08/18/2022
🚨🚨🚨Attention fellow film and media scholars! Check out the Call for Papers from the University of California, Santa Barbara below.
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Call for Papers: Media Fields VIII Conference
Zones of Mediation
Film and Media Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara
November 18th and 19th, 2022 | Virtual Conference
Submission Deadline: September 12, 2022
The Media Fields Collective is proud to announce a call for presentations for the biannual Media Fields graduate student conference. To ensure the health and safety of participants and encourage international participation and accessibility, this conference will be held virtually. Pending health advisories in November, an in-person event at the Po***ck Theater at UC Santa Barbara may be scheduled for the evening of Thursday, November 17.
Keynote Speakers:
Adrian Ivakhiv (Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture & Steven Rubenstein Professor for Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont)
Yuriko Furuhata (Associate Professor & William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History, McGill University)
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What are the domains, epistemologies, or territories often obscured but essential to both the production of film and media and understandings of mediation? For the 2022 Media Fields conference, we invite scholars to focus on zones as a framework through which to conceptualize and understand film and media.
Zones are traditionally conceived as regions or areas set off and distinguished from their surroundings. As the historical zoning of ecological disasters, marginalized communities, and other states of exception have shown, the notion of the zone is inherently embedded in practices of restriction and purpose. At the same time, zones encircle and exist between parallel planes or places. They allow for a more congealed nature of space and place—not as distinct areas but as always already co-mingling. The zone and its etymology thus account for a more porous nature of borders and technics that may elicit unique points of contact, resistance, and imaginary potential.
At this conference we ask: What zones have been central to media and film history? What does the concept of the zone add to the discourse on spatiality in media studies? How might thinking about zones enhance studies of space and place? How is our understanding of media archives, infrastructure, film history, and media ecology bolstered by the concept of the zone? With these questions in mind, we seek to take stock of the scholarship on the zone and work towards an interdisciplinary understanding of the zone as a concept in film and media studies at large.
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We welcome presentations that engage broadly with zones of mediation and their connections to cinema, media, and technology. Presentations may engage with, but are certainly not limited to the following themes:
● Exclusion and Exception: war zones and ‘camps’; prisons and other carceral spaces; biopolitical borders and disciplinary regimes; contact zones and critical pedagogy
● Contamination and Exposure: quarantine and containment zones; biogeographic realms and ecological disasters; extraction practices
● Media and Environment: ecological zones; environments and/as media; media/mediated zones for nonhumans; media and environing
● Infrastructure and Design: urban and rural zoning; architectural practices; forensic architecture; sensing technologies; academic disciplines and methodologies
● Exhibition and Distribution: screenings; questions of logistics; the piratical; regions of coordination and resistance utilizing film and media
● Temporality and Progression: time zones and periods; archives and spaces of preservation; disassociation and other psychological contexts
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We invite scholarship from across disciplines and methodologies. Alternative presentation formats and early-stage projects are welcome. Participants will have 15-20 minutes to present their work virtually over Zoom. Please email a 250-300 word proposal and a brief bio to [email protected] by September 12, 2022.
