[ecrea] CFP: Intimacy at a distance: Television at home and away

Call for Papers: Intimacy at a distance:  Television at home and away

13th & 14th June 2015,  University of Cape Town, South Africa

Questions of closeness and distance have characterised discussion of 
television since the very early days of the medium. Whether in the form 
of anxieties about sitting ‘too close’ to the TV, in debates over the 
immersive ‘gaze’ of cinema  vs. the detached ‘glance’ often ascribed to 
television viewing, or the issue of television’s negotiation between 
public space and domestic worlds. A contradictory sense of intimacy over 
a distance is arguably fundamental to a medium that has been defined by 
its capacity to broadcast pictures across space and into homes.
This defining tension between proximity and distance is even more 
complex when considering global television flows. Television reaches 
across vast chasms of geographical space, across cultural, class and 
national boundaries. Thus while television can make us feel very close 
to the people and worlds it represents, it is also a site of 
contradiction, displacement, fragmentation and tension between local and 
global (often Western) programming. We are interested in thinking about 
how work on the role of affect, emotion and memory in television studies 
might be aligned with or held in conversation with recent scholarship on 
transnational television.
This symposium takes advantage of a collaboration between the University 
of Cape Town in South Africa and The University of Glasgow, Scotland in 
order to consider ideas about engagement, space and television through a 
transnational lens.  We are interested in considering how conceptions of 
distance and closeness, intimacy and detachment are complicated by the 
globalisation of television, the migration of viewers, and by the 
possibilities of viewing communities opened by media convergences. How 
might ideas about intimacy, the feminine and the home be expanded or 
complicated by thinking about the global production, reception and 
circulation of televisions’ domestic stories? What are the uses and 
limitations of this spatial thinking?


Topics the symposium will cover:
Television’s simultaneous sense of closeness and distance.
Considerations of intimacy, affect and emotion.
Television and homesickness or nostalgia.
Work on television and space/place.
Meditations on domesticity and conceptions of home.
Work on Race/Gender/Class Identity and the home.
Discussions of national or regional television.
Discussion of global television received, distributed or adapted to 
specific local contexts.
The negotiation of national/local/migrant and diasporic identities on 
and through television.
Media convergence and transnational television.
Work on travel and television.
Global television aesthetics.
Debates in transnational television.

Organisers/Editors: Amy Holdsworth, University of Glasgow and Alexia 
Smit, University of Cape Town

Please send abstracts no longer than 300 words to (alexia.smit /at/ uct.ac.za) 
before April 16th 2015
There is no registration fee for this event.


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