CAMERA OBSCURA: FEMINISM, CULTURE, AND MEDIA STUDIES



Call for Submissions:

Collectivity





For the fortieth anniversary of *Camera Obscura*, we invite submissions on

the theme of collectivity.



Collectives often emerge in periods of crisis in response to new social,

economic, and technological conditions. *Camera Obscura*’s feminist

editorial collective has functioned in this way since its beginnings in the

1970s, a time when many forms of cooperative action proliferated. In this

period, collectives formed around issues of gender, race, and politics,

with many organizing around forms of media production. In the last ten to

fifteen years, a growing constellation of collectives, many international,

has emerged, configuring artists and activists in new political and

cultural formations. These collectives are a response to developments like

the growing impact of digital media and mobile technologies, new paradigms

of relational aesthetics, new configurations of labor and precarity, and

the rise of neoliberal policy, which has worked to erode the public sphere

and shared resources in favor of the idea of individual responsibility. In

contrast, the theory and practice of collectivity emphasize participation,

consensus, and working toward common goals. However, as anyone who has been

part of a collective knows, these formations are never free of difficulty

and disagreement—difficulties that relate to issues of communication as

well as to the very dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, race, and

multinationalism that demand collective responses.





Topics might include, but are not limited to:



 Conceptualizing “collectivity,” “cooperation,” and “commons”



Historically specific investigations of past and still-functioning

collectives



The affective economies of collectivity



The analysis of films, videos, or other media objects produced through

collective action or participation



The cultural, discursive, and economic structures that underlie and produce

collectivity



Collectivity and forms of labor and media



The temporality of collectivity



Collectivity and utopianism



The relationship of technological change to collectivity



The relation of collectivity to identity, individuality, and subjectivity



Transnational forms of collectivity



Collaboration, microtopias, communities of practice, and the space of the

commons



Swarms, multitudes, and political uprising



Specific dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, and class in collective

formations





We welcome both essay-length submissions and shorter writings appropriate

to our “In Practice” section. Please visit

http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/ for our complete submission

guidelines. Submissions and queries should be sent to

[log in to unmask] The deadline for submissions is 15

October 2014.





-- 

Athena Tan

Managing Editor, CAMERA OBSCURA: FEMINISM, CULTURE, AND MEDIA STUDIES

Ph.D. Candidate, Film and Media Studies

University of California, Santa Barbara



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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite

http://www.ScreenSite.org