University of Washington Cinema & Media Studies Graduate Conference May 4, 2024
Keynote Speaker: Weihong Bao, UC Berkeley
Call for Proposals
Throughout history, our encounters with cinema and media have unfolded within complex scenarios and environments. Corporeal, embodied interactions with technological devices like 3D glasses, VR equipment, and headphones shape many viewing experiences. Behind-the-scenes labor performed by mobile projectionists, translators, and censorship officers reveals the alchemy behind media productions and transforms our experiences of media content. Furthermore, films and other media are mediated through diverse and often mundane settings, such as open-air playgrounds, public transportation, home theaters, and even karaoke venues.
As scholars of film spectatorship, exhibition, and media archaeology have demonstrated, the experience of film and media does not simply occur at the textual level. It is susceptible to the historical yet ever-evolving forces of technology, materiality, labor, and environment. How are our experiences with media augmented, infected, and altered by these forces? In what ways do these forces constitute new interfaces that shape different modes of reception, consumption, and experience? Addressing these questions may require culturally specific perspectives to excavate both tangible and intangible forces that generate encounters between multiform media and humans. This exploration may, consequently, challenge the conventional historiographies and universalized theorizations of the relationship between humans and media technologies.
To discuss these ideas, we invite graduate students to the University of Washington in Seattle for a one-day conference on Saturday, May 4, 2024. We welcome submissions that explore media viewing and interactive experiences and their intersections with technology, labor, atmosphere, materiality, and other such forces. In tandem with conventional research papers, we encourage the submission of scholarly pieces in an audiovisual format. Presentations, whether in the form of conference papers or creative projects, must not exceed 20 minutes in length.
- Media technology and infrastructure
- Below-the-line labor and media industry
- Rae, gender, and identity
- Anthropology of media
- Post-cinema and ontology
- Theatrical space and media environment
- Canon and decanonization
- Glitch aesthetics and bad objects
- Body, control, and politics
Please submit an abstract (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) to the email uwcmsgraduateconference@gmail.com no later than 5 PM PST on Monday, January 15, 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 15, 2024. Final papers and creative projects are due March 30, 2024.