[Commlist] Call for Papers: Screening violence: affect, responsibility, accountability

*/Screening Violence/ will take place on the 4^th  and 5^th  April, 2019 
at The Storey, Lancaster, UK.*

*The deadline for abstracts is the 8^th  February 2019.*

*Abstracts should be up to 300 words.*

*Keynote speakers: *

Shohini Chaudhuri, University of Essex, UK.

Alexa Dodge, Carleton University, Canada.

Ashwani Sharma, University of East London, UK.

/“… these violent delights have violent ends”/

Contemporary screen violence is inextricable from seismic shifts in 
gender relations, growing schisms in personal and political belief 
systems, and a polarization of public sentiment, highlighted in the 
Anglo-American West in the election of Donald Trump in the US and the 
Brexit referendum in the UK. We have witnessed growing racism, 
transphobia, homophobia, sexism and misogyny. Some of this violence has 
emerged from ‘obvious’ places, such as in the extreme nationalism of the 
alt-right or in the recuperation of power by MRAs. In the media 
industries, the Weinstein scandal, among others, has revealed swaths of 
sex pests, abusers and rapists living on multi-million fortunes, 
reanimating feminist arguments about the ways in which patriarchy and 
capitalism are entangled in media industries themselves as well as the 
media they produce. At the same time, critical attention has been paid 
to the role of austerity, neoliberalism and widening social inequality 
in intensifying violent public discourses around race and ethnicity, 
migration, poverty, disability and mental health.  In such ‘troubled 
times’, it is no wonder that screen cultures reveal a new, complex kind 
of violence. This includes a range of media, from television, film, and 
digital culture.

But the growing media attention to such ‘obvious’ forms of gendered, 
racialised, ableist and classed forms of violence raises other important 
questions: about the terms on which violence becomes visible, the ways 
in which we consume violent images and narratives, and the effectiveness 
of visible violence as a political strategy. For example, the Kavanaugh 
hearings and the protests that followed, the #MeToo and #TimesUp 
movements and #BlackLivesMatter represent an important moment at which 
hidden forms of trauma and suffering become visible. But they also raise 
uncomfortable questions about whose trauma counts, and what forms of 
hidden and exploited labour are made invisible through these spectacular 
moments of visibility. There are further questions to be asked about the 
ways in which violent imagery circulates through digital media. Do viral 
videos of racist incidents, the deaths of child refugees, or those of 
sexual violence operate to raise consciousness and bring about change? 
Or do they reinforce existing power relations, and further the cultural 
and emotional impacts of violence – for example, by securing a sense of 
moral superiority of the privileged and safe spectators, while brutally 
re-traumatising those whose lives were and continue to be tangibly 
affected by such screened brutality? How is violence against some 
subjects produced as normal, natural and taken for granted, while 
violence against others is seen as unconscionable? How do we account for 
the ways in which speaking out about trauma might provide opportunities 
for healing and for meaningful protest, while also recognising that 
trauma narratives also have the potential to be commodified and 
exploited, as well as to re-traumatise? And how is violence enacted in 
radical and liberal spaces, through the stigmatisation of identity 
politics, say, or the current resurgence of transmisogynistic discourse 
in popular feminism?

A contemporary look at violence would also need to ask how the screen 
itself now plays a part in the violence. For example, in the evolution 
of digital culture from a static, text based medium to more visual and 
‘participatory’ interactions, which often enable or encourage commentary 
and exchange. How might we think about the digital not just as social 
media, but also as archive, witnessing, and legal forms of screening? 
Finally, we also address the questions of hope and optimism. What kinds 
of positive change can be envisaged through violence? How does violence 
allow us to witness and be receptive to challenging inequality? What 
kinds of compassion and collectivity form through violence?

This interdisciplinary event invites papers that consider how media 
images and narratives of violence provide spaces of care, 
wish-fulfilment, and escapism for violated communities, and how trauma 
and survival are modelled in the stories we tell. Our focus on ‘the 
screen’ reflects our intention that violence is covered by papers in a 
way that reflects the diversity of contemporary media and our 
engagements with many different kinds of screens. We aim to bring 
together voices that offer new approaches to mediated violence: ones 
embedded in feminist, anti-racist and anti-ableist perspectives, and 
ones that pay attention to the contexts we are living in and to our 
positionality with regards to each instance of mediated violence. We 
strive to address the affective power of violence on each of us as a 
victim/survivor, a spectator, a bystander, or a complicit beneficiary; 
while centering our debate on questions of responsibility and 
accountability. We welcome contributions from traditional academic 
papers to creative/performative pieces, graphics, poetry, and more.

Topics include:

·       When does violence become difficult and disruptive?

·       How does the widening social, political and economic divide 
shape the violence of now?

·       Divisions create the context for violence; but how, on screen, 
do these ideologies end up facing off?

·       How can despair, outrage and shame be harnessed as a political 
weapon?

·       How do we define violence, as an affective and bodily intensity 
alongside its more physical manifestations? Between epistemic violence 
and more material forms of harm?

·       How does the sentience of the human and non-human shape violence?

·       How does the screen violence of robots mirror the inhuman 
treatment of low-paid, precarious or illegal workforces?

·       How does the screened hypervisibility of violence create forms 
of exclusion and erasure?

·       What visibilities are engendered through the intersections of 
race, class, ethnicity, religion in the screening of violence?

·       How do the affective fabrics of violence shape disabled, abled 
and extraordinarily abled bodies?

·       What possibilities are opened up and closed down in, for 
example, the screen’s engagement with the violence of the marginal or 
oppressed?

·       How does violence silence or problematize mental health?

Please send abstracts to (screeningviolence /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(screeningviolence /at/ gmail.com)>, and contact Debra Ferreday, Adi 
Kuntsman or Adrienne Evans if you would like any further information.



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