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:
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Alternative archives
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Media literacy and pedagogy
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(Re)appropriation of media texts
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Resistant spectatorship practices
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Feminist, queer, and transgender media
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Racial difference, racialized identities, and racism
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Avant-garde movements
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Postcolonial, revolutionary, and state media
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Protest music
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Taste and respectability politics
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Circuit-bending
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Affect and embodiment
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Conspiracy theories
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Media activism/hacktivism/slacktivism
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Political campaigns
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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
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