The graduate students in the Critical Studies division of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts seek conference papers from graduate students addressing the theme of “failure.” “F is for Failure” University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA Saturday April 9th, 2011 Submission deadline: *JANUARY 18th, 2011* For its 5th conference in as many years, the ZdC Graduate Student Conference seeks contributions that engage the critical valence of failure in the narration of media history. Given the tendency to historicize media according to financial success, critical praise, or historical coherence, we instead want to position failure as its own positive and historically generative framework. What happens when the logic of failure is positioned at the center of our critical praxis? What happens when we shift our attention to the unsuccessful, the failed object, or the obsolete as a point of departure in our examination of film, television, and new media? How does an examination of the failure, flop, hoax, or the amateurish change the ways that we theorize media studies? Does a consideration of failure potentially open up sites of resistance within film and media studies? How do images of dystopian futures help us reflect on the unfulfilled promises of the past and present? How might attentiveness to failure account for differences of taste or alternate affective engagements? We welcome papers, creative projects, and/or pre-constituted panels that approach the topic from a range of methodological approaches and in a variety of media contexts. Possible topics may include (but are not limited to): -failed technologies and media obsolescence -technological determinism and media in transition -failures of/in the archive; theorizing absence in the media archive -failures of representation (of visuality, memory, trauma) -the “bad” text and amateur aesthetics -failing business models; collapsing industrial infrastructures -failures of adaptation or translation -accidents, anomalies, hoaxes, non-events -failures of broadcasting; inability to capture liveness or quantify audiences -representations of failure/dystopia -methodological/pedagogical failure; the future of the humanities Selected papers will be included in a special conference-themed issue of Spectator, the University of Southern California's Journal of Film and Television Criticism. [http://cinema.usc.edu/programs/criticalstudies/spectator/] Submission deadline: *January 18th, 2011*. To propose a paper, e-mail a 250-word abstract, bibliography, and brief bio to [log in to unmask] Please feel free to address any questions or comments to Brett Service at [log in to unmask] ZdC is the Critical Studies graduate student organization at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Information and programs from past conferences can be found at: http://zeroforconduct.org/conference.html ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu