Dear all, My colleague Ruth Goldman and I welcome you to apply to this panel on women media makers for the 2014 SCMS conference. We are open to a very broad range of ideas, approaches, and interpretations, so even if you are not sure if your idea fits, please feel free to email us with questions! Abstracts are due by August 5th. CFP: The Elusive Woman Media Maker Despite the fact that some forty years ago, women were emboldened to start their own training and distribution collectives and organizations, and eventually, festivals, film and media studies students today are hard-pressed to name even one woman media maker. Pedagogy and scholarship continue to privilege and canonize a select few women media makers and works while inadvertently excluding countless individual women and media collectives, who work—either deliberately or by default—in the margins, outside of mainstream modes of production. Because decisions about preservation and distribution are largely tied to this very pedagogy and scholarship, many important women media makers and their works remain un- and under-appreciated. Worse, often their works have become inaccessible, trapped in the amber of older formats or forgotten in arcane vaults or dusty attics. Thus an enormous body of groundbreaking work in film and media history is submerged in limbo. Often pioneering women are recognized post-mortem or late in their career; and such recognition does not always translate into increased funding or distribution, as the office-in-the-street scene from Agnes Varda’s self-made memoir *Les Plages d’Agnès* so trenchantly illustrates. While women continue to lack mainstream funding, distribution, and recognition, there *are* significant numbers of women working in independent feature and short narrative, experimental, animation, documentary, and various hybrid forms of media. Furthermore, historically and today, women have been and continue to be leaders in grassroots community and activist media. This panel will investigate some of the historical and contemporary reasons for and implications of the large number of women media makers working in and with alternative modes, spaces, networks, and forms of production and distribution, including the scarcity of scholarly and pedagogical attention to these forms. Paper topics may include but are not limited to: --Historical and contemporary independent/alternative women media makers --Women media makers and film/video/media technology --Historical and contemporary women media makers’ collectives and networks --Historical and contemporary women working in community and activist media --Women media makers and alternative modes of funding and/or distribution -- How film and media studies pedagogy and scholarship affects women media makers --Preservation of women’s media --How film and media criticism/the festival circuit/awards system affects women media makers Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words by August 5th to Elizabeth Finnegan <[log in to unmask]> Ruth Goldman <[log in to unmask]> http://www.cmstudies.org/forums/posts.asp?group=&topic=604954&DGPCrPg=1&hhSearchTerms=&#Post604954 cheers, Lizzie Elizabeth Finnegan, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English D’Youville College Liberal Arts Department 320 Porter Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14201 716.829.8481 *** We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.* ---Ludwig Wittgenstein *I do not want to show things but to give people the desire to see. ---Agnes Varda* Do you GoodSearch? I GoodSearch for The Southern Poverty Law Center Raise money for your favorite charity or school just by searching the Internet or shopping online with GoodSearch - www.goodsearch.com - powered by Yahoo! ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu