CALL FOR PAPERS: *a reminder that abstracts are due June 1*

"Screen Teens: Film, Television and Youth Culture"

For the screen industries 'teenagers' mean business. They are frequent film-goers and brand-impressionable television viewers with pockets full of disposable income, and a demographic that has surged in recent years as the 'echo' generation enters their teen years. And for young people, this means that screen media occupy an ever-larger place in the business of their everyday lives. At this moment of resurgence, this collection of essays would like to reassess the cultural and historical implications of film, television and youth culture from the post-war years to the present. This anthology looks at how teens matter to screen industries, and how screen texts matter to young people. It focuses on how representations of youth have come to pervade the popular media, and on the implications of screen media becoming increasingly constitutive of youth culture.


This volume combines the disciplinary strengths of screen studies (genre, textual, and industry analysis) with critical media and cultural studies (political economy, everyday uses, identity politics) to interrogate the interfacing of production and consumption contexts, texts and their uses, and culture industries and lived publics. Sections and topics of consideration include but are not limited to the following:

Section I - "Popular Culture and Youth"

Ground clearing essays here consider conceptual questions central to youth studies and the popular including youth and consumerism, political economy, citizenship, ethnography, cultural policy, interpretation, empirical studies, cultural regulation and postmodernism. If youth studies have focused on music and subcultures, this section investigates methodological options for considering how screen media (re)constitute youth cultures, and why teen screen events become sites for channeling social and cultural anxieties or ideological contradictions.

Section II - "Genre and Teen Cycles"

Genres are cultural forms born at the intersection of culture industries and lived publics. Essays here investigate the generic constitution of the 'teenpic', teen television series, or teen subgenera through this interplay of industries and publics.

Section III - "Youth Matters"

From music, fashion and sex to identity, freedom and alienation this section considers the things of significance, pleasure and struggle for young people as they interface with the media. They are also of concern to institutions, governments, censors, parents, juries and associations. Essays here follow a topics/themes/issues approach that elaborate youth matters and media such as violence, race, sex, censorship, grrl culture, stars, audiences and fandom.

Section IV - "Consuming Teens"

This section considers how the culture industries approach youth as market, audience, and consumer including: media synergies and conglomeration; advertising, marketing, market research, branding and scheduling; the music industries and film and television; delivery technologies and youth culture (the internet, cable and satellite).

Section V - "Screen Teens and Global Youth Culture"

Cultural production is increasingly global in circulation and design, and youth culture has often been a driving force in this globalization of popular media. This section seeks papers that consider diverse local, national, regional, and international screen industries and contexts:

Please e-mail 500 word abstracts and a short bio (or any inquiries) by 1 June 2000 to John McMurria, [log in to unmask] Completed papers for accepted abstracts will be due by 1 March 2001.

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