Call for Papers for Proposed Panel: Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference - March 6-10, 2013
Panel Title: The Action Genre, Urban Space, and Technologies of Vision

What are the convergences between the action genre and the global city? This panel welcomes a diversity of perspectives with which to account for critical resonances between a highly visible and globally-dominant cultural product (the urban action genre) and potentially productive parallels to the global city, itself a primary nodal point in interconnected economic, communication, and media networks. How might the hypermediated display endemic to both sites/sights bring together technology, space and genre? Screenspaces of spectacle, speed, and motion: how do they define the mobile trajectories of capital, characters, bodies, boundaries, and optical technologies in the global urban imaginary?
Expanding upon the scope of early scholarship on action cinema in both form and content will provide a renewed approach which simultaneously moves beyond pop culture geopolitics and the white man’s muscle while investigating new digital production and exhibition technologies (HD DV, CGI, 3-D, etc.) and the ways in which these affect representation/identity, reception, transnational industry imperatives, and social geographies onscreen and/or in the urban environment. From gender to the global economy, from cinema to television to new media formats, and from centers to peripheries of the global city—what connective circuitry can we see? 
 
Individual papers on this panel might explore (but are certainly not limited to) the deeper implications of the following:
-Transnational city space and the action protagonist (white/male/Western or distinctly otherwise!)
-Global technologies-translations through the conduit of action-oriented media platforms
-Electronic surveillance in the cinematic/televisual urban panopticon 
-The global action franchise
-The cityscape-mediascape-gamespace in action adaptions and crossovers
 -Embodied/technological resistance to spatial/optical control within globalization
 -Spatial mastery in the mediated action city
 -Action/sci fi  technologies: aesthetics and narrative, onscreen and off
-Action Capture: Industrial shifts in genre production/distribution/reception
-Action movies and city space: homogenization, marginalization, and difference
 
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract, proposed bibliography and brief bio to Lorrie Palmer ([log in to unmask]) by August 1, 2012. Panel selection will be made by August 15. 		 	   		  
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