CALL FOR PAPERS

Backward Glances 2017: Mediating Resistance
The Screen Cultures Graduate Student Conference
Department of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University
September 29 & 30, 2017
Keynote Speakers: Professors Mary Celeste Kearney and Kara Keeling
DEADLINE for Submission: June 15, 2017

In our tumultuous political landscape of “fake news” and reality TV
presidents, the urgency of critically engaged media scholarship has never
been greater. At a time in which many are experiencing a sense of traumatic
upheaval, such work has the potential not only to enlighten the workings of
media in our present moment, but to trace the history of media’s
relationship to movements of resistance, rebellion, and radical change.

To this end, the theme of this year’s Backward Glances, Northwestern’s
biennial graduate student media and historiography conference, is Mediating
Resistance. We invite scholars to explore the role of resistance in media
as well as the role of media in resistance, in historical and contemporary
contexts.

Resistance manifests in forms ranging from political and activist content
to formal and aesthetic innovation. These multiple inflections of
resistance inform a number of interrelated questions we aim to address:
What role do media play in shifting norms, broadening access to discourse,
or even overthrowing regimes? How have marginalized communities used media
to resist violence or imagine alternative modes of being? Alternately, how
have hegemonic institutions used media to instigate violence or impose
constructions of reality? In what ways are media implicated in the
deepening of cultural divisions and the forms of social or political
resistance they engender? As scholars, how might we engage resistant
methodologies? What constitutes a “resistant reading” of a media text? What
types of formal or aesthetic innovations resist norms of media-making or
media consumption?

Further topics may include, but are not limited to:

   - Alternative archives
   - Media literacy and pedagogy
   - (Re)appropriation of media texts
   - Resistant spectatorship practices
   - Feminist, queer, and transgender media
   - Racial difference, racialized identities, and racism
   - Avant-garde movements
   - Postcolonial, revolutionary, and state media
   - Protest music
   - Taste and respectability politics
   - Circuit-bending
   - Affect and embodiment
   - Conspiracy theories
   - Media activism/hacktivism/slacktivism
   - Political campaigns
   - Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing

We invite scholarship from a broad range of disciplinary approaches, such
as gender and sexuality studies; critical race studies; game studies; new
media studies; postcolonial studies; comparative literature;
historiography; film and television studies; disability studies;
communications; and performance studies. Northwestern faculty will serve as
respondents for graduate student panels.

Our keynote speakers will be Mary Celeste Kearney and Kara Keeling.
Professor Kearney is Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre
and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame.
Her research focuses primarily on gender, youth, and media culture. She is
the author of Girls Make Media, as well as editor of The Gender and Media
Reader and Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture.
Her most recent book, Gender and Rock, will be published in August 2017 by
Oxford University Press. She is currently completing research for her
second monograph, From Nancy Drew to Gidget: The First Wave of Teen-Girl
Media, and editing the new book series Routledge Research in Gender,
Sexuality, and Media. Her essay, "Sparkle: Luminosity and Post-Girl Power
Media," (Continuum 29.2) won the 2016 Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award
from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Professor Keeling is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the
School of Cinematic Arts and of American Studies and Ethnicity at the
University of Southern California. Keeling works in the areas of Film and
Media Studies, Black Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Critical Theory,
and Cultural Studies. Keeling’s book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic,
the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of
cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic
conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between
cinematic visibility, exploitation, and the labor required to create and
maintain alternative organizations of social life. Keeling is co-editor
(with Josh Kun) of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies and (with
Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James
A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and
Other Writing. Keeling’s most recent book manuscript, tentatively entitled
Queer Times, Black Futures, is under contract with New York University
Press.

Please send an abstract (up to 300 words) to
[log in to unmask] by June 15, 2017. Participants will be
notified by mid-July. More information about the conference can be found at
www.backwardglancesconference.wordpress.com.

-- 
Lauren Herold, M.A.
PhD Student, Screen Cultures
Department of Radio/TV/Film
Northwestern University

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