[Commlist] CFP: Narrating "New Normal" Graduate Student Symposium

    CFP: Narrating “New Normal”: Graduate Student Symposium

May 17-18, 2021

Organized by: Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Image

Centre for Film and Moving Image Research (FMIR)

Academy of Film, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University

Abstracts Due: Dec 1, 2020

CFP webpage: https://research.hkbu.edu.hk/page/detail/532#CFP1 
<https://research.hkbu.edu.hk/page/detail/532#CFP1>



What is “new normal?” As the COVID-19 pandemic sickens millions, 
isolates billions, and brings economies to a standstill around the 
globe, the phrase has entered the everyday lexicon of governments, news, 
and social media, with many regarding the ensuing widespread shift of 
basic human activities online – school, shopping, work, and socializing 
– as a “new normal.” Yet, the phrase “new normal” itself is not new. 
Governments, corporations, and institutions readily deploy “new normal” 
to legitimize regulations, laws, and policies that ensure organizational 
survival in crisis, thereby relegating the people whose uncertain 
livelihoods they normalize as expendable. After the 2008 financial 
crisis, American economists declared reduced consumer spending due to 
chronic underemployment as “new normal.” In 2014, PRC President Xi 
Jinping described steadily diminished GDP growth as a more stable “新常 
態” — a direct translation of “new normal” that Chinese state media now 
regularly employ to allay public panic about economic volatility. As a 
malleable signifier designed to manage expectations, “new normal” weaves 
itself into visions of a stable post-crisis future as though normalcy 
requires only minor adjustment to major disasters.

Through its widespread circulation and vernacularization, “new normal” 
normalizes precarity and obfuscates the uncertainties wrought by crises, 
especially for those who cannot simply adjust. However, everyday 
netizens also use the narrative of “new normal” to convey their current 
experiences and imaginations of the future, whether hopeful or 
pessimistic. Novel articulations of “new normal” emerge as human 
activities and relationships shift online. Empowered by inexpensive 
technology and broadcasted to mass audiences through social media 
networks, ordinary people have become global storytellers with the 
capacity to weave affecting stories of “new normal” that effect how the 
concurrent epidemiological and political upheavals will shape human society.

We invite graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to present their 
research on digital and moving image stories and storytelling about “new 
normal(s).” We ask how internet users, film and media makers, 
institutions, governments, and other cultural organizations narrate “new 
normal” as a way of shaping reality, producing knowledge, and making 
emotional sense of drastic change. What, indeed, is “new normal?” What 
does it mean for something new to be normal? What stories do people and 
organizations tell about “new normal”? Who tells these stories, and how 
are these stories told?


    Possible topics

 1. How do stories of “new normal” unfold and take shape in various
    media platforms?
 2. What roles do storytelling on digital media platforms play in
    ascribing meanings to “new normal?”
 3. How do digital media users and organizations use “new normal,” to
    what end, and what new meanings does the phrase signify?

Possible topics for this conference include, but are not limited to:

  * Emotional experiences of “new normal” and uncertainty
  * Digital media, relationships, and intimacy
  * Borders, boundaries, quarantine, and social distance
  * Precarity, discrimination, and disenfranchisement
  * Public health and cultural politics
  * Social media and community organizing
  * Online activism and cancel culture
  * Online learning and teaching
  * Crisis economics and essential services
  * Ecosystem collapse and environmental catastrophe
  * E-commerce and new economies
  * Global, regional, and national politics and policies
  * Risk and crisis management
  * State power, surveillance, and censorship
  * Deglobalization, populism, and authoritarianism


    Submission information and acceptance

To submit a proposal, please send an extended abstract of no more than 
500 words, 2-page CV, and email address for correspondence to 
(gstjournal /at/ hkbu.edu.hk) <mailto:(gstjournal /at/ hkbu.edu.hk)> by December 1, 2020.

Results will be emailed by January 15, 2021. Draft full papers 
(approximately 6000 words) will be uploaded and shared amongst 
presenters before the conference. The Centre for Film and Moving Image 
Research (FMIR) in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University 
will offer need-based financial support to participants at the 
discretion of the conference organizers. Selected papers will be 
published in special issue of /Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital 
and Moving Image 
/(https://research.hkbu.edu.hk/project/global-storytelling-journal-of-digital-and-moving-image 
<https://research.hkbu.edu.hk/project/global-storytelling-journal-of-digital-and-moving-image>). 



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