CALL FOR PAPERS Backward Glances 2017: Mediating Resistance The Screen Cultures Graduate Student Conference Department of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University September 29 & 30, 2017 Keynote Speakers: Professors Mary Celeste Kearney and Kara Keeling DEADLINE for Submissions: June 15, 2017 In our tumultuous political landscape of “fake news” and reality TV presidents, the urgency of critically engaged media scholarship has never been greater. At a time in which many are experiencing a sense of traumatic upheaval, such work has the potential not only to enlighten the workings of media in our present moment, but to trace the history of media’s relationship to movements of resistance, rebellion, and radical change. To this end, the theme of this year’s Backward Glances, Northwestern’s biennial graduate student media and historiography conference, is Mediating Resistance. We invite scholars to explore the role of resistance in media as well as the role of media in resistance, in historical and contemporary contexts. Resistance manifests in forms ranging from political and activist content to formal and aesthetic innovation. These multiple inflections of resistance inform a number of interrelated questions we aim to address: What role do media play in shifting norms, broadening access to discourse, or even overthrowing regimes? How have marginalized communities used media to resist violence or imagine alternative modes of being? Alternately, how have hegemonic institutions used media to instigate violence or impose constructions of reality? In what ways are media implicated in the deepening of cultural divisions and the forms of social or political resistance they engender? As scholars, how might we engage resistant methodologies? What constitutes a “resistant reading” of a media text? What types of formal or aesthetic innovations resist norms of media-making or media consumption? Further topics may include, but are not limited to: - Alternative archives - Media literacy and pedagogy - (Re)appropriation of media texts - Resistant spectatorship practices - Feminist, queer, and transgender media - Racial difference, racialized identities, and racism - Avant-garde movements - Postcolonial, revolutionary, and state media - Protest music - Taste and respectability politics - Circuit-bending - Affect and embodiment - Conspiracy theories - Media activism/hacktivism/slacktivism - Political campaigns - Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing We invite scholarship from a broad range of disciplinary approaches, such as gender and sexuality studies; critical race studies; game studies; new media studies; postcolonial studies; comparative literature; historiography; film and television studies; disability studies; communications; and performance studies. Northwestern faculty will serve as respondents for graduate student panels. Our keynote speakers will be Mary Celeste Kearney and Kara Keeling. Professor Kearney is Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses primarily on gender, youth, and media culture. She is author of Girls Make Media, as well as editor of The Gender and Media Reader and Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture. Her most recent book, Gender and Rock, will be published in August 2017 by Oxford University Press. She is currently completing research for her second monograph, Making Their Debut: Teenage Girls and the Teen-Girl Entertainment Market, 1938-1966. Her essay, "Sparkle: Luminosity and Post-Girl Power Media," (Continuum 29.2) won the 2016 Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Professor Keeling is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her current research focuses on theories of temporality, spatial politics, finance capital, and the radical imagination; cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism, Africana media, queer and feminist media, and sound. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. Currently, Keeling is writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled Queer Times, Black Futures and co-editing (with Thenmozhi Soundarajan) a collaborative multi-media archive and scholarship project focused on the work of Third World Majority, one of the first women of color media justice collectives in the United States, entitled From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema. Please send an abstract (up to 300 words) to backwardglancesconference@gmai l.com by June 15, 2017. Participants will be notified by mid-July. More information about the conference can be found at www.backwardglancesconference.wordpress.com. -- Lauren Herold, M.A. PhD Student, Screen Cultures Department of Radio/TV/Film Northwestern University ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: https://listserv.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html