[Commlist] Northwestern University Graduate Student Conference CFP

Backward Glances 2019: REBOOT

The Screen Cultures Graduate Student Conference

Department of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University

September 27 & 28, 2019

Keynote Speakers: Professors Susan Murray and Reem Hilu

Submission Deadline: July 1, 2019


Fuller House, Twin Peaks, Spiderman, Roseanne, The Twilight Zone, Tomb 
Raider.Our popular film and television landscape is inundated with those 
media properties now popularly known as reboots. Whether the 
proliferation of reboots constitutes a true revival,giving new life to 
old texts, or an aesthetic emergency signaling the end of originality, 
it prompts us to ask what the notion of the reboot has to offer in 
considering the relationship between present and past. Backward Glances, 
Northwestern’s biennial graduate student media and historiography 
conference, invites submissions addressing the theme of “reboot” in all 
its many valences.


A reboot may mean a restart or a reinvention. It can involve 
rearticulating a previously existing topic, recreating a pre-existing 
work, or revisiting a long-forgotten idea. It may be a reimagining of 
something we think we understand, or a re-dissemination of a message 
that older generations have heard and that newer ones have yet to 
receive. A reboot may be a renewal, but in the age of endless remakes, 
the utility and cultural work of the reboot must be called into 
question. What does the rebooted text reveal about its past and present 
context? Does our theory need a reboot as much as our childhood favorites?


Like so many neologisms, “reboot” comes to us from the world of 
computing. An electronic system is “booted up” when the hardware is 
switched on and ready for use, and we reboot our tech when our protocols 
glitch, when we update our operating system, or we want a clean 
technological slate to get our programs running smoothly. Media 
theorists have often revisited technology as model and metaphor for 
gender, race, ability, and mechanisms of power. How might the concept of 
the “reboot” help us understand not only aesthetic and industrial 
cycles, but larger shifts in culture, politics, and power?


Further topics may include, but are not limited to:

  *

    Remakes vs. Sequels vs. Reboots

  *

    Casting and labor

  *

    Memory and nostalgia

  *

    Cross- and transcultural remakes

  *

    The social, political, and cultural implications of reinvention

  *

    The history of reboots

  *

    Authorship and fandom

  *

    Zombie media and hacking

  *

    Reimagining genres and aesthetics

  *

    Cultural and political cycles

  *

    Intertextuality/paratextuality/multiplatform storytelling

  *

    Franchises

  *

    Racial difference, racialized identity, and racism in remakes

  *

    Multigenerational viewing

  *

    Remixing and reappropriation


Our keynote speakers will be Susan Murray and Reem Hilu. Dr. Murray is a 
professor in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New 
York University. She is the author of Bright Signals: A History of Color 
Television 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/bright-signals?viewby=subject&categoryid=48&sort=newest>(Duke 
University Press, 2018), which has been awarded the 2019Katherine Singer 
Kovacs Book Award 
<https://www.cmstudies.org/page/awards_kovacs>presented by the Society 
for Cinema and Media Studies and the 2019 Michael Nelson Book Prize 
<http://iamhist.net/2019/03/the-2019-iamhist-michael-nelson-prize/>(biennial) 
presented by the International Association for Media and History. Her 
work has appeared in journals such as Public Culture,Screen, The Journal 
of Visual Culture, and Technology and Culture as well as popular outlets 
such as The Atlantic 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/09/when-televisions-were-radioactive/570916/>andNewsweek 
<https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fake-news-awards-danger-reality-tv-presidency-782586>. 
She is also the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early 
Television and Broadcast Stardom 
<https://www.amazon.com/Hitch-Your-Antenna-Stars-Television/dp/0415971306>(Routledge, 
2005), the coeditor of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture 
<https://www.amazon.com/Reality-TV-Remaking-Television-Culture/dp/0814757340/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8>(NYU 
Press, 2004; second edition, 2009) with Laurie Ouellette, and is 
currently in the process of researching her next book project: a history 
of the development and use of closed-circuit television in a range of 
contexts such medicine, education, industry, policing, and the military. 
She is associate faculty in Cinema Studies, sits on the advisory board 
of the NYU Center for the Humanities, and is a Peabody Awards faculty judge.


Dr. Hilu is an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at 
Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in Screen 
Cultures from Northwestern University in 2017. Her work focuses on the 
history of digital media and the relationship between gender, 
domesticity, and technological change. She is working on a book that 
explores the shifting norms and practices of intimacy and sociability 
that were catalyzed by the introduction of computers into domestic space 
and family life in the 1970s and 1980s. This project attempts to expand 
our understanding of computers in the home by not only considering 
desktop machines and video game consoles, but also researching everyday 
objects like toys and appliances that were embedded with computer chips 
during this period – helping computers to become entrenched into 
intimate relations between family members in daily life. Her article on 
voice, girlhood, and digital media entitled “Girl Talk and Girl Tech: 
Computer Talking Dolls and the Sounds of Girls’ Play,” is published in 
The Velvet Light Trap (Fall 2016). Professor Hilu has also taught at 
Northwestern University and McGill University. Her research interests 
include the history and theory of video games, digital media and 
computing, feminist media history, children’s media culture, educational 
technology, and interactive television.


We invite scholarship from across disciplines and methodologies, 
backward-, forward-, and present-facing. Please send an abstract of up 
to 300 words and a bio of up to 100 words to 
(backwardglancesconference /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(backwardglancesconference /at/ gmail.com)>by July 1, 2019. 
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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