[Commlist] CfP: Visible Evidence XXVII. Documentary and Democracy in Crisis

Visible Evidence XXVII. Documentary and Democracy in Crisis

Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Date: 16.12.2020 - 19.12.2020

Deadline for proposal submissions: 12.04.2020
https://www.visibleevidence.org/

What we call documentary today emerged in the 1920s and 1930s in 
response to a perceived crisis of liberal democracy, as a mode of 
factual representation which empowers citizens to participate in the 
political process. But how does documentary respond to what has been 
widely diagnosed as the current crisis of democracy? How does 
documentary react to the return to nationalism and other forms of 
political tribalism in the face of global migration? How does 
documentary shape our perceptions of the consequences of globalization, 
from climate change to the transformation of the economy? And how can 
documentary in theory and practice contribute to defend the space and 
modes of deliberation necessary for the life of democracy?

Visible Evidence, the international conference on documentary film and 
media, now in its 27th year, will convene in Frankfurt, Germany, on 
December 16-19, 2020. Hosted by the Institute for Theatre, Film and 
Media Studies (TFM) at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Visible Evidence 
XXVII will address these and other current issues related to the 
history, theory, practice and pedagogy of documentary and non-fiction 
cinema, television, video, audio recording, digital media, photography, 
VR, games and performance in a wide range of panels, workshops, plenary 
sessions, screenings and special events. We welcome panel, workshop, 
screening and paper proposals that address documentary and non-fiction 
media from a diverse range of disciplines that open the field to new 
lines of investigation through innovative and original perspectives.

Designed as a public event open to the citizens of Frankfurt, the 
conference makes a conscious nod towards documentary history as an 
instrument of public opinion. The notion of crisis, a thread weaved 
through the history of documentary, calls for new political, formal and 
social possibilities that consolidate and expand documentary’s role as a 
space for representation and democratic deliberation. These new 
possibilities should be explored in a dialogue between theory and 
practice. We invite scholars, filmmakers, archivists and activists to 
propose panels and presentations that address any aspect of documentary 
and non-fiction media. Special thread and themes may include (but are in 
no way limited to):

Documentary and Conflict: How should we perceive conflict not just as a 
historically-specific geopolitical crisis, but as an interaction of 
aesthetic forces that reorders documentary temporalities, geographies 
and speech-acts? What role is taken by documentary in an age of rising 
fascism, post- and neo-colonialism, transnational military interventions 
and global humanitarianism?

Documentary Infrastructures: How does documentary depict and expose 
industrial infrastructures? In what ways does documentary itself 
comprise, or challenge, larger social and material infrastructures, 
including funding structures and distribution platforms to new visual 
technologies?

Documentary Publics: The advent of new media platforms and technologies 
bare, on the one hand, potential for a radical reorganization of social 
bodies. On the other hand, create fraught contexts through which the 
social is organized by corporate logic and pseudo-democratic regimes. 
Framed within these social and medial settings, what forms of 
deliberation documentary brings to contemporary public and 
counter-public spheres?

Race, Gender and Sexuality: How can documentary serve as a means of 
transgression, a tool for community building, or a platform for 
organization/organizing in political climate marked by exclusionary 
tribalisms? How can documentary resurrect non-hegemonic pasts and 
presents and open up spaces outside of a white, heteronormative and 
patriarchal matrix?

Documentary and the Non-Human: In the epoch of the Anthropocene and in 
the wake of environmental crisis, how can documentary exceed its 
“discourses of sobriety” that centers the human? How can it give form to 
the material world, traversing the representational hierarchies between 
the human and non-human? How do documentaries of nonhuman subjects 
interact with, reinforce or diverge from human political regimes?

Documentary and Operational Media: Considering the proliferation of 
tools for data analysis, image-based computational techniques and 
forensic media, how can we re-think documentary’s evidentiary claims at 
its intersections with fields such as science, medicine, design and law?

Documentary Pedagogy: How can we think of documentary pedagogy through a 
vernacular prism? How have documentary studies responded to the shifting 
labor conditions of teaching at individual, departmental, and 
disciplinary levels? How have they been reshaped by videographic 
practices of criticism and scholarship? How do the evolving 
methodologies of teaching and writing about documentary speak to the 
labor it asks of us?

Guidelines for Submission:

Panel proposal:
Panels will consist of three papers of no more than 20 minutes each and 
one ten-minute response by the panelists’ chosen respondent. Panel 
proposals require a title; 300-word description of the panel itself; 
five keywords that identify the panel’s focus; 250-word abstract for 
each paper; 100-word biography for each participant and 5 bibliographic 
entries for the entire panel.

Workshop proposal:
The emphasis of the workshop is on an open and unstructured exchange of 
ideas and techniques between all workshop participants. Workshops will 
consist of five or six opening statements that sum up to forty minutes 
in total, with the remaining time dedicated to discussion. Workshop 
proposals require a title; 300-word description of the workshop; five 
keywords that identify the workshop’s focus; 50-word description of each 
contribution; 100-word biography for each participant and 5 
bibliographic entries for the entire workshop.

Paper proposal:
Individual paper proposals can be submitted through the open call. 
Accepted papers will be programmed into panels with other individual 
paper and screening submissions. Individual paper proposals require a 
title; five keywords that identify the paper’s focus, 300-word abstract; 
100-word biography and five bibliographic entries.

Screening Proposal:
Visible Evidence XXVII also invites filmmakers to present their work. To 
stress the interconnectedness of theory and praxis, screenings and 
filmmakers’ talk will be integrated into panels through the open call. 
Screenings will be allotted 20 minutes, ideally for introducing a work 
in process or for showing clips while introducing the overall project. 
Screening proposals require a title; 5 keywords that identify the work’s 
focus; 300-word description of the work; a screener of no more than 
20-minute material (as a link) and a 100-word biography.

Each session will be allotted one hour and forty-five minutes.

Deadline:
All proposals must be submitted here: 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ve27
All proposals are due by April 12th, 2020.
Multiple submissions will not be accepted, except for panel respondents.
Applicants will be notified of acceptance by June 15th, 2020.
For questions please email (visibleevidence2020 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(visibleevidence2020 /at/ gmail.com)>

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