[Commlist] cfp The (Un)bearable Lightness of Media. Critical Approaches to “Sustainability��� in Film and Audiovisual Production, Circulation and Preservation

  The (Un)bearable Lightness of Media Critical Approaches to
  “Sustainability” in Film and Audiovisual Production, Circulation and
  Preservation

Udine (IT), November 2nd - 4th 2022

Deadline: September 10th, 2022

Email: (udineconference /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(udineconference /at/ gmail.com)>

As an increasingly crucial concept recurring in the public domain as 
well as in transnational cooperation politics, “sustainability” is not 
only an ambitious societal goal but also a key-term (and, to some 
extent, a buzzword) that has begun entering and reshaping the agenda of 
Film and Media practitioners, critics and scholars. The XXIX FilmForum 
edition will be devoted to question the many possible meanings of this 
notion whenever applied to the realm of media, by moving from two 
crucial areas and perspectives of
inquiry

Ecological Sustainability. Film, Media and the Environment. In the last 
decade or so, ecocriticism and ecomaterialism have taken shape as the 
two alternative approaches for tackling film and environmental 
sustainability. Scholars in this field have focused alternatively on 
issues of representation (Cubitt 2020; Willoquet & Maricondi 2010) or on 
the material impact that film and television production and distribution 
practices have on the biophysical world (Vaughan 2019; Kääpä 2018; 
Starosielski & Walker 2016; Bozak 2012). Taking cue from these distinct 
strands of reflection, we encourage on the one hand ecocritical 
discussion about how film and media offered representations of natural 
or human-provoked catastrophes,
utopian or dystopian futures caused by climate change (Kaplan 2016), 
environmental issues (Olausson & Berglez 2014) and how they contributed 
to raising environmental awareness (Parham 2016). On the other hand, 
ecomaterialist approaches may assess either the way in which film or 
media industries have been participating in capitalist-fossil fueled 
economies, weighting on the mining (Parikka 2015; Wan 2019) and the 
extraction of raw materials (Grieveson & Jaikumar 2021) and to the 
production of waste (Zimanyi 2022), or the increasingly relevant of 
environmental awareness underlying the field of film and media production.

Media Sustainability. Economies, Politics and Infrastructures. The 
notion of sustainability doesn’t exclusively include environmental 
issues but also presents political, ethical, and economic implications. 
The discussion can thus be furthered to all the logics by which film and 
media production, circulation and preservation organize their own 
“resources”, be them hardware or content-related, laborers or 
consumers’, human or non-human. From a materialist point of view, the 
sustainability of media can be measured through an “infrastructural 
approach”, focusing on short-term marginal and local practices or on the 
longstanding maintenance policies through which socio-technical systems 
are kept “alive” (Krebs & Weber
2021). The awareness that “we are never looking solely at media” 
(Mattern 2015) but dealing instead with a complex of human communities, 
tacit knowledges and techno-cultural assemblages, calls also for a 
deeper understanding of gender, race, class, labour and geopolitical 
inequalities, and to which extent they are implied in the archiving, 
access and distribution of resources and data. Moreover, a different 
perspective, a re-thinking of the proliferation, accumulation, reuses 
and misuses of images may raise questions on the cultural and ethical 
sustainability of affective visual ecologies (Shaviro 2010; Ivakhiv 
2013; Weik von Mossner 2017) and of state of saturation of the current 
iconosphere (Fontcuberta 2016). Following Marran (2017)’s critique of 
ecocriticism our very concept of “visual culture” must be radically 
reshaped, decentring the ethno-centric and anthropo-centric views to 
make room also for animal and other non-human elements.

As a final provocation, the discourse on sustainability can also take a 
self-reflexive turn, interrogating the possibilities and forms of 
developments of and within film and media studies. Digitisation 
practices and “datafication” impact research habits and challenge 
traditional qualitative approaches to knowledge, even in the humanities 
(Schäfer & van Es 2017; Dencik 2020). Concurrently, our field is 
increasingly migrating into other domains, and a dialectical questioning 
between synchronic excavation and diachronic transmission of knowledge 
arises (Keilbach & Pabiś-Orzeszyna 2021): as scholars, how far can we go 
with mining and how should we deal with so much cumulative knowledge, 
the preservation and transmission
of which is progressively less sustainable? How much can our networks of 
data, knowledge and practice exchanges be considered sustainable, in a 
material, conceptual and ethical sense? We encourage our scholar 
community to confront these questions as integral part of a critical 
assessment, that should be also
self-critical, of the concept and role of sustainability at large.

Starting from these general areas of interest, we encourage 
contributions addressing (but not limited to)
the following topics:

  * The role of cinema and media in building a“hydrocarbon imagination”
  * Ecoimperialism and the media I: “exploitative” histories of media
    and film industries
  * Ecoimperialism and the media II: film and media in the public image
    of extractive industries
  * Media-Waste and Wasteful Media
  * Ecojustice, Ecoinclusivity, Ecoactivism and the media
  * Practices and policies of “greenwashing” in public media campaigns
  * Greening film shooting and post-production
  * Greening theatrical venues and cinema spaces
  * Sustainability and alternative distribution networks, minor
    archives, radical communities, local infrastructures
  * Reuse, recycle and repair as sustainable practices in media and
    audiovisual economies
  * Sustainability and film/media archival infrastructures, economies,
    preservation practices and policies
  * Sustainability and transnational, transgeographical balances and
    cooperation (North/South divide, East/West divide,
  * rural/urban divide)
  * Sustainability and archival and museum film and media objects
    preservation, caregiving, and exhibition
  * Sustainability and platform economy
  * Sustainability and digitization, digital archiving, digital access
  * Sustainability and scientific research (knowledge exchange, sharing
    practices, digital humanities, datafication, and research
    infrastructures in film and media studies)

We invite proposals for papers or panels of up to 700 characters with 
spaces.

Please make sure to attach a short biographical note (up to 400 
characters for each contribution). The deadline for submission 
isSeptember 10th, 2022

To send your application and to ask for more information, please contact 
us at (udineconference /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(udineconference /at/ gmail.com)>

The conference will be held in presence in Udine. The following 
registration fees will be applied:
- Tenured professors: 50 Euros (Early Bird Registration) 70 Euros (Full 
Registration)
- Lecturers and Researchers: 30 euros (Early Bird Registration) 45 Euros 
(Full Registration)

No fee will be charged for Ph.D. students and candidates.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------