[ecrea] Call for Papers - Film Studies no. 14: special issue on “Institutions and Agency”

REMINDER Call for Papers - /Film Studies/ no. 14: special issue on 
“Institutions and Agency”

Under the auspices of the new film history, media industry studies, the 
new political economy of communication and others, film and media 
scholars have increasingly attended to institutions. This trend agitates 
against the long disciplinary tradition by which media have been 
appreciated as the expressions of subjective visions and artistic 
designs. To be sure, the new institutional approaches are not without 
their critics, who have maligned them as inflexible, reductive and 
ignorant of extra-economic motivations, cultural inflections and 
individual decisions.

How can film and media scholarship effectively seek both macro /and/ 
micro explanations and attend to both larger networks /and/ human 
agency? This special issue of /Film Studies/ (Manchester University 
Press), due for publication in 2016, seeks to answer this question by 
collecting a diverse series of case studies that illustrate such 
comprehensive approaches. These 6000-8000-word articles *may pertain to 
any area of film and media studies*, but should grapple with their 
objects of inquiry by taking account of both institutions and individual 
agency.

Possible topics might include (but are not limited to) case studies that 
reveal:

--the place of (a) film (or a genre or production trend) in relation to 
government bodies (e.g., the EU; the State Department; local municipalities)

--how individual directors, cinematographers, screenwriters or other 
film workers negotiated with companies, unions, regulation bodies, 
government authorities or other large organisations

--how media control, convergence or conglomeration has been inflected by 
individuals’ decision-making

--the role of individuals in censorship and classification decisions

--how arts journalists or film critics fit into larger media 
organisations and associations

--how individual cinemas, film festivals, distribution companies or 
other film-cultural groups deal with larger networks; how these larger 
networks codetermine the individuals’ everyday practices

--audience or fan studies that attend to both institutional pressures 
(or incentives) and individual desires and tastes

Abstracts (of less than 200 words) and a short biographical note should 
be sent by 1 November 2014 to Mattias Frey at (M.J.Frey /at/ kent.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(M.J.Frey /at/ kent.ac.uk)>. Complete manuscripts should be ready for 
peer review by the summer of 2015. Publication is due for summer 2016.



Dr Mattias Frey
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies
Co-Editor, /Film Studies/
Co-Director, Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the 
Moving Image
University of Kent
Jarman School of Arts, 2-26
Canterbury CT2 7UG
UK