[Commlist] CFP Inquiring healing across screen cultures: Recuperating narratives, mediums, and creativities

CFP
Inquiring healing across screen cultures:
Recuperating narratives, mediums, and creativities

1-2 June 2021; online

*Abstract deadline extended until 31 March 2021*

There has always been a desire and necessity to tell the difficult 
times, to uncover how they have been lived. Letters were written, 
diaries were kept, cameras captured the moments. Memories, narratives, 
images, and utterances have been shared across all kinds of media in 
diverse forms. Do these exposures have a capacity to heal us or others? 
Or do they trap us in our traumas by constantly reproducing them? What 
kinds of recuperating potentials can we ascribe to our screen cultures 
across film, media, and art in troubling times?

Amid the turbulent events of our age that rapidly emerge and expand in 
personal, social, and political realms, we are prompted to explore 
questions of healing. During a global pandemic, and while we are 
spending more and more time on the screens, this workshop aims at a 
critical inquiry of the recuperating forms, mediums, and creativities 
across screen cultures. Experienced in bodies, homes, institutions, 
environments, and borders, difficult times can leave us in loss, 
deprivation, confusion, anxiety, fear, and grief. Yet, as the great 
number of cultural and artistic works and everyday practices show, these 
are also the times when transformative questions, ideas, and practices 
of recovery can flourish. In this workshop, we understand healing not 
necessarily as the complete recovery but as exploring transformative 
possibilities and creative agencies for living with and acting on the 
difficult times.

In Sara Ahmed's (2014) words, "healing does not cover over, but exposes 
the wound to others: the recovery is a form of exposure."[1] For Davina 
Quinlivan (2014), film functions as a reparative object that "encourages 
the mediation of trauma beyond its representational qualities, and 
envisages a kind of 'healing' through the very texture of its material 
attributes and multisensory images."[2] In this sense, we pay critical 
attention to the ways screen cultures deal with and manifest traumas, 
wounds, and injuries. By rethinking recuperative potentials of narrative 
devices, performances, mediums, and everyday practices across film, 
media, and art, this workshop aims to explore ideas about and 
possibilities of healing through creative agencies around the screen.

Inspired and intrigued by these ideas, we aim to critically explore a 
series of questions: How can we think of narratives, aesthetics, and 
forms as recuperative possibilities? How do film, media, and art treat 
difficult times, traumas, convalescents, and their possible 
transformations towards healing? Is it possible to access and construe 
trauma through screen media? How do people engage in screen cultures and 
explore possibilities for individual and collective healing through 
everyday creativities? What kind of subject positions does screen media 
practice suggest for the wounded / the hurt / the spectator? What kind 
of hierarchies and power relations are involved? How can we critically 
approach the industries of healing that emerge or become popular in 
times of crisis? How do they make use of the momentum as political tools 
and new modes of consumer culture?

Suggested topics might include (but not limited to):
- Soothing affects of the screen
- Imaginations and fantasies of healing
- Gendered aspects of healing, queer healing
- Racial healing
- Exilic and migratory healing
- Colonial / postcolonial healing, decoloniality and healing
- Politics and networks of care and solidarity
- Practices of self and their possibilities for physical and psychical 
healing
- Remembering / forgetting and memorabilia
- Ecological healing

Please submit your abstract of 300 words by 31 March 2021 to: 
(ozgur.cicek /at/ fu-berlin.de) and (oezlem.savas /at/ hu-berlin.de)

Deadline for abstracts: 31 March 2021
Notification of acceptance: 3 April 2021
Workshop dates: 1 - 2 June 2021

Organizers:
Özgür Çiçek, Freie Universität Berlin, Cinepoetics
Özlem Savaş, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, BIM


[1] Ahmed, S. (2014). Cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh 
University Press.
[2] Quinlivan, D. (2014). "Film, healing and the body in crisis: a 
twenty-first century aesthetics of hope and reparation." Screen, 55(1), 
103-117.

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