ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

SOAS, University of London, UK

September 2020

Deadline: January 15, 2020

“A way of apprehending the world based on my experience, my education, my culture and my environment. Mantisme is a system of thought that we virtually assimilate to a language that is unique to each individual. A language that I permanently “negotiate” with the language of the “other” with whom I would share an experience, education, culture and a similar environment.”

(Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Africa for the Future: sortir un nouveau monde du cinema [2009], cited and translated by P. Julie Papaioannou, “‘Qu’elle aille explorer le possible!’ Or African Cinema according to Jean-Pierre Bekolo, in Harrow and Garritano, eds, A Companion to African Cinema, Wiley Blackwell, 2018, p.405)

In September 2020, a three-day, fully-funded workshop will be held at SOAS, University of London as part of the ERC-funded project “African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies”. In the broadest sense, the workshop is designed to facilitate and inspire collaborative dialogue and work on creative African screen media texts and contexts among scholars working in this field in different parts of the world and – in particular – within Africa. To facilitate this, all transport, accommodation, visa, and meal costs will be fully covered for the selected participants, regardless of where they will be traveling from. In a more specific sense, the focus of the event will be collectively workshopping and developing pre-submitted chapters for publication in an edited volume titled African Screen Worlds. There will be several inspiring keynote presentations by leading African screen media scholars, practitioners and creative researchers.

All submissions will need to engage, in some way, with the concept of “screen worlds”, which we put forward as a heuristic device to encourage creative, provocative approaches and angles of analysis in relation to African screen media. Our reasons for suggesting this concept are twofold. First, we would like to put the emphasis on the importance of analysing screen cultures through the diverse “worldviews” of particular locations and individual artists, acknowledging that films are significantly influenced by the ways that filmmakers constantly negotiate their subjective experiences of the world with the contexts in which their films are conceptualised, made, circulated and viewed. Second, we wish to interrogate the possibilities and tensions that manifest themselves in the creation and circulation of diverse “screen worlds” in a variety of formats (feature fiction films, short films, creative documentaries, web series) in our era of digital flows as well as barriers, of mediated border-crossings as well as geo-blocking and censorship. For example, as mobile data becomes cheaper in Africa, the possibilities for streaming African-made content via phones could become transformative for people’s viewing experiences, and platforms such as iRoko, ShowMax, Sodere and Netflix are responding to these opportunities. And if African films are growing in popularity and accessibility, this perhaps means that even “arthouse” films might be able to break out of the international film festival circuit on which they have been dependent for so long, moving beyond the “world cinema” category to which they have often been consigned, for better or worse.

This workshop asks participants to consider these recent developments in African screen cultures and technology in relation to one or more of the following: specific “worldviews” (both on the African continent and in Africa’s diverse diasporas); contemporary, mainstream theorising around screen cultures and experiences (e.g. the work of Giuliana Bruno, William Uricchio, Haidee Wasson); the representational forms African films currently take and might take in the near future; and the ways in which African films are made, circulated and viewed. In each case we encourage authors to foreground something about their own identity, positionality and/or lived experience in relation to the subject matter (in line with Bekolo’s idea of “mantisme”). We wish to be clear that we hold no preconceived or fixed views on how the concept of “screen worlds” should be theorised; we suggest this concept as a prompt to see how different scholars of African screen media choose to theorise/translate/argue against/reject this concept in relation to particular cinematic texts and/or their contexts of production and consumption. We are particularly interested in chapters from Africa-based researchers grounded in local perspectives and experiences, and based on long-term research. We strongly encourage submissions from both established and early career researchers. 

In addition to the issues raised above, chapters might address the following questions (although this list is by no means exhaustive):

-          How do African filmmakers conceptualise screen content depending on whether they are targeting “big screen” or “small screen” cinema audiences?

-          How are the melodramatic, low-production-value “screen worlds” that are common across commercial film industries in Africa changing under new industrial conditions of film production, distribution and exhibition?

-          How do audiences in diverse African and diasporic contexts experience the diegetic “screen worlds” of different African films?

-          What are the relationships between film and television in African and diasporic contexts, particularly in relation to Moradewun Adejunmobi’s groundbreaking theorisation of the “televisual turn” in African screen media (2015), and the general global turn to television?

-          How are video on demand platforms such as ShowMax, Sodere, and Netflix, as well as phone apps such as iRoko, changing the forms, modes and routes of African screen media?

-          Are chasms developing or closing between “popular” cinema and “film festival” cinema in Africa and elsewhere because of the different kinds of screens on which these forms of cinema tend to be watched?

-          What does the popularity of certain film genres across and beyond Africa, as well as the emergence of popular local film genres in specific African contexts, tell us about the local/global nature of “screen worlds”?

-          What kind of new genres of filmmaking, and convergence of artistic forms beyond cinema, are evident in recent creative African screen media texts, both in the continent and beyond?  

-          Does “world cinema” remain an important category of analysis when it comes to contemporary African screen media and why/why not?

Submissions need to include:

i)                    a draft chapter of between 6,000 – 8,000 words (word count includes footnotes but excludes bibliography)

ii)                  a chapter abstract of 300 words

iii)                a biography of 300 words

Please use the Harvard style referencing system and UK rather than US spelling. If you quote something in an African language (which is encouraged), please make sure that you also provide an English translation. 

Please note that the workshop will take place either directly before or after the 2020 African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) conference at Cardiff University, Wales, to make it easier for participants to potentially attend both events. We strongly encourage our participants to also submit abstract/panel proposals to this conference when the Call for Papers is published. Please note, however, that we cannot cover participants’ costs for attending ASAUK.

Deadline: 15 January 2020

Submit to: Dr Lindiwe Dovey (LD18@SOAS.AC.UK) and Dr Michael W. Thomas (MT97@SOAS.AC.UK)

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 819236).

Dr Michael W. ThomasPostdoctoral Research Fellow

ERC funded project - African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film Studies

co-editor of Cine-Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa

G|A|M|E, n. 8/2019

Deadline (extended): July 30, 2019

The new issue of G|A|M|E proposes a re-examination of the concept of agency in games. We welcome contributions that address the idea of agency from a variety of academic perspectives, taking into account its interdisciplinary history and application, in order to expand our critical understanding of the concept more broadly. We therefore invite scholars from all fields to reflect on different notions of agency, not only in relation to physical and digital games, but also to other media and art forms as they impact on games and game studies.At the end of the influential first-person shooter Bioshock (2K Games, 2007), its critique of the rhetoric of choice and freedom emerges from the dialogue between the protagonist Jack and the visionary despot of Rapture, Andrew Rayan. Rayan’s seemingly innocent question ‘Would You Kindly?’ conceals a cognitive trigger that casts a shadow over the protagonist’s actions.By shattering the illusion of free will for both character and player, the game breaks the fourth wall and confronts the user with the question: who is being/has been controlled?

Already central to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction as well as that of design (e.g. Sherry Turkle, 1984; Brenda Laurel, 1991), agency was redefined more than twenty years ago in Janet Murray’s seminal volume Hamlet on the Holodeck (1996, p. 123) as ‘the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices’. To this day, the concept of agency is still prominent in scholarly debates on video game and game design: to describe a key ontological category that delineates the multiplicity of paths as well as the breadth of choices made available by interactive texts; and also –closer to Murray’s acceptation– to define a primary category of video game aesthetics, a textual effect attached to the pleasure of taking meaningful decisions within virtual environments.

On one level, agency informs media objects, texts and devices. Agency can be observed in relation to old and new game genres (adventure games with branching narratives, interactive movies, sandbox and open-world games); degrees of agency are provided by the affordances of VR/AR and mixed reality technologies (Oculus, PlayStationVR, HoloLens etc.); forms of agency are conceptualised across diverse media and art forms (interactive design, experimental film, on- demand TV, experiential theatre, museum installations) as well as in physical and digital hypertexts (Choose You Own Adventure books); agency is reallocated through new modes of distribution and fruition (VoD, streaming platforms and digital piracy); and agency is also embedded in sub-cultural practices and products (machinima, fan-fiction etc.).

On another level, agency is crucial to debating conceptual categories relevant to interactive digital media. Digital artefacts are immersed in a cross- and trans-media landscape, in which the interface constantly brings into question the relationship between objects, developers and users, blurring the boundaries between authors and audiences and questioning the sovereignty over these objects on multiple fronts. Here, agency provides an opening to explore aesthetic, social and political tensions (gender, race, class), and can be used to analyse discourses that challenge the role of the spectator/reader/player in relation to media object and their creators (art and exhibition, authorship, fandom, prosumer culture).

With its eighth issue, G|A|M|E wants to investigate the agency afforded by games, software and interfaces, as well as the agency claimed by players, users and spectators. Exceeding Murray’s original aesthetic understanding of the term, we intend to expand our examination of agency within and beyond the virtual borders of game studies. Agency is, in fact, a pivotal concept in philosophy, adopted to address relations of intentionality and causality between actors and actions (e.g. Anscombe, 1957; Davidson, 1963); as well as in social sciences, which locate agency within material and immaterial networks between human and non-human agents (Latour, 2005). In light of the vast interdisciplinary history of this concept, we seek contributions that can productively inform and renew our understandings of agency in gaming and play, while also using game agency to inform larger political, philosophical and cultural issues, developing current critical debates in game studies and in other disciplines.

Topics may include:

• agency in game studies
• agency and gaming technologies (VR, AR, mixed reality)
• agency and interactivity
• agency in video game criticism
• close textual analysis of games in relation to agency
• player reception and agency: modding, fandom etc.
• agency in traditional games: board games, sports etc.
• video game agency and issues of authorship
• agency as interdisciplinary concept, from games to: arts, social sciences, law and philosophy
• game agency in relation to other cultural forms (experimental film, cinema, art, architecture, design)
• agency and non-linear textuality
• politics (race, class, sexuality, gender, geopolitics) and video game agency
• agency and media ecologies

Scholars are invited to submit an extended abstract (between 500-1,000 words excluding references) or full papers by Friday the 19th of July, 2019 to editors@gamejournal.it

New extended Abstract deadline: 30th of July 2019; new Notification of acceptance: 10th of August 2019

All accepted authors will be asked to submit the full paper by the 30th of October 2019. We expect to release this issue in Winter 2019

Editors: Ivan Girina (Brunel University London), Berenike Jung (University of Tübingen)

Aeron Davis

We are living in a period of great uncertainty. Votes for Brexit and Trump, along with widespread political volatility, are not only causing turmoil; they are signs that many long-predicted tipping points in media and politics have been reached. Such changes have worrying implications for democracies everywhere. In this text, Aeron Davis bridges old and new to map the shifts and analyse what they mean for our aging democracies. Why are volatile, polarised electorates no longer prepared to support established political parties? Why are large parts of the legacy media either dying or dismissed as ‘fake news’? How is social media rapidly rewriting the rules? And why do some democratic leaders look more like dictators, and pollsters and economists more like witchdoctors? These questions and more are addressed in the book. Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times both introduces and challenges the established literature. It will appeal to advanced students, scholars and anyone else trying to understand the precarious state of today's media and political landscape.

Chapter Outline: 

Part 1: Introductory Frameworks;1 Introduction; 2 Evaluating Democratic Politics and Communication; 3 Political Communication and Crisis in Established Democracies; 

Part 2: Institutional Politics and Mass Media; 4 Political Parties and Elections; 5 Political Reporting and the Future of (Fake) News; 6 Media-Source Relations, Mediatization and Populist Politics; 

Part 3: Interest Groups and Citizens; 7 Citizens, Media Effects and Public Participation; 8 Organised Interests, Power and the Policy Process; 

Part 4: Challenges and Disruptions to Democracy; 9 Economics, the Economy and Media; 10 Digital Media and Online Political Communication; 11 Globalisation, the State and International Political Communication; 12 Conclusions: Post-Truth, Post-Public Sphere and Post-Democracy. 

More here.

October 25-27, 2019

University of Texas at Austin

Deadline: August 1, 2019

The purpose of the Global Fusion Conference series, which began in 2000, is to promote academic excellence in Global Media and International Communication Studies. The conference is sponsored by a consortium of universities: the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Ohio University, Southern Illinois University, University of Virginia, and Temple University.

We invite original, non-published research submissions on any aspect of global media and international aspects of mediated communication. Any theoretical or methodological approach appropriate to communication and media studies research is acceptable and encouraged. These approaches may include research on social justice and media, issues of new technologies and communities or social movements, representation of global or transnational issues, qualitative or quantitative studies of global media flows, media audiences and reception, the connections between communication and immigrant or diasporic populations, the comparative or international role of social media in political systems and institutions, messaging techniques and strategies for health communication in global settings, investigations on media policy and law in global or international settings, infrastructural challenges for media and development, research concerning the philosophy of globalization and media, and approaches engaging the rise of anti-globalization around the world and in the United States. In order to open panels to the widest possible range of topics, we have specifically chosen to adopt no conference theme beyond global or international communication broadly defined.

Submission instructions

Individual papers: proposals may be submitted in the form of completed papers or abstracts of 300-400 words. (Only full papers will be considered for best paper awards.) Please include a cover sheet with the paper title, the names of all authors, and contact information for the submitter or corresponding author (affiliation, mailing address, telephone number, and email address). No identifying information should appear on the paper or on the abstract page for blind review.

Panels: Please submit a panel abstract of 200-300 words, and 50-100 word abstracts for each included paper. The names of all authors along with their paper titles, as well as contact information for the submitter, should appear on a cover sheet. No identifying information should appear on the panel proposal page for blind review.

Individual Abstracts: Please submit a paper abstract of 200-300 words The names of all authors along with their paper titles, as well as contact information for the submitter, should appear on a cover sheet. No identifying information should appear on the panel proposal page for blind review.

Please indicate if you would be willing to have your paper presented as a poster at a poster session, if it does not fit in one of the panels.

Notice: Submission format should be Word or PDF.

The abstract/paper/panel proposal page should: (1) Be separate from the cover page; (2) Contain the title of the proposed paper; (3) Include a total word count; (4) NOT contain any identifying information about the submitter (including contact information).

At least one author of an accepted faculty paper must attend the conference to present the paper. If student authors cannot be present, they must make arrangements for the paper to be presented by someone else. If you will not be able to present, please notify us a month before the conference date.

Submission deadline: 11:59 P.M. (EST) Thursday, August 1, 2019. Submit to globalfusionconference@gmail.com.

Awards: The Global Fusion conference offers a graduate student competition. To be considered for an award, a full paper must be submitted by August 1, and must be marked on the title page as being a submission for the competition. Papers submitted with both faculty and student authors will be considered faculty papers and are not eligible for graduate student competitions.

Registration: More information on registration and the conference can be found at https://rtf.utexas.edu/conferences/global-fusion-2019

October 30, 2019

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Deadline: August 3, 2019 (email to mehita.iqani@wits.ac.za)

Convener: Prof Mehita Iqani, Wits

With the support of the Governing Intimacies research project, based in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, this symposium will bring together new research that explores the multiple intersections and links between consumption and gender in the global south.

Broadly, the symposium seeks to offer a space for work that explores how gender shapes consumption habits, broadly defined, and how consumer culture, broadly defined, produces gendered selves.

How do gendered subjects consume, and how in turn are they consumed?

We invite proposals for presentations from researchers and postgraduate students from around South Africa, Africa and the Global South, exploring any of the following themes, questions and subjects:

• Feminine/Masculine/Non-Binary? Consumer Identities and Self-writing
• What new forms of self-representation and self-branding in service of the performance of gender are emerging in media culture?
• Yes sex sells, but how? What narratives of sexiness work for or against feminine, masculine or queer empowerment?
• What new global values (the cosmopolitan, Afropolitan?) shape identity in the gendered marketplace?
• What new gendered ideas about self, success, aspiration or agency are produced by individuals in their own narratives of their lives, or for them by powerful institutions?
• What new narratives or old patterns are shaping our understandings of the links between wealth and gender?
• What kinds of intimate gendered relations are made visible through forms of public consumption?
• The Materialities of Shopping: Gender, Place and Culture
• How is gender made material through different consumption practices?
• How do body politics and neoliberal power intersect in consumer identities?
• What commodities are gendered and traded, from push up bras to botox, from sex toys to sex?
• How do beauty industries exploit and invent ideas about gender?
• How do luxury objects, spaces, brands and cultures market with (or against) gender?
• How do domestic versus public forms of gendered consumption differ?
• How do different expressions of gender shape public spaces, especially those organized around market exchange?
• Working it: Gendered Labour and Circuits of Care
• What new forms of self-care, self-management or work on the self are emerging in relation to gendered consumption?
• What new forms of gendered entrepreneurship, using all forms of capital available, are emerging in economically precarious times?
• What sorts of relationships are produced through gendered consumption?
• How do women/men/non-binary subjects spend, hustle and hack their way through the consumer marketplace?
• How does gender fit into the kinds of work done in relation to post-consumer waste (from recycling to re-using)?
• What new forms of gendered work are appearing as men/women/non-binary people seek new pathways to wealth and success?

We welcome presentations from current, new research that explores any of the above themes, or is related to them. Please send your paper title and a 350-word abstract in the body of your email to mehita.iqani@wits.ac.za by Sunday 3 August 2019.

A small number of travel bursaries for scholars based in South Africa will be available. Please indicate your interest in applying for these when you submit your proposal.

Accepted papers will be notified by the end of August. Please direct any queries to Mehita Iqani (mehita.iqani@wits.ac.za).

Deadline: October 1, 2019

Submissions for the new issue of the Interações Journal published by Instituto Superior Miguel are now open. The journal welcomes original articles that present research results and/or theoretical reflection in the different fields of Social and Human Sciences.

From an interdisciplinary editorial perspective, Interações' primary objective is to foster the reflection and diffusion of knowledge in the areas of Social and Human Sciences. The journal accepts articles of scientific investigation, reviews and critical essays, in Portuguese, English and Spanish.

Interações is ruled by the double-blind review standard, ensuring the anonymity of reviewers and authors throughout the review process.

Deadline for submission of articles: October 1

Notification of acceptance: November 17

Publication: December 2019

Any questions should be addressed through the email: interacoes@ismt.pt

The articles must be submit through the website: https://www.interacoes-ismt.com/

Guidelines and other instructions for authors can be found on the journal's website:  http://www.interacoes-ismt.com/index.php/revista

Braunsweig

Deadline: July 31, 2019

The ‘Leibniz ScienceCampus Postdigital Participation’ in Braunschweig invites applications for a Post-doctoral research fellow  (to lead a research group of early career scholars)

This is afull-time position at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, member of the Leibniz Association (GEI) with a pay-scale grouping of TV-L 14 (German federal public service scale).

The position is available from 1 October 2019. The contract is initially for the period until 30 September 2023.

The ‘Leibniz ScienceCampus Postdigital Participation’ is an interdisciplinary research partnership between the GEI, the Technische Universität Braunschweig, the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, the German Maritime Museum. Leibniz Institute for Maritime History in Bremerhaven, the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen and the Haus der Wissenschaft Braunschweig GmbH.

The ScienceCampus focuses on societal participation in today’s ‘postdigital’ world, i.e. one in which our lives are embedded in hybrid assemblages of analogue and digital technology and practices. A Social Living Lab will bring together cultural, social and technical sciences with local citizens to collaboratively design, explore and reflect on participation in education and urban life.

The researcher will:

• lead a junior research group as principal investigator (PI), investigating ‘postdigital participation’ and schooling. The group will comprise two doctoral students (the first doctoral project is to be conceived and supervised by the PI; the second doctoral project will be collaboratively developed with information/computing science colleagues)
• develop and conduct research projects on ‘postdigital participation’ related to school education and rooted in the Social Living Lab approach
• identify synergies across the social science, cultural studies, information science and computing science research projects taking place at the ScienceCampus 
•  pursue further academic qualifications (‘habilitation’ or equivalent)

The position requires:

• excellent doctoral degree in cultural studies, media studies, education or social sciences
• knowledge of, and experience in using, qualitative social science methods
• knowledge of participatory methods, such as design-based research
• knowledge of current sociological or cultural theories and analyses of digitality, e.g., datafication, sociotechnical imaginaries, the postdigital
• excellent teamwork skills, a high level of reliability and attention to detail
• a working knowledge of German

The position would also benefit if the candidate has:

• a keen interest in information science and/or computational methods
• experience of winning bids for external grants
• experience with Social Living Labs
• a solid understanding of school and classroom research

This is an attractive position in a vibrant interdisciplinary research community at a renowned research institute within the Leibniz Association. The successful candidate will have numerous opportunities for further professional development. The position is based in Braunschweig, Germany.

Further details here.

UCL

Deadline: July 16, 2019

Part time (0.6 FTE)

Salary £43,884 - £51,769 per annum (inclusive of London allowance)

Interview date: 24 July 2019

UCL is seeking to appoint a Lecturer in Media Studies to join our faculty at the Department of Culture, Communication and Media (CCM) and contribute to our expanding MA in Digital Media: Critical Studies.

MA Digital Media: Critical Studies is one of three digital media programmes at UCL along with MA Digital Media: Education and MA Digital Media: Production. This post is specifically for our Critical Studies programme and the post holder will work in a team of scholars with diverse backgrounds in the broader fields of media and cultural Studies, and media and communications.

Applicants should have a doctorate (completed or close to completion) in media studies or similar fields; experience of teaching in these areas, ideally at MA level; and an emerging research and publication record.

Please note that the closing date is less than two weeks away (16 July 2019), and the interviews are scheduled to take place on the 24th of July 2019.

A detailed job description and person specification can be accessed at UCL HR recruitment website here.

Deadline: August 5, 2019

Within the framework of the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development and its Working Group on Freedom of Expression and addressing Disinformation, UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector (CI) launches a new Request   For  Proposals (RFP).

The initiative encourages researchers to put in proposals to conduct a research report on the various efforts being taken around the world to counter the abuse of broadband for the dissemination of what diverse actors may define as disinformation. 

The research should analyse the different modalities of responses based on empirical data from all parts of the world, with the findings presented mainly at a level of generality which extrapolates key trends. 

Overall, the research should seek to provide insights that can stimulate creativity and innovation in tackling problems in broadband use while reinforcing freedom of expression and sustainable development, as well as help set agendas for future research. 

The study should also aim to provide useful resources for stakeholders including governments, courts, regulators, educators, companies, academia, media, civil society organizations and others. 

To this end, the research should include a “gap analysis” through reviewing studies, surveys, and other research about this phenomenon. It should give an assessment of the different modalities of response to disinformation, at a general level, and in    terms of the costs, benefits and risks of each modality from the point of view of freedom of expression and ICT contribution to sustainable development.  Based on this, the study should recommend proposals for the way ahead.

 The framing of this project is founded on the universal right to freedom of expression, and the importance of ensuring that measures concerning disinformation do not impact negatively on the essence of this right. 

UNESCO invites interested researchers, institutions, research consortia, entities and organizations to submit proposals which should include comments on the Terms of Reference, detailed description of the research methodology, description of the proposed team, including updated CV, deliverables, timeline requested funding, and what the researchers can offer in terms of promotion of the final study. To ensure that experience is covered internationally, consortia of researchers from different countries are encouraged. Proposers may wish to suggest outcomes that can be scaled in terms of differing budget options. 

The research should be produced over a maximum of six months, with an interim report due mid-way. The outcome should be a publishable report in mother-tongue level English, of approximately 100 pages, plus references, and including a 12-page Executive Summary for translation. Oversight and final editing will be by a working group of Broadband Commissioners as well as external experts in the field. The final document will be published by the Broadband Commission under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

UNESCO, therefore, invites interested researchers and organizations to submit their proposals, according to these Terms of Reference, by email to before noon (CET), 5 August 2019 to J.Hironaka@unesco.org(link sends e-mail). 

October 25-26, 2019

 Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Deadline: July 15, 2019

Continuing our series of conferences dedicated to rethinking intermediality in contemporary cinema and visual culture, we propose to initiate a discussion around aspects of intermediality that may unfold from the perspective of the picturesque.

The much-debated notion inherited from the art theories of the late 18th century originally denoted both an aesthetic quality (something pleasing to the eye situated between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring sublime) and a particular visual impression (something that looks like a picture in nature). It anticipated and later became deeply entangled with many of the ideas of Romanticism, of modernity and postmodernity by shifting the appeal of images from knowledge to imagination, sensation and mood, by applying the frame of art to life, or the frame of one art to another, and emphasising the abstract aesthetic value of a kind of pictured vision. Photography appropriated it as a strategy of so-called pictorialism and popular culture perpetuated it in various forms of spectacularization from the early dioramas and panoramas to today’s ubiquitous digital screens through which we continually reframe our lives in picturesque images.

The picturesque emerges therefore not only as a transversal concept in art history or visual culture, but also essentially connected to issues of intermediality and in-betweenness that we would like to bring into focus. In a “beautifully circular” dynamics (Rosalind Krauss), in a “conjunction of nature, picture, eye” (Geoffrey Batchen) a given moment of the perceptual array is connected to recognizable patterns in a picture which always reveals the form of one medium perceived in another (e.g. painterly tableaux in photography, film, installation art, photographic frames in film, photos that look like film stills, etc.). As such, the picturesque directs our attention to the sensuous aspects of intermediality and their relevance in our so-called postmedia age, when the “photographic”, “the cinematic” or the “painterly” can be seamlessly merged through digital technologies.

We would also like to address the controversial aesthetics of the intermedial picturesque that foregrounds instead of a sublime Gesamtkunstwerk-like effect the sheer visual pleasure of imageness, and to highlight its range in this respect from the decorative and the playful to the contemplative. Keeping in mind the potentially “troublesome” aspects of “pretty” images (Rosalind Galt), we encourage proposals to consider their “politics” as well, which can either align with what John Ruskin described as the “heartlessness of the picturesque” (i.e. delighting in images of ruin and decay), or can imply a reflexive acknowledgement of their underlying tensions between art and life (by engaging Raymond Bellour’s and Laura Mulvey’s “pensive spectator”).

Accordingly, we invite proposals to explore the variety of intermedial strategies that generate visual pleasures associated with the picturesque in a broad sense, and to uncover their intricate relations of in-betweenness.

We suggest the following topics (but welcome any relevant approach to the issues outlined in the CFP):

• The tableau vivant as a visual attraction between high art and popular culture, and in-between painting, photography, sculpture, theatre and film
• Synaesthetic pleasures: picturesque impressions in conjunction with tactility, soundscape and music
• Picturesque landscapes in slow cinema, slow TV and experimental films
• Media reflexivity and the picturesque in contemporary documentary and essay films
• Moving image installations and the immersiveness of picturesque images
• The picturesque world and the ruins of civilization: nature versus culture in images of the anthropocene
• Painterly images and remediations in heritage films and bio-pics
• Gender and postcolonial perspectives of the picturesque intersecting with intermediality
• The picturesque in-between the analogue and the digital, the natural and the artificial
• Theorising what “looks like a picture” today
• The intermedial visual pleasures of VR
• The picturesque and the spectacular in video games

Confirmed keynote speakers:

STEVEN JACOBS (Department of Art History, Ghent University), an art historian specialized in the relations between film and the visual arts. His research interests include the visualization of architecture, cities, and landscapes in film and photography. He is the author of: The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir (2013, with Lisa Colpaert) as well as the co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017), and The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (2018).

LAURA MULVEY (Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London), one of the most influential film theorists of our time. Her major works include: Visual and Other Pleasures (1989/2009), Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye (1996/2013), Citizen Kane (BFI Classics series 1992/2012), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), together with groundbreaking articles on narrative film, feminist film theory, the aesthetics of stillness in the moving image, etc. She is also an avant-garde filmmaker who co-wrote and co-directed with Peter Wollen and Mark Lewis several experimental essay films.

Submission of proposals:

We invite proposals both for individual papers and for pre-constituted panels. Panels may consist of 3 speakers.

Deadline for the submission of proposals: July 15, 2019.

Please fill in one of the SUBMISSION FORMS:

INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSION: https://goo.gl/forms/9rvw9Ne6yCL090o33

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The official language of the conference is English. The time for presentations is limited to maximum 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute debate.

Conference fee (which includes participation, conference buffet and banquet): 120 EUR, special fee for participants from post-communist/communist countries: 70 EUR.

A selection of papers based on the conference presentations will be published in our department’s international, peer reviewed journal (Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film & Media Studies) indexed in several international databases.

You can contact the organizers at this e-mail address: 2019.picturesque@gmail.com

For further information and updates see the official website: http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/the-picturesque-visual-pleasure-and-intermediality