SCMS 2016 CFP: “Screening Finance: Economic Fictions and Realities”

Mass media have always had complicated relationships with finance. From the financial institutions and logics that have long structured Hollywood, to the intertwined proliferation of communications and financial networks globally, scholars have mapped these transformations in industrial and political economic terms. The eruption of financial terms, imaginaries, subjectivities, and crises into media content, however, remains comparatively underexplored.

This panel seeks to open up the space of financialized content onscreen: how are financial values and relationships represented, and how do they structure modes of representation themselves? Who are the subjects of finance sought by various media and communication technologies, from social media to reality television to film? What images and narratives coalesce around finance culture, its figures and institutions, its fantasies and crises? From social media and darknet entrepreneurs to new frontiers of capital and debt accumulation to imaginaries of poverty, wealth and inequality, this panel understands finance broadly (hedge funds, investment banking, trading, neoliberal entrepreneurialism, strategic philanthropy, alternative economies, architectures of regulation, etc.). We are interested in proposals that address these or related themes across a range of temporal, geopolitical, and media borders. 

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Finance in “lifestyle television” 
- Stock market-based programs and personalities 
- Mediations of finance through performance, identity, affect
- Entrepreneurialism in fiction and reality television
- Online “free labor” and the production of financialized subjects
- Screen images and/or narratives of Wall Street 
- Documentary engagements with finance 
- Gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions of finance media cultures
- Methodological interventions in mediated finance 
- Mediations of indebtedness
- Queering finance on/through the screen 
- Adaptations and transnational circulations of finance-based media texts
- Transnational and/or transmedia journalism and coverage of financial crises
- Alternative economies and financial subjectivities 
- Philanthropy in fiction and reality television
- Philanthropists, celebrity, and media culture  
- Representations and narratives of finance in silent cinema and early television

Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words, a 3-5 title bibliography, and a brief author bio to Justin Owen Rawlins ([log in to unmask]) and Zenia Kish ([log in to unmask]) by August 5th. Notifications will be sent out by August 10th. Feel free to email us with inquiries.

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