. We therefore invite abstracts for presentations, performances and creative responses on the following topics. Note our examples below are from a UK context, but please do not let that constrain your responses:

*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* "REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE IN LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ARTS", VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

In his foreword to World Report on Violence and Health, published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2002, Nelson Mandela states that “the twentieth century will be remembered as a century marked by violence” (Krug et.al., 2002, “Foreword”).  Now we are nearly at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, but violence still permeates in our lives at various levels. Various forms of violence occurring at levels of interpersonal, self-directed, collective, state, warfare, child and youth violence, intimate partner violence, environmental violence, and animal violence lay bare the complexity and pervasiveness of the phenomenon, yet it also brings along the necessity to discuss violence from multiple perspectives.

It is difficult to present a comprehensive definition of violence since not only the concept of violence is broad as stated above but also it runs the risk of degrading the concept through fixed meanings. Keeping in mind that the concept of violence has always attracted philosophers, writers, and artists across disciplines throughout centuries, the evolving nature of the concept has made it essential to address it from different perspectives. Concordantly, Dahlberg and Krug’s definition of ‘violence’ is an applicable one which characterizes violence on different aspects as follows: “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (Krug et.al., 2002, 5). 

*CFP* "OTHERING / OTHERISATION", EDITED COLLECTION

The concept of “Othering/Otherisation” refers to the classification of individuals or groups as outsiders. This cognitive classification divides any sociocultural and political formation into potential two generally monolithic and mutually exclusive blocks: the in-group community versus the out-group community. The inclusion or exclusion of each block is contingent on different criteria like religion, ethnicity, culture, race, politics, class, etc. When these differences are used descriptively, they become somewhat acceptable and harmless. However, when they are normative, they are often couched in the discourses of superiority or inferiority, goodness or badness, civilized-ness or uncivilized-ness, etc. Thus, those differences become highly harmful and unacceptable. The politics of “Othering” are quite likely to generate social in-justice, discrimination, racism, and power abuses. So, “Othering”, as a concept or a practice, needs more careful study and vigorous research to understand the dynamics of its production and the goals of its installation.

The perception that one group stands as a threat to another group increases people’s tendency to reject each other and to create a negative representation of them. “Othering” rests on a binary opposition of the self and the other. It is structured around a positive representation of the self and demonization of the other. Hence, “Othering” or “otherisation” rests on a solid politics of fear of the strange, the unfamiliar, the unknown, and the mysterious. It seems that the politics of “Othering” is one indulging in and capitalizing on xenophobic sentiment par excellence.

*CFP* "SECONDHAND CULTURES AND UNSETTLED TIMES", INTERDISCIPLINARY VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM

Secondhand Cultures in Unsettled Times

Interdisciplinary Virtual Symposium

School of Journalism, Media & Culture, Cardiff University

15-16 June 2021

 

Secondhand cultures and practices, from reselling sites to charity shops and thrift stores to waste picking, have expanded and transformed over recent decades, with profound social, political, and environmental implications. Despite vibrant and growing research into secondhand worlds, opportunities to share and discuss this research across interdisciplinary boundaries have been rare. Further, secondhand cultures have been unsettled by the global pandemic in ways that are not yet well understood.

*CFP* "MEDICAL CULTURE IN EAST ASIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA", EDITED VOLUME

The current COVID-19 global pandemic has inspired renewed attention to the intersection between public health and mass media. With constant media updates of case counts, healthcare guidelines, and preventive strategies, among other public health communications, the boundaries of various imagined communities have been newly established or strongly reinforced. The complex cultural and geopolitical region of East Asia, in particular, has become a center of media attention, following wide circulation of essentialized cultural norms (such as collectivity and uniformity), stereotypical accounts of hygiene habits, racialized discourses surrounding the East Asian bodies, and techno-orientalist narratives of East Asian use of digital means for disease tracing and control. 

Both personal and public health outcomes thus have become inextricably intertwined with processes of representation and (re)mediation, while the pandemic itself has become a media event inseparable from various audiovisual forms. We are therefore living a historical moment that demands reflection on the precarious socio-political structures revealed through audiovisual media, including health care access and its relation to class, gender, and ethnic hierarchies.

*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* "TOWARD THE ANTIRACIST CONFERENCE: RECKONING WITH THE PAST, REMAINING THE PRESENT", THOMAS R. WATSON CONFERENCE IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

Toward the Antiracist Conference: Reckoning With the Past, Reimagining the Present

April 21st-23rd, 2021

Online

 

The thirteenth biennial Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition, which will be held virtually from April 21-23, 2021, will focus on policies and practices for planning and convening antiracist conferences. The exigence for our theme is global and local. 

 

This year’s uprisings for Black liberation have only reaffirmed the need for institutions of higher education to confront their roles in perpetuating a white supremacist system and, with the BIPOC students, faculty, and staff who have endured this violence and marginalization, to create just and equitable structures in its place. Moreover, we seek to extend the repair work the Watson Conference has undertaken in addressing its own history of enabling anti-Black racism by forging a way forward. (See Watson and Anti-Black Racism for a complete discussion).

*CFP* "RADICAL FILM AT THE DAWN OF A NEW SOCIETY", BOOK CHAPTER

You are invited to make a contribution to a new book arising from the Radical Film Network Meeting Berlin (RFNMB). Under the working title “Radical Film at the Dawn of a New Society”, the book aims to critically interrogate how various actors working at the intersection of radical film, art and digital culture are engaging with issues of our present time shaped by changes and disruptions of seismic proportions. The events of the year 2020 have fundamentally transformed public life almost beyond recognition. It remains to be seen if these transformations are here to stay or just a passing phase. These events and many of the transformations they have given rise to have fostered a surge of anxiety, feelings of powerlessness and a dark vision of the future.

However, if we take a second look at the current situation, we can also see a newly developed focus on the importance of community, of solidarity and on maintaining sociality, all of which hold the promise of a new society. And while anxiety is often said to embody paralyzing features, one could argue that anxiety — a basic human emotion like joy, lust and anger — is a strong motive for collective human action because nobody wants to stay alone in the dark.

*CFP* "MIGRANT BELONGINGS: DIGITAL PRACTICES AND THE EVERYDAY", 2021 ONLINE CONFERENCE

Migrant Belongings. Digital Practices and the Everyday

22nd-23rd April 2020

Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Online Conference

Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.

This international conference focuses on the connection between the media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also subjects individual as well as groups to increased datafied migration management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression. 

*CFP* "SCREENING CONTROVERSY" EDITED COLLECTION, ROUTLEDGE SCREENING FILM SERIES OF BOOKS

You are invited to submit an abstract for the upcoming edited collection Screening Controversy, part of the Routledge Screening Film series of books that aim to support the use of individual film screenings as a core aspect of film studies pedagogy. Books devoted to individual films are often difficult to assign as set readings due to their length and approach which is not conceptualized for screening-based support. Screening Film is positioned to fill this gap in teaching film where screenings are a core activity. Each volume of Screening Film includes fifty key readings on individual films specifically designed with the aim of supporting film screenings. Contributions should be short, focused, contextual and analytical readings that address an individual film of your choice, and, as the title of this volume suggests, this volume is specifically interested in films whose reception has been marred by controversy. 

We invite established and emerging scholars specializing in film studies and cognate disciplines, to contribute chapters of a maximum of 4000 words on an individual film that responds to the theme of the collection. It is expected that each chapter includes any key historical, political, stylistic, industrial contexts which are necessary for understanding the film more broadly, especially in relation to the canon, movements, and debates which circulate around the text and that this is in advance of, or alongside, any new insights, research, and arguments brought to the analysis.

*CFP* "BUILDING BRIDGES/ DISMANTLING RACISM FOR THE COMMON GOOD", INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP & VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Building Bridges/Dismantling Racism for the Common Good

International Workshop - Virtual Conference

June 9th-11st, 2021. 

The workshop-conference will examine the characteristics of systemic racism and its impact on everyday life by exploring the interrelated themes of diversity, alienation (anomie), whiteness, and community. Presentations developed around these themes will establish critical frameworks for understanding how race and racial ideologies persist in shaping social and cultural institutions, which mediate interconnectedness and/or social isolation between individuals and social groups, and how these factors foster or hinder community-building. 

 

Towards this end, perceptions of identity and community will be examined by (i) presenting concepts and theories that are core to cultural diversity including the basis of stereotypes, prejudice, stigma, discrimination, and privilege, (ii) investigating the links between practices of exclusion and the structuring of societies, and (iii) exploring the psychosocial factors that contribute to alienation (anomie) and social isolation. 

*CFP* "PHOTOGRAPHY & RESISTANCE", SPECIAL ISSUE, MAI: FEMINISM & VISUAL CULTURE

MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture invites authors with expertise in visual and cultural studies and related disciplines to contribute to our upcoming special issue on photography and resistance. Of particular interest are contributions that illuminate the lives and work of women and non-binary photographers and that draw on the insights and practices of anti-racist and intersectional feminism.

Photography, as Yvonne Vera writes, “has often brought forth the most loaded fraction of time, a calcification of the most unequal, brutal, and undemocratic moment of human encounter (1999). Photography has also been used as a form of resistance to repressive regimes, to oppose war and violence, and as a means to challenge heteronormative patriarchy. 

Photography offers both a means of critique and a way of making visible events and forms of power that are not intended to be seen. Feminist and LGBTQ+ photographers have taken up cameras as a way to produce entirely new visual vocabularies, to reimagine the world otherwise, and to challenge hegemonic ways of seeing.

*CFP* "JORDAN PEELE", SPECIAL ISSUE, SUPERNATURAL STUDIES JOURNAL

Submissions may consider Peele’s work as a writer, director, and/or producer as it falls within the scope of the journal’s purview; representations of the supernatural, the speculative, the uncanny, and the weird. Writers may focus on any of Peele’s works, with preference given to Get Out, Us, Candyman, Lovecraft Country, or any speculative or genre works that come out between now and the publication of this issue. Papers may center any topics, but special attention will be paid to Black masculinity, Black femininity, the way that comedy informs horror (and vice versa) within his work, Black bodies in abject horror, historical context and legacy, obscure nuances, and hidden easter eggs. Likewise, articles can put Peele’s work in conversation with other genre works, film makers, literature, and histories of Black horror.

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words to cburke2@stetson.edu and supernaturalstudies@gmail.com by 30 April 2021. The Subject line should read: “Jordan Peele Issue: [abbreviated title].” Completed manuscripts will be due by 15 September 2021, with revisions to be completed no later than 31 January 2022.

*CFP* "COMMUNITY MEDIA IN THE ERA OF PANDEMICS, PROTESTS, AND POST TRUTHS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE PROJECTOR JOURNAL

This special issue of The Projector seeks submissions focused on contemporary community media as activist and aesthetic practices. In 2005, Kevin Howley described community media as “popular and strategic interventions into contemporary media culture committed to the democratization of media structures, forms, and practices.” (Howley, 2005) In revisiting this definition 15 years later, the holistic aim of this special issue is to interrogate shifts in various community media making environments brought about in the past decade. Importantly, the shifts themselves were heralded by unprecedented conglomerations of both mainstream and alternative media outlets as well as by developments in media technologies that increasingly shrink the perceived distinction between media making and media consuming.

We are particularly interested in submissions that address roles and practices of community media making (U.S. or global) within current crises in global health, media legitimacy, and democratic consensus, as well as within the increased visibility of grassroots engagement with issues of social justice, in general, and Movements for Black Lives, in particular. 

*CFP* "WOKE TV: POLITICALLY ALERT TELEVISION IN THE TRUMP, BLM, AND POST-#METOO ERA", CHAPTER BOOK

Debate around ‘woke television’ has been increasingly more present in popular parlance. Within television criticism, there has been heavy reflecting on (and co-constructing of) a meta-genre of contemporary US television characterized by a particular sensitization to issues of social justice, racial justice, and gender equity and a showcasing of commitment toward denouncing institutional ideologies such as structural poverty, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Indeed, a swell of popular criticism has been quick to discern the micro-contexts of politically alert television fiction, discussing for instance African-American history and white privilege in Atlanta and Dear White People, diversity in Star Trek, progressive reimaginings of classic shows such as Buffy and Charmed, the gender-swap in Doctor Who, LGBTQ pedagogy in the revival of Will & Grace, multidimensional female characters in Glow, complex and unapologetic teen sexuality in Normal People, Big Mouth and Sex Education. These instances inform the notion of “woke television” as the inclusion of relevant and topical themes, blatantly calling out structural inequalities and delivering cultural texts that reify the pleasures and intricacies of ‘woke culture.’

Apart from celebrating contemporary television’s bold engagement with social, racial and gender-related issues, popular critical writing has simultaneously questioned the transformative and empowering implications of woke television, recognizing issues such as the ideological ambiguity of feminist shows (including the impossible-to-ignore whiteness of critically acclaimed The Handmaid’s Tale and the poshness of Fleabag), as well as the problematic representational strategies of gendered violence and rape (for example, in 13 Reasons Why).

*CFP* "COMMUNITY AND ACTIVIST MEDIA: RESISTANCE AND RESURGENCE", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF ALTERNATIVE AND COMMUNITY MEDIA

The Journal of Alternative & Community Media (JOACM) publishes research that helps explain the shifting media environment, and the ways in which people use alternative forms of media and communication. Issues of concern to the journal include the nature and distribution of media power; access to and participation in media; media practices of communities and social movements; and the possibilities of emerging technologies and new media.

This special issue of the The Journal of Alternative & Community Media is inspired by papers from the OURMedia gathering in Brussels, 2019; and the planned (but cancelled) post-conference to the ICA 2020, to submit papers on the theme, ‘Community and Activist Media: Resistance and Resurgence’.

We call for academic papers alongside contributions from alternative media practitioners who will contribute to a special section, ‘Essays from the Frontline’.

*CFP* "PROSECUTING AND POLICING RAP", SPECIAL ISSUE, POPULAR MUSIC JOURNAL

Contributions are invited to a special issue of Popular Music on the complex interface between rap music (taken in its broadest sense to include mainstream rap, gangsta rap, grime, drill, activist rap, etc.) and criminal justice systems around the world. Rap music is an international youth-cultural powerhouse and, while its spread has been celebrated, it has also been attended by mounting criminalisation. This special issue asks researchers to explore the policing and prosecuting of rap and how this has been framed in media reporting. It also considers what might make rap susceptible to such state criminalization and how rappers, communities, civil liberties groups, defence lawyers, and scholars have come to challenge ‘prosecuting rap’.

The growing use of rap music in criminal and civil proceedings has emerged as a well-documented debate and issue of public concern in the US—dubbed ‘Rap on Trial’ (as per the title of Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis’ recent book).However, outside the US, it is much less understood and there is a pressing need for more scrutiny and critique. This special issue is particularly interested in work that addresses case studies and trends in the global South; in Britain and other non-US parts of the global North; and in comparative work on the US in relation to other countries.