[ecrea] CFP -- "Imagining Crisis": Yor k Universi ty Cinem a & Media St udies Grad uate Stude nt Confere nce 201 4‏

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 
(imaginingcrisis /at/ gmail.com) 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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