Alphaville Issue 26

Deadline: December 3, 2022

Issue 26 of Alphaville will focus on Home as a Site of Resistance - Editors: Anna Viola Sborgi and Elizabeth Patton.

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the way we think about home and has illuminated structural, spatial, gender,  racial, and economic inequality. Intervening within a growing area of scholarly interest on mediated representations of the home (Schleier 2021; Wojcik 2010 and 2018; Rhodes 2017; Baschiera and De Rosa 2020; Patton 2020; Price 2021), this proposal seeks to focus specifically on practices of resistance centred in or on the home, working on a range of geographical areas and periods of time.

The forthcoming issue of Alphaville, to be published in Winter 2023, will apply a variety of methodologies, for example, archival research, comparative approaches, participatory documentary. Contributors are asked to widen the focus of existing scholarship to formats beyond the theatrical feature film, including home movies, VR documentaries, short films, and public film installations. 

Building on current debates in different areas of film and media studies–home movie studies, useful cinema, VR, media and activism, film and urbanism–the papers in this issue should highlight how film can archive the practices of resistance centered around the home and, at the same time, rewrite dominant accounts of domesticity.  Contributors should offer new perspectives on innovative possibilities for cinema and media studies to build new representational aesthetics, intervening in the politics of representation of marginalized communities. We are seeking proposals to complement an existing range of essays on Ireland, France, Portugal, UK, and the US. Of special interest are essays that examine the Global South or European countries not included in this range. Essays that take an historical perspective are also encouraged but not required.

The Editors invite contributors to investigate topics and issues including, but not limited to:

• precarity, and the home (evictions, displacement, inadequate housing)
  
• home as a space of labour
  
• homelessness
  
• housing affordability
  
• home as the centre of media production
  
• the role of the home for marginalized communities
  
• home and inequality
  
• representations of the home and social identity
  
• gender and the home
  
• home as an intersectional space
  
• the home and its relation to other spaces (urban, rural, the neighborhood) or/and other parts of the built environment (i.e. infrastructures)
  
• sheltering and crisis (i.e. COVID 19)
  
• housing as a human right
  
• home in relation to safety/unsafety and/or  stability/instability
  
• home and mobility
  

If you are interested in contributing to this special issue please send a 300-word abstract, 3-5 keywords, and a short biography by December 3, 2022 to Anna Viola Sborgi (asborgi@ucc.ie) and Elizabeth Patton (epatton@umbc.edu).

Authors will be notified of editors’ decision by 17 December 2022. Following acceptance, authors will be required to submit their completed articles of 5,500–6,000 words that fully adhere to Alphaville Guidelines, MLA and House Style by Wednesday 1 March 2023.

Feel free to contact us for any questions and queries.