*Call for Submissions:
MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL ISSUE 3
DOCUMENTARY AND SPACE
Submission Deadline:** February 15, 2011**.*
This issue of Media Fields Journal demonstrates the central importance of
spatiality for documentary studies. Documentary strives to understand the
sociocultural world, and space is integral to that understanding. There has
been a ?spatial turn? in fields such as critical geography, feminist
studies, anthropology, and film and media studies?manifest in the work of
Nick Couldry, James Ferguson, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and Anna
McCarthy amongst others. With this issue, we ask: how can we draw on
theories of space to rethink documentary? We invite contributors working in
and on different regions and from a variety of critical positions to
construct conceptual frameworks that bring together documentary and space.
We welcome work that considers a wide range of objects and practices as they
relate to documentary, including media installations, music videos, media
ethnography, video essays and other multimedia interventions.
Documentary cinema is known for its social importance, its personal and
political narrative impact, its pedagogical role, and its artistic and
historical value. We are interested in how the insertion of ?space? into
these potentialities inflects the way documentary is thought of as a genre,
form, and mode of production. Driven to represent social realities,
documentary filmmakers often transgress boundaries?social, ethical,
physical, geographical etc*.?*in order to foreground aspects of cultural and
institutional spaces that might otherwise go unseen, ignored, and
undervalued. At the same time, documentaries can also reaffirm and reify
these boundaries or create new ones. In a world characterized by shifting
rural and urban landscapes, and increasing translocal and transnational
circuits and flows of capital and labor, documentary films connect places
and publics that exist in different space-times. The techniques and
practices through which documentaries produce space at different scales of
self, domesticity, local, national and global have inspired the exploration
we undertake in this issue.
Changes in technology and industrial organization have arguably altered
documentary production practice and reconfigured the possible modes of
distribution and exhibition. These changes have enabled mediated coverage of
unfolding events from multiple perspectives and locations, fostered novel
communities of participatory producer-consumers, and rendered the already
indistinct boundaries between amateur and professional even more fuzzy. Such
shifts raise questions not only about what documentary is, but also about
how we think of space in documentary, as well as how documentary works in
and on space.
*We seek a wide range of engaged and imaginative works (mediumlength essays
of 15002500 words, digital art projects, audio/**video** interviews) that
might investigate but not limit themselves to the following questions and
approaches*:
1) Are there limits to where documentarians or ethnographers can go, spaces
they cannot enter, or boundaries they cannot cross? How do documentaries
address filmmakers, subjects, and audiences as ?outsiders? and ?insiders??
2) How do the bodies of documentary subjects work as reminders of another
(off-screen) space? How can filmed bodies, in their out-of-place-ness, speak
to locations and times despite their not being pictured? How do
self-documentary/auto-ethnographic projects work to intertwine and embody
subjectivity and space?
3) What is the relationship between pictorial space, referential space, and
constructed space in documentaries? What are the stakes of collapsing these
spaces in documentary and documentary studies?
4) How do naming, voice-over, music, and the soundtrack mix layers of sound
to work with and against visual spaces in order to situate documentary
spectators?
5) How do multi-sited documentaries create ?transplace? alliances and
negotiate ?polylocality?? In an era characterized by global power relations,
how has documentary cinema contributed to un-mappings and re-mappings of
geopolitical asymmetries shaped by and shaping globalization?
6) How do travel and environmental documentaries, with their potential to
capture journeys, driftings, moorings, explorations, and discoveries
reconfigure epistemologies and ontologies of places and spaces?
7) What alternative exhibition sites and distribution circuits exist or have
existed for documentary films in recent years? How are they regulated and
facilitated in different regional, national, and cultural contexts by
censorship policies, mobile technologies, piracy etc?
8) In thinking of testimonies, archives, and futures, how does documentary?s
recording, reenactment, and fabrication of stories and events relate to
remembered, imagined, and hypothetical space-times?
9) What new spaces of representation and surveillance have opened up with
Reality TV shows that borrow the documentary look and aesthetics and are
produced and shown in different cultural and economic settings?
10) How can we think of documentary space in relation to online and gaming
environments?
*For more information and submission guidelines, please visit
* * **http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/*<http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/>
*Feel free to contact issue co-editors, Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee,
with proposals and inquiries. Email submissions, proposals, and inquiries to
**(submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org)* <(submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org)>*.
*
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Ryan Noelle Bowles
PhD Student, UCSB Dept. of Film and Media Studies
Teaching Associate, UCSB Dept. of Feminist Studies
Editorial Assistant, Camera Obscura Journal
