*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* "LAS SERIES DE TELEVISIÓN COMO OBJETO DE ESTUDIO MULTIDISCIPLINAR", VOL. 14 Nº 1, REVISTA MEDITERRÁNEA DE COMUNICACIÓN

Con fecha 28 de diciembre de 2020, Teseo, la base de datos del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, que recoge las tesis doctorales defendidas en España desde el año 1976, identifica un total de 600 trabajos de alumnado de Doctorado que incluyen el término de búsqueda series de televisión; en su título y/o resumen. Esa misma búsqueda documental, llevada a cabo en la base de datos Dialnet (tipología Tesis), recoge 363 registros que aluden al concepto series de televisión, de los cuales, el 78% fueron defendidos entre los años 2010 y 2019. Estamos, pues, ante un objeto de estudio relevante y latente que sigue suscitando a día de hoy el interés no solo de la audiencia televisiva y social, sino también el de la comunidad investigadora, científica, académica y profesional a nivel internacional.

Las series de televisión han sido, son y serán estudiadas desde diferentes perspectivas: audiovisual, educativa, social, profesional, artística, lingüística, técnica, transmedial y comercial-publicitaria, entre otras.

Se trata de un objeto de estudio altamente consumido por los principales destinatarios de los contenidos formativos que se enseñan en las aulas, independientemente del nivel educativo -primaria, secundaria, grado y postgrado- y que por tanto reúne gran variedad de aspectos sobre los que se forma al alumnado. Por ello, el profesorado debe conocer, al menos de forma general, los contenidos de ficción audiovisual más consumidos por la juventud, para tratar de convertir su dedicación docente en contenidos relevantes que capaciten al alumnado a través de contenidos, herramientas, estrategias y técnicas que susciten su interés, motivación e implicación.

*CFP* "GEORGE A. ROMERO: A CANNIBALIZED BODY OF WORK?", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

International Conference

George A. Romero: A Cannibalized Body of Work?

November 24-25, 2022, Montpellier, France

 

Dug up in 2019, The Amusement Park (1973), and released in theaters in June 2021, commissioned by the Lutherian Church, stands as a reminder that George Andrew Romero (1940-2017) was not just the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and creator of the modern zombie. By focusing on an old man abandoned in a theme park where he will be subjected to all sorts of humiliation and abuse, the Pittsburgh director once again fires away at US-American society and remains faithful to an aesthetics whereby the figures of Gothic horror are portrayed in a raw realist mode.

Prompted by this posthumous release, and considering the continued relevance of Romero’s stories of contamination, zombified lives, and deserted stores and streets in the light of a global pandemic, this two-day international conference aims to decenter the habitual views cast on a body of work that has been cannibalized by the living dead. From 1968 to 2009, ten out of the sixteen feature films directed by Romero have ignored the creature to focus on witches in Jack’s Wife/Season of the Witch (1972), vampires in Martin (1977), killer monkeys in Monkey Shines (1988) and faceless yuppies in Bruiser (2000).

*CFP* "HUMANISM AND THE FICTIONAL REPRESENTARIONS OF MONARCHS IN LITERATURE, ARTS AND MEDIA", BOOK CHAPTER

When Gilgamesh rejected the advances of Ishtar and refused to do what his father did, he renounced the status of the chosen lover and champion of the Goddess and (unwittingly) decided to be human. The death of Enkido made him realize that he is no longer favored by the Gods. His failed attempt to reach immortality can be read as an attempt to regain the former status he renounced. The epic of Gilgamesh, like other epics, anounces the severing of the connection between the divine and the human in the political realm. After Gilgamesh, the biographies of Mesopotamian rulers started to seem more human despite the formulaic presence of the divine. In ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, Monarchs were either gods or descendents of gods. In the Medieval age, he devine right of kings replaced the old myths about the divine lineage of monarchs. Machiavelli's realpolitiks and the advent of Renaissance humanism put the concept of divine right in question. The human rather than the divine started to define the monarchs in the West. In the East, however, while Europe was restricting its monarchs, the Meiji restoration puts the emperor at the center of the political system in Japan. The Victorian and Edwardian ages are the last literary periods to be named after monarchs. They both witnessed the rise of Gothic literature. The figure of Dracula strikes the reader as a monarchic figure. But this monarch is a posthuman figure cursed with immortality and a hunger for human blood. In recent years, the gothic and horror genres have gained remarkable popularity in cinema and popular culture. The figures of the Mummy and the vampire are usually depicted as monarchic figures that seek revenge for past wrongs. Revenge is closely related to the theme of royalty. In classical and Renaissance, modern and contemporary revenge narratives where loyalty to a deceased patriarch gives legitimacy to the actions of their heirs. Indeed, revenge narratives in Shakespeare and beyond are generally based on father-son emotional dynamics. These emotional dynamics are described as monarchic by Martha C Nussbaum in her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. In Victorian and contemporary horror fiction, the father-son dynamics are more complex as the royal father is the past self of the revenant. 

*CFP* "FANTASY ACROSS MEDIA", GIFCON 2022

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2022 with the theme of 'Fantasy Across Media'.

Much of fantasy studies has focused on the genre’s presence in literature, with histories and theoretical frameworks often either implicitly or explicitly centring the written word. In some cases, academic, critic, and fan responses to the genre outside of literature even go so far as to erase or question the possibility of the genre’s existence in other media, perhaps most famously embodied in J.R.R. Tolkien’s insistence in ‘On Fairy-stories' that some media, such as drama, are fundamentally incompatible with fantasy. These types of responses fail to account for the medium-specific benefits and challenges that different media pose for depictions of the impossible, serving to establish hierarchies between media, exclude non-literary media from analyses of the genre, and potentially limit a full understanding of the genre’s history.

Fantasy and the fantastic have had long, rich histories outside of literature, playing a central role in the development of theatre, film, and comic books, and celebrating a more recent boom on the small screen. Furthermore, from the innumerable reimaginings of the Arthurian tradition, to The Wizard of Oz, to manga and anime, to contemporary multimedia franchises and cinematic universes, fantasy texts have been integral to the history of transmedia storytelling, allowing their rich storyworlds to expand across multiple media. 

*CFP* LLAMADA A ARTÍCULOS, VOL. 1 Nº 2 (2022), REVISTA SERIARTE

SERIARTE es una revista, con revisión por pares, creada con la intención de proporcionar un espacio a la investigación, el debate teórico, metodológico y crítico sobre las series televisivas y el arte de los nuevos medios audiovisuales.

La profunda transformación experimentada por el entorno, la difusión y el consumo de la imagen en movimiento, además de la rápida expansión bajo el impacto de la tecnología digital, ha llevado a los académicos en el campo de los estudios del audiovisual a elaborar nuevos paradigmas teóricos y enfoques metodológicos para dar cuenta de las complejidades de un panorama cambiante de convergencia e hibridación, unos paradigmas que, además, se traducen en el avance y la transferencia de unos conocimientos que encuentran su reflejo en la sociedad actual. Teniendo en cuenta este escenario en evolución, SERIARTE facilita un espacio internacional para el estudio de las series televisivas y los nuevos medios de comunicación como el cine, los videojuegos, los videoclips o las plataformas digitales, entre otros. Todo ello atendiendo al compromiso crítico, la discusión científica de naturaleza teórica y el análisis de las obras. Para ello dispone de las siguientes secciones: Artículos (Monográfico y Miscelánea), Tribuna, Reseñas y Crítica.

Convocatoria del Vol. 1 No. 2 (2022)

*CFP* "SUPERHEROES: A COMPANION", BOOK CHAPTER

As media texts show us superheroes from around the world(s), demonstrating extraordinary abilities and living a life shaped by a moral code, how we define their iconic features and cultural impact has been the focus of much scholarly debate.

Superheroes have proliferated and multiplied in the 21st Century, coming to prominence in film, television, and video game industries the same way that their popular narratives had begun to flourish in the comic book industry some eighty years before. Yet, while all of these stories and characters are tethered to these early years of the genre, through iterative retellings, reboots, and cultural readjustments, superheroes have consistently found renewed life in modern and contemporary re-imaginings.

Seen through examples, such as the synergy of “Batmania”, the convergence culture of the MCU, the conglomerate hierarchies that facilitate the Arkham games, or the multi-verse publications that enable spaces for a female Thor or an Afro-Latino Spider-man, superheroes continue to evolve through the conditions of their production and the cultural discourses that they engender. 

*CFP* "DRACONES IN MUNDO: DRAGONS IN LITERATURE, FILM, AND POP CULTURE", A SERIES OF EDITED VOLUMES

As the popularity of mythical creatures in films and literature grows, there is one creature that remains prominent: the dragon. Dragons have become most visible recently in the cinematic versions of The Hobbit and in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones Series). However, there are other films, such as Dragonslayer (1981), Reign of Fire (2002), Dragonheart (1996), and the How to Train Your Dragon series (2010-2019), and numerous adult and children’s literature series that feature dragons.

This call for papers will result in several themed volumes under each of these main headings:

 

Full volume(s):

• Wings, Wonders, and Warriors: Dragons in Children’s Literature and Graphic Novels

*CFP* "EPIC AND ICONIC: ESSAYS ON THE WORK, INFLUENCE, AND LEGACY OF ALEX ROSS", BOOK CHAPTER

Nelson Alexander Ross, better known as Alex, has exerted nearly thirty years of profound influence upon sequential art storytelling. Ross emerged into the comics world in the early 1990s with his work on Terminator: Burning Earth, Marvels, and Kingdom Come, immediately establishing his photorealistic style of painting, influenced by Norman Rockwell, Salvador Dali, and Andrew Loomis, among others.

In the years since, Ross has drawn and painted nearly every recognizable character in the Marvel and DC universes, expanded the storytelling capacity of the graphic novel form, and taken home numerous Eisner and Harvey awards. His prolific output can be found across media platforms, from traditional comics to art galleries, from film and television to magazines, toys, and video games.

Given Ross’s substantial and acclaimed level of production, it is no exaggeration to consider him among the most important commercial artists of his generation – and yet, his work has garnered little academic interest. In this collection, we hope to curate the first definitive set of scholarly perspectives on Ross’s creative approach, his interventions into sequential art narrative and aesthetics, and his lasting influences upon popular culture and the creative community.

*CFP* LLAMADA A PARTICIPACIÓN, III CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE COMUNICACIÓN Y REDES EN LA SOCIEDAD DE LA INFORMACIÓN

III Congreso Internacional de Comunicación y Redes en la Sociedad de la Información

Universidad de Salamanca

3 y 4 de marzo de 2022 (presencial)

 

El impacto de las redes sociales ha continuado creciendo de forma espectacular en la última década, tanto en número de usuarios y tiempo invertido en ellas, como en los ingresos obtenidos. El fenómeno de las redes sociales está cobrando aún más importancia gracias a la posibilidad de acceso a través de la banda ancha móvil, mediante aplicaciones para dispositivos móviles. Ambos fenómenos se retroalimentan y configuran un binomio de éxito dentro de la Sociedad de la Información.

Los usuarios de las redes sociales tienen ahora la capacidad de conectarse, opinar, seguir a sus amigos, informar, etc., en tiempo real. El acceso a las redes sociales en movilidad aporta un valor añadido al propio servicio, ya que el usuario está siempre conectado y puede interactuar en todo momento, independientemente del lugar en el que se encuentre.

*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* "EXPLORING MOTHERLY INSTINCTS: REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERS IN INDIAN CINEMA", ISSUE 63, CAFÉ DISSENSUS MAGAZINE

The figure of the mother has always been glorified and depicted in black and white without shades of grey. However, time and again filmmakers and academic thinkers have strived to push this conventional depiction to accommodate various layers associated with the concept of motherhood, as they have sought to challenge the simplistic representation of mothers in popular media. It is important to explore the maternal world further in this highly digitized, globalized and gender-neutral environment. This proposed issue of Café Dissensus aims to curate a collection of essays on the representation of mothers in films that go beyond the stereotypical portrayal of motherhood as epitomized in the figures of Nirupa Roy and Rakhee Gulzar in conventional Bollywood style, showing unconditional love toward her offspring. The proposed issue welcomes submissions on the following themes (though not limited to them):

• Queerness and motherhood 
• Good vs. bad mothers 
• Evolution of the representation of mothers in cinema 
• Modern women and motherhood 
• Reimagining the domestic space 
• Masculinity and motherhood 

*CFP* "THEOLOGY AND VAMPIRES", THEOLOGY AND POP CULTURE SERIES COLLECTED VOLUME

From the ‘vampire craze’ of the eighteenth century, and up to contemporary takes on the genre, vampire narratives have been inextricably bound up with theological questions. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its many adaptations, the vampire is repelled by the crucifix and the consecrated Host. Two puncture wounds on the victim’s neck in Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ make the doctor send for a clergyman. In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil, Lestat believes that he has witnessed the Crucifixion and tasted Christ’s blood. ‘God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves’, he tells Louis in Interview with the Vampire, styling himself as a God, and mimicking divine omnipotence. But he has no answers to give Louis, no revelation, and no known salvation or solace, because he is just like him in their shared vampiric nature. What do these examples tell us about where the vampire sits in relation to the divine? And what kind of theological vision do vampire stories uncover?

Given the richness of theological substratum in vampire fiction, we invite submissions for a collected volume entitled Theology and Vampires, for the Theology and Pop Culture Series published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. The aim of this volume is to explore the theology of vampires, with a particular focus on the pop culture aspect of vampire narratives. We are seeking essays exploring the theological implications of the vampire across a wide range of media, from popular Victorian tales through to films, video games, and animated series.

*CFP* "CINEMATIC BOND AT 60: NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES", A HISTORY RESEARCH GROUP SYMPOSIUM

Cinematic Bond at 60: National and International Perspectives

A History Research Group Symposium

Bournemouth University (Online), 4 March 2022

 

In 1962 the first James Bond film, Dr No (Terence Young) was released. The film was a huge financial success for EON productions, catapulted Sean Connery to lifelong stardom and started a period of Bondmania that lasted for most of the 1960s. As a cultural icon and cultural phenomenon, James Bond and the Bond film have become a globally recognised brand. 

The films have been widely analysed for their spectacle, their often problematic engagement with masculinity, gender relations and cultural appropriation as well as the ideological implications of how they engage with their backdrop of social and geopolitical change across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With 2022 marking 60 years of the cinematic Bond and the latest instalment, No Time to Die (Cary Fukunaga), due (allegedly) for release in October 2021, critical reflections on this ongoing franchise are relevant and timely.

*CFP* "REFOCUS: THE FILMS OF ABEL FERRARA", BOOK CHAPTER

Over his four-decade long career, Abel Ferrara has built himself a reputation of being one of the most audacious and unconventional filmmakers in contemporary cinema. After his beginnings in the exploitation circuit of late 1970s he developed to become one of the central figures in the ‘indie’ wave of the 1980s and 90s and is by now a frequent guest at the leading international film festivals in Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Locarno.

Ferrara’s unique career covers the entire cinematic spectrum from grindhouse to arthouse but has seldomly been at the center of scholarly attention. The prospective collection of essays (planned to appear in the ReFocus series at Edinburgh University Press) aims to close this gap by offering a comprehensive critical survey of the director’s multi-faceted oeuvre covering his narrative features as well as his documentaries and his work for television.

In order to ensure a broad range of methodological, theoretical, historical or philosophical perspectives on Ferrara’s work, scholars of film studies and related fields such as cultural studies, screen and media studies, or philosophy are invited to submit a short abstract (approx. 300 words) for essays to be included in the collection. 

*CFP* "BORDERS AND DETECTIVE FICTION", THEME ISSUE, CLUES: A JOURNAL OF DETECTION

For this theme issue of Clues, proposals are sought from a wide variety of critical, national, and cultural perspectives addressing how and why borders are represented in detective fiction, film, television, or other media (e.g., computer games, graphic novels, radio drama, podcasts). As David Newman and Anssi Paasi argue, “The construction of boundaries at all scales and dimensions takes place through narrativity.” Thus, it makes sense to turn to the detective story, a genre whose plots conceptualize issues of morality, legality, security, and transgression to understand the ways in which borders are conceptualized and mediated. Crossing borders can signify openness, mobility, cultural exchange, and cooperation. But the border can also be a site of surveillance, discipline, risk, exclusion, and violence, a place where geographic, cultural, economic, and bodily integrity are rendered vulnerable. It can, in short, be the scene of (the) crime. How do imaginative narratives across the diverse range of historical and contemporary crime fiction constitute investigations of defined, dynamic, and/or developing border spaces?

Suggested topics:

• Detective fiction and migrancy/refugees 

*CFP* "SPECULATIVE FICTION'S INTERSECTIONS WITH POSTHUMANISM AND NEW MATERIALISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, EXTRAPOLATION JOURNAL

Extrapolation invites papers for a special issue investigating how speculative fiction, broadly conceived, dramatizes the tensions between the material limitations of the body and efforts to think beyond the human subject in posthumanism and new materialism. Taking our cues from contemporary authors like Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Caitlín Kiernan, Kathe Koja, Ken Liu, and China Miéville, we will examine how experimentation with form serves to articulate human practices for enduring and even flourishing in our extra-human reality. We are particularly invested in the ways speculative texts critique the centrality of the human while remaining attentive to the lived experience of the material body as it responds to ecological, technological, and economic demands that exceed human capacities of understanding.

Despite its modest aim to investigate thought and life that operates beyond the boundaries of enlightenment humanism, the field of the critical posthumanities often employs a rhetoric of extremes that invites us to abolish, expunge, contort, challenge, and undo the category of the human entirely. Yet, this expansive model of posthuman(ist) thought is often haunted by bodies, environments, and matter that resist being tamed by intellectual abstraction. Concomitantly, the turn to new materialism takes up problems of inter-relation and ecological co-constitution, offering ethical practices for coping with threats posed by the Anthropocene. Aiming to think more expansively than anthropocentrism allows, new materialist discourse disavows the human subject as the agent of our world to describe, instead, how agency—or animacy—is distributed beyond the human. 

*CFP* "MEMORY, GUILT AND SHAME", 3RD INTERNATIONAL INTERISCIPLINARY ONLINE CONFERENCE

Memory, guilt and shame

3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference

Conference online (via Zoom)

 

The 20th century – an epoch of genocides – will be forever associated with feelings of guilt and shame. And it is not only the case of perpetrators. People are still ashamed of their ancestors and of the members of their nations, societies or families. Those who suffered from crimes and cruelties often experience survivor guilt, a mysterious phenomenon that psychotherapists try to tame. The status of bystanders is nowadays more and more often called into question, as it became clear that remaining “neutral” in the face of violence and atrocities was simply impossible. At the same time, many of both the victims and executioners make efforts to forget about the past events and repress the uncomfortable emotions. Others forget the facts involuntarily. Yet others cultivate false memories of what never occurred. Politicians impose their own narratives of history, with the hope of re-shaping the common convictions and achieving their short-sighted goals. Therefore, researchers dealing with memory studies of various kinds aim at explaining the complex relations of facts and phantasms, real and imagined guilt, justified and irrational shame.

*CFP* "CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA", EDITED COLLECTION

In the world of teen drama (or YA drama, as some prefer), there are a number of ways to represent adolescence and its attendant horrors, and we’ve seen a great deal of fantasy-based approaches; beginning with Buffy, some establish that high school is actual hell. But few series come close to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s devotion to that idea. The Netflix series (2018-20), based on the Archie Comics spin-off and featuring a much darker version of Sabrina Spellman, may be difficult for audiences to reconcile with ABC’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the previous adaptation. While one is a teen sitcom in which Sabrina’s powers get her into wacky situations, and she is supported by a talking Salem the cat, the other might feel closer to The Craft. However different this version of Greendale is from what we may be used to, it certainly offers much to explore.

We invite proposals for a forthcoming collection of essays on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and welcome those that engage with industry perspectives, textual approaches, audience studies, and issues of critical reception. We anticipate a broad audience for this collection, which includes scholars as well as students of the humanities at both graduate and undergraduate levels. As such, submissions from contributors at various levels and from diverse fields are encouraged. 

DEFENSA DE TESIS "THE PORTRAYAL OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ON NATIONAL TELEVISION IN LEBANON: THE CASES OF LBCI AND MTV"

Próxima defensa de tesis del Departamento de Comunicación de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Información de la tesis: 


"The Portrayal of Domestic Violence on National Television in Lebanon: The Cases of LBCI and MTV"

Autor/a: KAFAA MSAED