CALL FOR PAPERS

Imagining Crisis
York University Cinema & Media Studies Graduate Student Conference 2014
Toronto, Canada
November 21-23, 2014

Midway into the second decade of the 21st century, the term crisis has
emerged as a dominant signifier, descriptor, and instrument of provocation
and analysis. Crisis marks both a separation and a turning point, a break
and a place of decision. In this light, crisis can be a critical tool, a
means through which to imagine change, a site in which to work at
questioning established limits (social, political, epistemological,
ontological). As spaces of potential intervention in the given state of
affairs, crises emerge from within and against a great variety of
transitional moments, marking them as endpoints and/or origins. 

Crisis can also be seen as the raison d’être of contemporary systems of
control under neoliberal “24/7” capitalism. Indeed, in a world of “posts”
(post: 911, “Axis of Evil”, economic collapse, Egyptian Revolution, Snowden,
etc.), where economic, governmental, and mediatic forces of continuity now
arguably absorb and integrate rupture and exception into their norms, have
we reached a kind of crisis point of the very notion of crisis? Are we
“post-crisis”? “Imagining Crisis” takes as its starting point the question
of the crisis of crisis, and how to imagine  crisis — to take on a crisis of
the imagination — in way specific to our contemporary moment. 

What kinds of questions and contingent answers does crisis — or the crises
specific to our time, to our academic, activist, and artistic practices —
provoke? Conversely, how can we question the very notion of crisis, or use
crisis to imagine and bring into being new forces? How does crisis make
things politically and socially visible; and how does crisis as a critical
term reveal itself?

Crisis can offer cinema and media studies scholars, filmmakers, media
artists, and activists of many stripes an experimental and diagnostic space
for critique and research. For example: is film studies reaching a crisis
point in terms of its role in academia or in relation to significant changes
in its purported object of study (celluloid film and/or digital video)? For
media artists, are the institutions of the art gallery or the film festival
at a point of transformation or obsolescence? Do social media sites like
Facebook and Twitter present necessary challenges  to or opportunities for
political and social activism? The multiplicity of ways in which crises
present themselves as spurs and challenges to imagination and image
technologies, as well as how crisis itself needs to be interrogated as a
useful (or not) analytical term, is what “Imagining Crisis” seeks to begin
to map out. 

Topics for discussion and papers may include but are not limited to: 

 - film as a cultural and material object in a state of transformation,
decay, and/or mutation; 
- academic and disciplinary transformations and the challenges they pose to
critical thought, practice and pedagogy; 
- representations of ecological and environmental development and disaster
in film and media; 
- changes in social (sexual, moral, etc.) conventions as represented in film
and television programs; 
- the roles of attention, participation and/or boredom in the contemporary
mediascape; 
- the representation and/or the critical analysis of precarious labour and
identities (immaterial and manual labour, union busting, small studios,
etc.); 
- changes in media platforms and social networks and how they have affected
the practice of film criticism, history, and/or analysis; 
- navigating the blurring of boundaries between privacy and publicity; 
- temporality and historical change as located in/through media objects and
discourses; 
- the human, the animal, the posthuman, and the cyborg as (post)historical
subjects. 

We welcome papers that engage with the work of contemporary scholars and
theorists like, but not limited to, McKenzie Wark, Rosi Braidotti, Alexander
Galloway, Eugene Thacker, Wendy Chun, and Benjamin Noys. We also welcome
filmmakers, media practitioners, and activists to present and discuss their
work.

The confirmed Keynote Speaker for “Imagining Crisis” is McKenzie Wark,
author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the
Situationist International, The Beach Beneath the Street, and The Spectacle
of Disintegration, among others. He is a Professor at the New School for
Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Please send a 300 word abstract, brief bibliography, and bio (with
institutional affiliation, if applicable) as email attachments to
[log in to unmask] by September 28, 2014.

Notifications about acceptance or rejection of proposal will be sent by
October 1, 2014. 

“Imagining Crisis” will be held at York University, Toronto, Canada from
November 21-23, 2014. 

The conference is cosponsored by Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts &
Technology, York University.  

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org