[Commlist] The (Un)bearable Lightness of Media CfP - XXIX FilmForum Film and Media Studies conference

  XXIX FilmForum - International Film and Media Studies Conference
  November 2nd – 4th 2022, Udine (IT)

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

  Deadline: August 30th, 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
  is August 30th, 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.

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