[ecrea] CFP - Grad Student Conference at Northwestern University: Mediating Resistance

Backward Glances 2017: Mediating Resistance
The Screen Cultures Graduate Student Conference
Department of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University
September 29 & 30, 2017
Keynote Speakers: Professors Mary Celeste Kearney and Kara Keeling
Submission Deadline: June 15, 2017

In our tumultuous political landscape of “fake news” and reality TV 
presidents, the urgency of critically engaged media scholarship has 
never been greater. At a time in which many are experiencing a sense of 
traumatic upheaval, such work has the potential not only to enlighten 
the workings of media in our present moment, but to trace the history of 
media’s relationship to movements of resistance, rebellion, and radical 
change.

To this end, the theme of this year’s Backward Glances, Northwestern’s 
biennial graduate student media and historiography conference, is 
Mediating Resistance. We invite scholars to explore the role of 
resistance in media as well as the role of media in resistance, in 
historical and contemporary contexts.

Resistance manifests in forms ranging from political and activist 
content to formal and aesthetic innovation. These multiple inflections 
of resistance inform a number of interrelated questions we aim to 
address: What role do media play in shifting norms, broadening access to 
discourse, or even overthrowing regimes? How have marginalized 
communities used media to resist violence or imagine alternative modes 
of being? Alternately, how have hegemonic institutions used media to 
instigate violence or impose constructions of reality? In what ways are 
media implicated in the deepening of cultural divisions and the forms of 
social or political resistance they engender? As scholars, how might we 
engage resistant methodologies? What constitutes a “resistant reading” 
of a media text? What types of formal or aesthetic innovations resist 
norms of media-making or media consumption?

Further topics may include, but are not limited to:

  *
    Alternative archives
  *
    Media literacy and pedagogy
  *
    (Re)appropriation of media texts
  *
    Resistant spectatorship practices
  *
    Feminist, queer, and transgender media
  *
    Racial difference, racialized identities, and racism
  *
    Avant-garde movements
  *
    Postcolonial, revolutionary, and state media
  *
    Protest music
  *
    Taste and respectability politics
  *
    Circuit-bending
  *
    Affect and embodiment
  *
    Conspiracy theories
  *
    Media activism/hacktivism/slacktivism
  *
    Political campaigns
  *
    Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing


We invite scholarship from a broad range of disciplinary approaches, 
such as gender and sexuality studies; critical race studies; game 
studies; new media studies; postcolonial studies; comparative 
literature; historiography; film and television studies; disability 
studies; communications; and performance studies. Northwestern faculty 
will serve as respondents for graduate student panels.

Our keynote speakers will be Mary Celeste Kearney and Kara Keeling. 
Professor Kearney is Associate Professor of Film, Television, and 
Theatre and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of 
Notre Dame. Her research focuses primarily on gender, youth, and media 
culture. She is the author of Girls Make Media, as well as editor of The 
Gender and Media Reader and Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of 
Girls' Media Culture. Her most recent book, Gender and Rock, will be 
published in August 2017 by Oxford University Press. She is currently 
completing research for her second monograph, Making Their Debut: 
Teenage Girls and the Teen-Girl Entertainment Market, 1938-1966. Her 
essay, "Sparkle: Luminosity and Post-Girl Power Media," (Continuum 29.2) 
won the 2016 Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award from the Society for 
Cinema and Media Studies.

Professor Keeling is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in 
the School of Cinematic Arts and of American Studies and Ethnicity at 
the University of Southern California. Keeling works in the areas of 
Film and Media Studies, Black Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, 
Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. Keeling’s book, The Witch's 
Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, 
explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and 
maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the 
complex relationships between cinematic visibility, exploitation, and 
the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of 
social life. Keeling is co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Sound Clash: 
Listening to American Studies and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) 
of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European 
Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing.Keeling’s 
most recent book manuscript, tentatively entitled Queer Times, Black 
Futures, is under contract with New York University Press.

Please send an abstract (up to 300 words) to 
(backwardglancesconference /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(backwardglancesconference /at/ gmail.com)>by June 15, 2017. 
Participants will be notified by mid-July. More information about the 
conference can be found at www.backwardglancesconference.wordpress.com 
<http://www.backwardglancesconference.wordpress.com/>.


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