[Commlist] CFP 2019 Bridging Gaps: Re-Fashioning Stories for Celebrity Counterpublics

/The following international conference might be of interests to 
CSSA-FORUM members exploring contested narratives within and beyond 
Hollywood. Personal stories are welcome. Please share widely. Keynotes 
and publication updates will be announced shortly./*_
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*_NYC 2019 CMCS 8^th  International Conference_**
**/Bridging Gaps/**: Re-Fashioning Stories for Celebrity Counterpublics*

**

Terrace Club at Club Quarters

25 W 51st St, across NBC & Rockefellar Centre
New York City, USA
August 30 – September 1, 2019

*_Call for Papers:_*


In the recent past, there has been an increased interest in exploring 
intersections of life writing and studies of celebrity culture. 
Storytelling is central to effective branding in fame. Furthermore, the 
use of biographical elements has been recognized as a rhetorical device 
in writing op-eds, personal essays, and public speaking that often raise 
awareness on critical issues in popular media. Biography, as Lola 
Romanucci-Ross points out, is mainly a useful symbolic tool for 
reflecting, rotating and reversing real-life situations. Like biography, 
autobiography, memoirs, and testimonials play crucial roles in mapping 
social facts.__

The impacts of glamorous forms of storytelling in scandals, gossip, and 
rumor become so crucial that they are often studied as sociological 
data, regardless of whether they enable actual social change. For pop 
culture enthusiasts and social observers, celebrities may or may not be 
actual role models in telling meaningful stories and constructing 
subjectivity. Yet, fans and students often invest affective and 
intellectual labor when it comes to accepting, negotiating or contesting 
what appears to be significant in understandings of popular figures. 
Celebrity scholars are equally familiar with the complexities of 
engaging with and researching “glossy topics”. As Sean Redmond (2014) 
has shown, acknowledging one’s own celebrity attachments can produce 
innovative ways of (re)writing fame. Conversely, these first-person 
accounts may also contribute to the celebritisation of individual 
academics. What is the critical and pedagogical potential of personal 
takes on fame within the field of celebrity studies?

Celebrity narratives are perceived to have real power whether or not 
celebrities are “important” people in the academic or moral sense. 
Drawing on current affairs, celebrity politicians have used personal 
claims and outrageous stories to push political agendas in divisive 
ways. Many other famous personas use extravagant fashion as expressions 
of their luxurious lives and build persona brands at the cost of ethics. 
For Elizabeth Wissinger, the “glamour labor” involved in 
self-fashioning, surveillance, and branding is often an inevitable and 
unfortunate outcome in the production of consumer values and desirable 
bodies in fashion industries. Public personas still self-fashion 
themselves and promote their brand by extending text(ures) of language 
that sells to consumer tastes. However, the challenge remains to sell 
the values of social justice. Can public intellectuals learn narrative 
strategies from celebrity storytelling and fill this gap?

What appears to be a shared reason behind the success of most popular 
narratives, verbal (including oral) and non-verbal, is a persuasive 
‘strategy’ to effectively tell life stories. If studying celebrity 
biographies/autobiographies, best-selling memoirs, and other popular 
forms of life-writings and self-expressions carry cultural worth, then 
biographical elements of rising and celebrated public intellectuals, 
academics, critics, and activists are equally important to consider in 
disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices and understanding of fame. 
For instance, real-life first-hand accounts, such as testimonies and 
visual evidence, together with literary/artistic representations of 
gendered oppression provide meaning for progressive thinking and 
practice. Anecdotal accounts of famous sports personalities, actors, 
best-selling authors, and top models among other public figures are 
often useful rhetorical tools that help us to understand popular culture 
better. With this in mind, we need to extend popular storytelling beyond 
celebrity culture and persona branding, and use it to empower social 
change in academia, politics, and other spheres.

The Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS) /Bridging 
Gaps/ conference series uses a reflective practice paradigm and asks an 
urgent question: Can we learn popular strategies and re-fashion 
celebrity stories into tools for public intellectualism and social 
transformation, in addition to studying them? What enables or disables 
the public to tell personal stories in studies and practices of 
celebrity culture? Can different forms of storytelling from the lives of 
rising and celebrated academics, public intellectuals, critics, and 
activists enable urgent social change? The conference problematizes what 
it means to be a popular “storyteller” and invites all academics, 
journalists, publicists, activists and models and guests to attend, 
collaborate and publish valuable and purposeful work around this key 
question and related topics in our conference.

The format of the conference aims at being open and inclusive of 
interdisciplinary academic scholars and practitioners involved in all 
areas of celebrity culture, fandom, fashion, and journalism.  The 
conference combines paper presentations, workshop panels, roundtables, 
slideshows, and interviews that aim to bridge gaps in celebrity 
activism, persona branding, and fashion education. Working papers, media 
productions, and personal stories will be considered for the conference.

Extended versions of selected best papers will be published in an edited 
collection.

*_Registration includes_*: Your printed package for the complete 
conference, professional development workshop, access to reception, 
complimentary evening drinks, consideration for publication, and the 
CMCS $100 best paper and $100 best screen awards.


*_Abstract Submission Guidelines_*:

•    250-word abstract or workshop / roundtable proposal

•    Include a title, your name, e-mail address, and affiliation if 
applicable

•    Submit abstract at (celebrity.mediastudies /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(celebrity.mediastudies /at/ gmail.com)>: *February 28, 2019*

•    Notification of acceptance:* March 31, 2019*

•    Early bird deadline for hotel & conference registration:* April 30, 
2019*

•    Conference reception & presentations: *Friday, August 30 – Sunday, 
September 1, 2019*

*_Celebrity Chat video Submissions Guidelines_*:

•    Video length should be 10-20 minutes

•    Include a title, your name, e-mail address, and affiliation if 
applicable

•    Submit to Celebrity Chat producer Jackie Raphael at email

       address: (media.celebstudies /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(media.celebstudies /at/ gmail.com)>

•    Conference reception and presentations: *August 30 –September 1, 2019*

/Topics include but are not limited to:/

·Celebrity

·Fandom

·Audience

·Persona

·Life Writings

·Oral storytelling

·Fiction

·Fashion

·Photography

·Performance

·Publicity

·News

·Interviews

·Social Media

·Film and video

·Theory and Methods

·Research Agenda

·Business Models

·Ethics and Morality

·Media Literacy

·Education and Advocacy

·International Relations

·Community Building

·Business and Community Partnerships

*Conference Chair*: Dr Samita Nandy
*Conference Committee*: Dr Jackie Raphael, Kiera Obbard, Sabrina Moro, 
and Diana Miller

*Conference URL*: http://cmc-centre.com/conferences/nyc2019/
*Conference Twitter* @celeb_studies 
<http://www%2Ccmc-centre.com/celeb_studies> #CMCS19

Sponsors: Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS) & ESI.CORE

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