CFP: Limits of Cinema / Cinema Limited? – 27-28 Sep 2019

University of Pittsburgh

Film and Media Studies Graduate Conference CFP
Limits of Cinema / Cinema Limited?

September 27-28, 2019
Keynote: Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern University)

 

The cinematic medium has been historically shaped through several negotiations with its own limits and those imposed on it. Regulatory scrutiny of the moving image began as early as the peepshows of the Kinetoscope parlors. Formal censorship was soon implemented in many countries as a legal infrastructure serving in the moral guidance of youth and other demographics deemed vulnerable to irresponsible depictions of crimes and sex, as well as political propaganda.

Over the past decade scholars of film and media have signposted the materiality and mobility of media images and objects by resituating the question of the juridical in the contemporary media landscape. The seemingly unlimited proliferation of images across media platforms raises questions as to whether anything and everything can now be shown, and what means are acceptable in identifying, evaluating, and constraining various forms of harm that media inflict. How do regulatory practices simultaneously threaten to bound media and generate new praxes that hoodwink and overwhelm all frameworks of ordered statecraft and corporate ownership? We encourage applicants to engage with the materiality and affects of the sensory infrastructure of cinema past and present. `Limits of Cinema / Cinema Limited?’ hopes to bring together scholarship that builds on existing interdisciplinary approaches to paradoxes of law and media.

The 2019 edition of the University of Pittsburgh’s Film and Media Graduate Student Conference invites papers that examine the limits of cinema and cinema as a limited object and image in a broad sense, from the powers of censorship to the practices of media piracy and the traffic in contraband, from policies of preservation and access to new forms of media activism, from the formation of media publics and counter publics to the algorithms of social media.

Proposals might include but are not limited to the following topics:
 Legal Gaze as Infrastructure and Institutions
 Film Rating Systems: MPAA (USA), National Centre for Cinema (France), British Board of Film Classification (United Kingdom), Central Board of Film Certification (India), etc.
 Contemporary Censorship Debates (re. gore, extreme cinema, porn)
 Auteurs and Controversy (Lars Von Trier, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke, Takashi Miike, Larry Clark, Quentin Tarantino, Anurag Kashyap, Deepa Mehta, etc.)
 Control of Film, Television and Media Images
 Debates on Obscenity, Sleaze, Transgression and Taboo
 Theorizing Affect, Desires, Guilt, Pleasures, and the Sensory Infrastructure
 Actors of Non-Official Censorship (parental and/or religious associations)
 Pre-Code Hollywood
 Hollywood Censored
 Non-theatrical Networks of Distribution and Circulation (streaming platforms, festivals, fandom and cult venues)
 Keepers of Morality (moralizing in cinema and gatekeeping)
 Limits of the Body (figurations and images)
 Copyright and Fair Use vs Creative Commons
 Histories of Contraband and Bootleg
 The Modern Media Pirate
 The Cinephile as the Technophile
 Archives and the Collector
 Bastard Films and Web-Based Orphan Media Files
 Fantasies of unlimited cinema

Interested graduate students may submit abstracts (maximum 300 words)- along with institutional/departmental affiliations and current email- to pittfilmgradconference@gmail.com by May 30, 2019. For more information, please contact the FMSGSO by email at the above address.

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Symposium: Conversations on Care and/in the Community – 6 June 2019

Conversations on Care and/in the Community

 

Keynes Library, 6th June 2019, 12.30-6.30pm

Experiences and practices of care have changed dramatically in the past three decades. Since the passing of the NHS and Community Care Act (1990), healthcare, social care and short-term psychiatric care have been increasingly decentralised and delivered ‘in the community’. This shift has been both practical and discursive: altering the pathways by which care is accessed and the sites in which it is received; and changing perceptions surrounding the role of those receiving care in wider society. In the case of mental healthcare for example, it has led us to move from the ‘mental patient’ to the ‘service user’ as labels that define the relationship between persons receiving care and those providing it.

Thirty years on, community care continues to be a fraught subject. On the one hand, it has been seen as having a democratizing influence, opening up the possibility for greater patient choice, and of integrating patients’ and service-users’ voices into care provision. On the other, it continues to be viewed as a chaotic cost-cutting exercise which leaves vulnerable people to fall through the cracks.

‘Conversations on Care and/in the Community’ symposium invites researchers to engage in a series of conversations surrounding these new social and spatial conditions of care in the twenty-first century.

Register for a free space here: http://bit.ly/careandincommunity

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MIROnline Workshop – 25 May 2019: Fran Lock and Simon Coltman

MIROnline’s next workshop, poetry and meditation with Fran Lock and Simon Coltman, takes place on Saturday, May 25th. This is a free event but places are limited. You can book your place on our Eventbrite page:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-and-meditation-with-fran-lock-and-simon-coltman-tickets-60940146619

Exploring ways to improve focus, access new images and ideas, and turn those ideas into poetry, this afternoon will provide you with the tools you need to use meditation and free writing in your own poetic pursuits. Writing and editing poems will also be of great use to prose writers due to the focus on the lyric nature of language.

The workshop will begin with a mindfulness meditation session and will involve shorter and more focused mediation throughout the afternoon. There will be a series of exercises aimed at generating, structuring and editing poems. Editing meditations will provide the opportunity to view your writing as a reader would.

The afternoon will culminate in a feedback session facilitated by Fran and Melanie. All participants will be offered the opportunity for more detailed feedback via email after the session. Work produced may also be considered for publication on our website or performance at one of our live events.

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CfP – CHASE PG Journal Brief Encounters (deadline: 17 June)

The editors of Brief Encounters are pleased to open a call for papers for the journal’s fourth issue and warmly invite research students and staff to submit a short article, review or creative piece of work for publication. Submissions deadline: Monday, 17th June 2019.

Brief Encounters is an open access, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, postgraduate journal organised by CHASE. All postgraduate research students, regardless of their funding status, are welcome to submit to the journal as are staff.

For students in particular, publishing in the journal offers the opportunity to experience the peer-review process, to give their research exposure, and to build their publication record.

……………………………………………………………………………..

Call for Papers – Brief Encounters – Issue 4

URL: http://briefencounters-journal.co.uk/BE/pages/view/call-for-submissions

Brief Encounters is now open to submissions from research students and staff at CHASE-affiliated institutions (see below for the list). We welcome submissions in the form of academically rigorous and original articles (500–4,000 words), reviews (500–1,000 words) and creative works.

The deadline for submissions is Monday, 17th June 2019.

Brief Encounters welcomes submissions from any field. The journal’s aim is to improve the exchange of ideas between geographical or disciplinary boundaries. The journal provides a space where researchers can publish short articles and share findings which might not be long enough for publication in another journal. We also aim to help students in creative disciplines share their work and engage with other researchers (see below for more information about this).

There is no theme and all submissions will be considered on their own merits. In the past, articles have reflected the academic diversity of our author-base, with work touching on concepts like belonging, embodiment, sustainability, change, identity, space, deviation and division.

Submitting to the journal provides a valuable opportunity for authors to experience the peer-review process in a constructive environment – something especially valuable for postgraduate students and early-career academics.

What is Brief Encounters?

Brief Encounters is an open access peer-reviewed postgraduate journal, run by doctoral researchers from the CHASE doctoral training partnership to showcase the work of research students, staff and alumni of CHASE-affiliated institutions (see here for the list).

About reviews

Reviews can cover new publications, films, theatre productions, documentaries, and major exhibitions engaging with any aspect of the arts and humanities. Reflecting the ethos of CHASE, we are particularly interested in emerging scholarship and innovative interdisciplinary publications and productions.

About creative works

The editorial board is especially keen to receive submissions for its creative section; potential submissions could include (but are not limited to): video essays, creative writing, documentaries, posters, musical interpretations, and photography. These must be accompanied by a critical commentary of no fewer than 500 words.

Who can submit?

  • CHASE-funded students (see a list of institutions)
  • Postgraduate students at CHASE institutions (regardless of funding status)
  • Alumni of CHASE institutions
  • Individuals employed by CHASE institutions
  • Individuals employed by Non-HEI CHASE partners

Submission guidelines

Submission should be made by the deadline, Monday, 17th June 2019, through the Brief Encounters on-line submission process (see our step-by-step guide).

All submissions will follow MHRA style guidelines (footnotes and bibliography). Please see our style guide for further details.

Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting or, if already registered, can simply log in and begin the five-step process.

Along with your article, please submit an abstract (max. 300 words), and a list of key words (max. 5). When you register as an author on the website, please provide a brief bio statement (max. 200 words).

If you have any queries please contact journal@chase.ac.uk

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In-Jokes and outsiders: Considering internet memes as displaced performances’: GRiT (Graduate Research in Theatre) event. 8 May 2019

All are welcome to attend this year’s fourth and final GRiT (Graduate Research in Theatre) event. 

Film, Media and Cultural Studies doctoral student Hannah Barton’s talk ‘In-Jokes and outsiders: Considering internet memes as displaced performances’ will take place on Wednesday, 8 May  (4-5 pm) in Room 106 (43 Gordon Square). We look forward to seeing you there!

In-Jokes and outsiders: Considering internet memes as displaced performances’:

From LOLcats to Distracted Boyfriends, Galaxy Brain to SpongeBob, internet memes have been described as the lingua franca of social media. Commonly conceptualised as ephemeral visual (and sometimes aural) artefacts, memes tend to be ‘read’ in terms of form and content. However, memes are not simply proliferated artefacts; they are highly contextual and associative communicative events; shared as performances between creators and audiences, and mediated by technologies. As social and technological contexts iterate, so do the practices of meme production. Put otherwise, the experience of creating or encountering a meme can be markedly different from one week to the next. This dynamism poses interesting challenges for researchers. Can internet memes be comprehensively theorised once they become displaced from the technosocial conditions in which they were created? This seminar will discuss these points, and suggest that theoretical positions drawn from performance studies provide strategies for acknowledging – and where possible capturing – the technosocial context in which a meme was created and proliferated.

Hannah Barton is a doctoral student in Birkbeck’s Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, where she is researching the cultural history of internet memes. She is also Digital Project Manager at Tate, and an occasional writer.

 

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Films with a Mission: Medical Films from the Catholic Mission Archives – 11 May 2019

Films with a Mission

Medical Films from the Catholic Mission Archives

1930s-1960s 

Saturday 11 May 2019, 1.00pm  – 5.00pm.

Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image

Gordon Square Cinema

43 Gordon Square

London WC1H 0PD 

Films with a Mission, for its third screening event, will extend its focus this year to films on medical subjects from the Catholic missionary archives. The films were widely circulated and exhibited on their release and over subsequent decades, not only in Ireland and Britain, but also across the US. The afternoon symposium will explore some of the key issues and questions in historically assessing missionary film archives. It will discuss how we can gain new perspectives in understanding the motivations, reach and transnational impact of these productions on local and global audiences.

Screening rarely shown films from the Irish Film Institute (IFI) and the British Empire and Commonwealth collection at Bristol Museums, the symposium will discuss how Catholic medical orders used film to promote medical research and hospital practices. These films are part of a broader emergence of educational film at the time. They are significant for their involvement of filmmakers trained in documentary film in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s.

Amongst the films shown will be:

Visitation: the Story of the Medical Missionaries of Mary (Andrew Buchanan, 1947, 60 mins) about the medical work of a women’s religious order: the Medical Missionaries of Mary, at their mission in Nigeria, Africa;

Aran of the Saints (London Catholic Film Society, 1930s, 21 mins) made on the island of Aran, Ireland, by the Missionary Sisters of the Divine Motherhood, and produced by the London Catholic Film Society, after the release of Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran (1934);

Ecce Ancilla Domini  (FMDM,1950s; 54 mins) a recruitment film about the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Divine Motherhood (FMDM), Ladywell, Surrey, at their medical and educational missions in Northern and S. Rhodesia (Zambia, Zimbabwe), Nigeria, Singapore and Malaysia.

Speakers include: Dr. Emma Sandon, film historian and Dr. Carmen Mangion, historian of women religious, at Birkbeck, and they are joined by independent researcher, Edel Robinson, who catalogued the films in the IFI archive, and Isabelle Smyth, Writer in Residence, Medical Missionaries of Mary.

This event is run in collaboration with the Christian Missions in Global History seminar group, Institute of Historical Research, University of London; and supported by the Birkbeck Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund.

To book on Eventbrite please follow the link:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/films-with-a-mission-tickets-60371587042

The full timetable and programme of screenings and presentations for the afternoon will be released shortly.

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Napoleon Harlequin: Theatre and the Battle for Legitimacy, 1814-15 – 10 June 2019

Lecture by Professor Katherine Astbury

 Napoleon Harlequin:

Theatre and the Battle for Legitimacy, 1814-15

 6 -7.30pm, Monday 10 June 2019

Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square. WC1H 0PD

The Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group is delighted to announce a forthcoming lecture by Kate Astbury, Professor of French Studies, University of Warwick.

After the allies entered Paris at the end of March 1814, the city witnessed a flood of pamphlets and prints denouncing Napoleon as ‘tyrant’, ‘monster’, ‘assassin’ and ‘comedian’. This final ‘crime’ might, at first sight, seem somewhat out of place but the battle for legitimacy that was taking place hinged on who had the greater claim to rule France, Napoleon or Louis XVIII. To accuse Napoleon of being a charlatan and an actor merely playing a part was to undermine his right to reign and it thus becomes a repeated element of royalist attacks on the person of the Emperor.  It would however, also be a weapon Napoleon’s supporters could turn to their advantage and this paper will outline the ways in which theatrical metaphor was used by both sides in 1814-15.

The lecture will be followed by questions, and drinks.

All are very welcome!

For further information, please contact Dr Ann Lewis: a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk

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Thinking (about) Automata in Descartes, Shaftesbury, and Diderot – 20 May 2019

Lecture by Dr. James Fowler

Thinking (about) Automata in Descartes, Shaftesbury, and Diderot

6 -7.30pm, Monday 20 May 2019

Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square. WC1H 0PD

The Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group is delighted to announce a forthcoming lecture by James Fowler, Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Kent.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, discussions of the soul in the secular sphere involved thinking about automata, and whether they might think. Breaking with Aristotle, Descartes uses the cultural phenomenon of automates (such as those he viewed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye) to suggest that, quite simply, all non-human animals are ‘bêtes-machines’. Shaftesbury is strongly opposed to this: refuting Descartes and Malebranche, he argues that all animals – including humans – should only be viewed as ‘clockwork’ when they are seized by fits. By contrast, Diderot (an admirer of Vaucanson) argues, in support of materialism, that humans can usefully be imagined as animal-machines – or indeed as living statues. This tendency in Diderot can be traced in his early (1747) translation of Shaftesbury, in which the automaton, as ‘automate’, is introduced where it least belongs: in the English Earl’s thought experiment concerning a ‘solitary creature’.

 

All are very welcome! Please note: this event is part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2019.

To reserve your free place, and to see the full programme of events, please go to:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/annual-events/arts-week/arts-week-2019

 

For further information, please contact Dr Ann Lewis: a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk

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CFP: Productive Futures – Deadline 31st May 2019

Call For Paper: Productive Futures

12 – 14 September

The history of science fiction (SF) is a history of unreal economics: from asteroid mining to interstellar trade, from the sex-work of replicants to the domestic labour of the housewives of galactic suburbia, from the abolition of money and property to techno-capitalist tragedies of the near future.

 

LSFRC invites abstracts of 300 words, plus 50 word bios, addressing economic themes in SF, and/or exploring how SF can help to widen and evolve our sense of the economic. We encourage submissions from collaborators across disciplines and/or institutions.

 

For the full length call for papers, and more information, please visit www.lsfrc.co.uk or email lsfrcmail@gmail.com

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Corkscrew Podcasting Lecture – 30 May 2019

Corkscrew Podcasting Lecture
Led by Dr. Dario Llinares (d.llinares@brighton.ac.uk)
Thursday 30 May 2019, 12-13.15pm
Location: GORB03

12:00 PUBLIC LECTURE by Dr. Dario Llinares: Podcasting Praxis: Questions of Research and Knowledge through Aural Mediation.

Bio: Dario Llinares is Principal Lecturer in Contemporary Screen Media at the University of Brighton, UK. His current research focuses on the status and practice of cinema-going in the digital age, and on podcasting as a practice-research method. He is co-editor of Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-founder and co-host of the very popular and esteemed Cinematologists podcast.

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