Deadline Extended: CFP UCSB Media Fields Conference
UCSB MEDIA FIELDS CONFERENCE 2015 ENCOUNTERS
April 2‐3, 2015
Media Fields has extended this years Call For Papers for the fifth graduate conferences, Encounters. The conference, organized by the Media Fields Collective at UCSB will be held April 2‐3, 2015.
Abstracts are due by the extended deadline, January 18, 2015.
This years conference will feature keynotes from Dr. Bliss Cua Lim, professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, and Dr. Daniel Reynolds, of Emory College’s Department of Film and Media Studies.
Dr. Bliss Cua Lim is the Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies
School of Humanities at UC Irvine. Her research interests include Philippine cinema; cinematic temporality; queer temporality; moving image archives; postcolonial and feminist film theory; transnational Asian cinemas.
Dr. Daniel Reynolds received his Ph.D. in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation investigates the functions of media use in the context of the emergent systems that make it possible: platforms and apparatuses both technological and biological.
UCSB proposes “encounters” as a framework through which these intricate relationships may be addressed. This term has been strategically deployed to think about exchanges, contact zones, and interactions among agents, institutions, and technologies in various positions of power. The goal is to re‐examine the ways in which the encounter has been deployed and to explore its potential as a critical framework that may be applied to emerging trends across media studies.
UCSB invites participants to consider encounter’s potential for creating mutualities among parties and explore the ways particular encounters reflect, overturn, cloud or reverse this potential. How do we grapple with the slippage between the ideal possibilities of an encounter and its uneven actualities? What are theoretical, aesthetic, political and practical fields where we may locate such slippages and what is at stake? How can we think of casual encounters at media interfaces, platforms and screens? How do ways of conceiving proximity, isolation, autonomy, and agency shape notions of an encounter?
The following themes might serve as catalysts for these conversations:
– Interdisciplinary encounters involving film and media.
- How can we understand media texts as encounters.
- Who controls the spaces where these generative encounters may take place.
- Interactions involving governance and global/local media practices.
- How may we conceive of “placeless” encounters and how they allow us to rethink space.
- New types of encounters facilitated by social media and how these encounters shape our identity.
- Interpenetrations between media and socio-‐cultural discourses of difference.
- What kinds of meetings are produced through media industrial practices.
- The interplay between piracy and intellectual property rights.
- How might hapticity, interface, and software be understood as matters of interactive and technological encounters?.
- What kinds of encounters are produced through surveillance or clandestinely?
Each panelist will have 15‐20 minutes to present his/her paper. Please email a 300‐350 word proposal and a brief bio of the author (in Word format) to conference@mediafieldsjournal.org by January 18, 2015.