[Commlist] cfp: Detecting Europe in contemporary crime narratives

Final conference of DETECt
website <https://www.detect-project.eu/>

*International Conference*

*Call for Papers*

*Detecting Europe in contemporary crime narratives: print fiction, film, 
and television*

21-23 June 2021

Link Campus University

Via del Casale di San Pio V 44 – Rome

Conference Website: https://www.detect-project.eu/detect2021/

[Keynote speakers to be announced soon]

Among the different expressions of popular culture, no other genre more 
than crime – meant as a composite made up of many different variants or 
subgenres -- has proved able to travel and expand its reach into 
international markets and with audiences. Nor has any other genre been 
more adept at laying bare the conflicts and contradictions – social, 
political and historical – that characterise contemporary European 
societies. The Detecting Europe conference offers an open forum to 
explore and discuss how narratives of crime and investigation, as well 
as their production and reception, have helped define the major 
industrial, commercial, thematic and stylistic trends of European 
popular culture since 1989, fostering both the transnational circulation 
of its products and the appearance of new transcultural representations 
in line with the emergence

of new social identities. We welcome proposals that interrogate the 
notion of Europeanness as a critical category, and its viability for the 
study of contemporary popular culture, both in print and screen media. 
We wish to explore both the scope and limits of the interrelated notions 
of transnational identity and cosmopolitanism when applied to the works 
of European crime fiction, including print fiction, film, and TV.

A few general — but not exclusive — questions may be asked. Are we to 
conceive of cosmopolitanism and the  process of European 
transculturation merely as unifying factors, fostering the generation of 
a shared and uniform transnational identity? Or should we better 
acknowledge the existence of a variety of European transcultural 
identities, expressed in different writing and audio-visual styles, 
characteristic narrative models, place-specific production cultures and 
distribution and consumption patterns? What is the impact of national 
media ecologies in shaping the idea of the European, and how the 
national translate the European when foreign products appear in its 
mediascape? Should hybridization and transculturation be assumed as 
markers and powerful drivers of cultural homologation? Or rather the 
opposite is true, namely that cultural hybridization entails a growing 
differentiation of narrative forms and styles, contents and formats, 
production and reception practices, thus contributing to the emergence 
of a post-national assemblage of multiple and possibly diverging 
cosmopolitan identities? We deem it important, at this particular time, 
that the notion of Europeanness and its eventual instantiations in 
contemporary crime narratives is approached having in mind the multiple 
crises that are currently affecting the continent and its population.

We invite proposals from multiple fields of cultural studies, including 
representation studies, industry and production studies, and reception 
and audience studies. Possible topics may include, but are not limited 
to, the following:

• Main stylistic trends of the crime-genre works produced in Europe in 
the last 30 years.

Debating/reframing Euronoir as a critical category for cultural studies.

• Hybridization and transculturation: toward homologation or increased 
cultural differentiation?

• Crime fiction and the European crisis: immigration, migrant labour, 
Brexit, and the rise of right-wing popularism.

• The restaging and critical analysis of Europe’s recent past in the 
work of crime writers, screenwriters and directors.

• Images of Europe and Europeans: investigating social change through 
the study of popular crime narratives.

• Restating vs challenging class, gender and ethnic stereotypes, 
prejudices and discrimination in the representation of crime.

• The multiple facets of European diversity: how have social, spatial 
and historical identities been expressed in the works of the European 
crime genre?

• Ecocriticism and environmental humanities in the era of widescale 
ecological crisis: eco-noir and the challenges to European environment 
policies.

• The profiled position of crime in fostering transnational cooperation 
in the European cultural and creative sectors.

• Relationships and discrepancies between national/local creative 
industries and transnational cultural policies in the production milieu 
of the European crime genre.

• Transnational production and distribution and the emergence of 
transcultural formats.

• The hopes and limits of European cohesiveness, as revealed in 
practices of co-production and

distribution of crime novels, films and TV dramas across the continent.

• Crime narratives and the media discourse on organized trans-European 
crime.

• Fictional representations of legal and forensic practices in 
comparative perspective.

• Translation, dubbing, subtitling as strategies for cultural adaptation 
and appropriation.

• The imbrication of local, national and transnational identities in the 
reception of foreign crime stories, between old and fresh perspectives 
on proximate or distant neighbors.

• Transnational distribution and the role of audiences in shaping the 
circulation patterns of European crime narratives across the continent.

• Detecting transcultural identity and social change through the study 
of the audiences’ response to crime stories and trans/cross-media universes.

• Engagement and design of crime audiences in the age of digital markets 
and online distribution.

• Making sense of social change through the audience’s response to the 
representation of female, gay, lesbian and queer characters.

• Theorising transnational/transdisciplinary research for the study of 
European crime narratives in print and screen media.

*Conference Chairs*

Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna), Federico Pagello (University 
of Chieti-Pescara), Valentina Re (Link Campus University)

*Organizing Committee *

Luca Antoniazzi (University of Bologna), Sara Casoli (University of 
Bologna), Massimiliano Coviello (Link Campus University), Paola De Rosa 
(Link Campus University), Lorenzo Orlando (Link Campus University)


*Advisory Board *

Stefano Arduini (Link Campus University), Maurizio Ascari (University of 
Bologna), Jan Baetens (KU Leuven), Luca Barra (University of Bologna), 
Stefano Baschiera (Queen’s University Belfast), Giulia Carluccio 
(University of Turin), Silvana Colella (University of Macerata), Caius 
Dobrescu (University of Bucharest), Andrea Esser (University of 
Roehampton), Nicola Ferrigni (Link Campus University), Katarina 
Gregersdotter (Umeå University), Kim Toft Hansen (Aalborg University), 
Annette Hill (University of Lund), Dominique Jeannerod (Queen’s 
University Belfast), Sandor Kalai (University of Debrecen), Matthieu 
Letourneux (University Paris Nanterre), Natacha Levet (University of 
Limoges), Giacomo Manzoli (University of Bologna), Janet McCabe 
(Birkbeck University), Jacques Migozzi (University of Limoges), Andrew 
Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast), Marica Spalletta (Link Campus 
University)


*Deadlines and practicalities*

Abstracts deadline: 15 November 2020

Feedback: 15 December 2020

Registration deadline: 31 January 2020

Regular conference fee: €120

Reduced conference fee (PhD students, Postdoctoral researchers): €90

Further information: (info /at/ detect-project.eu)

**

*Submissions guidelines*

Submissions are welcome as individual papers (max. 20 minutes) and 
pre-constituted panels (3/4 papers).

Individual presenters are required to provide their name, email address, 
the title of the paper, an abstract (max. 300 words), references (max. 
200 words), and a short bio (max. 150 words).

Submit your paper proposal here 
<https://form.jotform.com/DETECt/abstract-submission>

Submit your panel proposalhere 
<https://eu.jotform.com/DETECt/panel-submission>(panel organizers are 
also asked to submit a panel title and a short description of the panel 
(max. 300 words).

The conference is supported by CUC – Consulta Universitaria del Cinema, 
Italy <https://www.consultacinema.org/>.



Luca Antoniazzi


Post-doctoral Researcher

Università di Bologna

Dipartimento delle Arti

Via Barberia, 4, 40123 Bologna (IT)

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