[ecrea] CFP: The Labour of Media (Studies): Activism, Education, and Industry

*The Labour of Media (Studies): Activism, Education, and Industry*

Call for Participation
Concordia University, Montréal, November 16-17, 2018
*EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: JULY 15, 2018*

Confirmed keynotes: Alexandra Juhasz (Brooklyn College), Vicki Mayer 
(Tulane University), Charles Acland (Concordia University)

We are a group of knowledge workers creating a forum for discussion and 
analysis of contemporary academic labour in media studies inside and 
outside of the academy.  The university is characterized, in a 
neoliberal environment, by precarity and exploitation, especially in 
humanities disciplines such as media studies. As media proliferates and 
is organized by capital in a variety of emergent contexts, the position 
of media labour, and the place of those studying media industries and 
representations, grows more precarious, contract-based and 
instrumentalized. Precarity is the new tenure.

The emergence of the “corporate university” in North America has created 
a vacuum in, and an exodus from, the field of knowledge work in media 
and industry, resulting in a migration of activists away from the 
university. Some of us leave the system entirely, entering 
para-academia, devoting our collective energies to causes impossible to 
reconcile with the neoliberalized university. In this context we 
continually find ourselves struggling within the constraints of profit 
and utility.

But how do we, as media scholars engage with those working in the 
industries and practices we so closely study? Within the university, 
where media scholars share departments with the new trainees of the 
post-Fordist knowledge economy, these dynamics of professionalization 
take hold at earlier and earlier stages of education, as obligatory 
co-ops, unpaid internships, promised futures, and student debt drain the 
potential for meaningful revolt. Buckle down, work hard, and you’ll do 
just fine. Never mind the debt, there are jobs aplenty as long as you’re 
prepared to sell your future labour time, with compounded interest. 
While this means that many media trainees enter industries increasingly 
designed to slash their protections as workers, others use their 
training for activist potential. But this ultimately means another 
avenue of traditionally un- or under-paid work. The university is 
designed to train the new indebted precariat for a lifetime of free labour.

We want to create a venue for discourse, and to encourage activist 
engagements with topics such as casualization, competition, 
colonization, and limitations to academic freedom in the context of 
media industry and labour research. As knowledge workers we must 
confront and articulate the normative bounds placed on our activities in 
order to mobilize outside of the institution. We must also engage with 
our comrades in the industries and networks we study in order to 
generate more robust bonds between contexts of knowledge production, 
cognitive labour, and so-called creative economies.

We invite graduate students, LTAs, artists, filmmakers, part-time 
lecturers, professors, para-academics, public scholars, community 
activists, union representatives, interns, writers, and all knowledge 
and media workers engaged with the exploitation of cognitive labour and 
committed to exploring these issues through their work, to join our 
forum. We welcome proposals for papers, panels, workshops, roundtables, 
performances, and non-normative modes of knowledge exchange in order to 
create an environment of dialogue and a platform for collective action 
that will build connections between disconnected sectors of cognitive 
labour.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

-para-academia, activism, street universities, and autonomous 
communities of knowledge workers
-challenging university/industry connections
-alternative/hybrid research and research-creation methodologies
-alternative/radical pedagogy and new pedagogical technologies
-unions, labour institutions, and political action
-training modules and the instrumentalization of media education
-immaterial, affective, and feminized labour
-research clusters, labs, incubators, and other neoliberal creatures
-internships and free labour
-the myth of the creative class and the city
-debt
-resistance, non-participation, and imagination of future politics

Abstracts or proposals of 250-300 words, in English or in French, should 
be submitted by email (tomedialabour /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(medialabour /at/ gmail.com)>by July 15. In addition, please include a 
~100 word bio. Submissions will be reviewed by committee members, and 
authors will be informed whether their paper is accepted by July 30. 
Conference proceedings will be published in a special issue 
of/Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies/, and 
information on submission will be provided after the conference.

For updates and more information, please see the conference website and 
Facebook: https://medialabourconference.wordpress.com/ 
<https://medialabourconference.wordpress.com/>and 
https://www.facebook.com/medialabour/ 
<https://www.facebook.com/medialabour/>


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