[Commlist] cfp JICMS conference - Italian cinema and media

*Extended deadline: 5 January 2022*

*
*

*Call for Papers*

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*Italian cinema and media: *

*Past and present, continuity and change, expectations for the future*

*Third Edition of the /Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies/ 
International Conference*

**

*In person ONLY*

**

*The American University of Rome*

**

*16-18 June 2022*

**

*Keynote Speaker*

Professor Stephen Gundle

University of Warwick, UK

* 'Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Changing Shape of Italian Cinema 
and Media Studies'***

This address will explore the way the landscape of Italian film studies 
has changed in recent decades both in Italy and abroad. It will 
consider, among other things, the way in which ideas of a canon have 
been challenged and reinterpreted, evolutions in (and displacements 
of) efforts to interpret Italian film production as a whole, the impact 
of the decline of Italian cinema as a commercial and artistic powerhouse 
on the study of film, and the growing attention to television and new 
media. The address will re-visit and assess recent and not-so-recent 
attempts to judge the study of Italian cinema as a field or to shift the 
agenda in some way. It will conclude by seeking (modestly) to indicate 
some possible fruitful avenues of future research.

*Stephen Gundle*is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the 
University of Warwick. A cultural and political historian, he has always 
paid close attention to Italian cinema and television. Among his books 
are /Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the 
Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91/ (Duke, 2000; Italian edition Giunti, 
1995); /Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold 
War/ (with David Forgacs, Indiana, 2007; Italian edition Il Mulino, 
2007); /Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy/ (Yale, 2007; 
Italian edition Laterza 2007); /Glamour: A History/ (OUP, 2008); /Death 
and the Dolce Vita/ (Canongate,  2011; Italian edition Rizzoli, 2012); 
/Mussolini's Dream Factory/ (Berghahn, 2013; Italian edition Kaplan, 
forthcoming); /Fame amid the Ruins/ (Berghahn, 2020).

*Organizing Committee*

Flavia Laviosa, Wellesley College, United States

Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, The American University of Rome, Italy

**

The year 2022 marks the 10^th  anniversary of the publication of the 
first issue of the /Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies/. 
Published by Intellect (UK) and co-sponsored by Wellesley College 
(USA), it remains the only English language journal on Italian cinema 
and media.

In the past ten years,we have been inclusive in our effortsto establish 
connections with scholars from several continents. We have also made it 
our mission to explore the resonance of Italian film in the world across 
times, themes, styles and genres. After publishing the first four 
issues— twoon Italy and Asia (2:1 & 2:3, 2014), a third on Italy and 
LatinAmerica (10:2, 2022), and the fourth one on Italy and 
post-socialist countries (2023), and organizing two international 
conferences (2027 & 2019), the Journal has created a large community of 
scholars of diverse disciplines, all engaged in studying the artistic 
intersections between Italy and other countries.

As we celebrate this anniversary, we are prepared to move forward with 
new explorations and discussions aimed at expanding these interconnected 
academic communities, with a focus on a broader understanding of Italian 
cinema and media in international artistic contexts.

The past decade has marked a series of successes for the /Journal of 
Italian Cinema & Media Studies/. This has coincided with a period during 
which the global media landscape has undergone remarkable 
transformations: from the Internet and World Wide Web to the rise of 
social networks and their deep impact on social interactions; from the 
ubiquitous smartphone emerging as the quintessential example of media 
convergence to the new conglomerates of a fast-changing panorama of 
platforms, devices and streaming services.

As media systems are always both driven by and the drivers of 
technological and social transformations, they are inextricable from new 
forms of everyday life, politics, society and culture, which scholarship 
must understand, analyse, and challenge.

With evolving media comes the development of new economies, production 
policies and distribution platforms, which match new and diverse 
formats, audiences, consumption patterns and modalities of interaction 
with the moving image. The relation of traditional cinema with evolving 
technologies, screen media, visual cultures and digital, social and 
interactive platforms has reconfigured what cinema means as production, 
consumption and prosumerism take shape under new landscapes of 
transmedia content and transnational audiences. From Netflix to YouTube 
and from Instagram to TikTok, cinematic and screen languages have 
accommodated the messages, interactions, arts and expressions of a 
changing world. This is a world dominated by an awareness of the urgency 
of climate, humanitarian, health and economic crises, along with the 
rise of movements for change and equality, including #MeToo and Black 
Lives Matter, which take on a global significance as well as cognizance 
of national- and region-specific approaches.

All of these changes have affected the ways we can and should look at 
cinema and media broadly speaking, but also how we can conceive of the 
cultural complexities of Italian histories and cultures and what 
challenges are faced by scholarship over the next years. Understanding 
Italian cinema and media cultures today means looking at how Italian 
cinema finds a place in the new media ecologies and economies at a 
national and transnational level as well as how YouTube, TikTok and 
social media have offered audiences new ways to narrate Italian cultures 
and specificities, how Italians communicate their diverse identities, 
and how these are shaped by new dynamics of inter-relation and distinction.

Looking at Italian cinema and media today thus also means understanding 
how the changing landscape of the cinema and media play an essential 
role in reframing Italian-ness in a changing national and global 
culture. New media have inherited the traditional forms in which our 
identities have been communicated, from our histories and the arts 
traditions on Instagram to YouTubers discussing our food cultures and 
Made in Italy design sensibilities. Social media have created new 
symbolic and relational bonds in the transnational web of connections 
and distinctions that tie Italians at home to those abroad. Media also 
have played and will play a key role in framing and re-framing the place 
of Italy in a postcolonial and decolonised perspective, offering 
visibility and providing points of access for non-white-centric ideas of 
Italian-ness, new subjectivities, and groups advocating for key issues 
such as migrants’ rights and an inclusive citizenship model for 
second-generation Italians.

As Italian media and cinema productions, agents, and audiences both 
national and transnational represent a lively and complex terrain of 
analysis, JICMS strives to capture and understand their complexities in 
all their newly-evolving forms.

As we reflect on the state of the disciplines (cinema and media 
studies), we open this CFP to a wide range of themes, with the intent of 
offering a unifying horizon that will allow scholars to explore diverse 
fields and topics in a broad international context and move forward with 
new studies, building the future of both the discipline and the journal.

With this CFP, the conference organizers invite proposals from scholars, 
independent researchers, cinema and media professionals, and graduate 
students for single papers, pre-constituted panels, and roundtables.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

·Post-cinema (intersectionality of cinema and social media)

·Social media (media ecologies, national branding, Facebook, Whatsapp)

·Cinema and media on demand: Amazon, Hulu, Netflix (from the theater to 
the home, watchers as content creators, multiplatform television, 
algorithms and taste)

·Non-theatrical cinema and media (industrial cinema and media, 
commercials, propaganda, didactic cinema and media)

·Immersive technologies (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed 
reality, spatial audio and artificial intelligence)

·Series (TV series, web series, pay TV, new frontiers in storytelling, 
transnational narratives, international circulation of TV series)

·Media, cultures, identity, politics, gender (mass vs. niche media, 
‘Audience’ and practices of participation, representations of power, 
popular culture, feminism, (in)equities in access and digital divide, 
politics of media and media in politics, embodiment, multicultural 
media, identities from stars to selfies, mediation and remediation, 
ideologies, gender)

·Crime television (crime and crisis, restaging history, social change 
through popular crime media, challenging stereotypes and discrimination, 
transnational productions, transcultural formats)

·Popular genres and transnationalism (Western, Sci-Fi)

·Migrant stardom (e.g. Raffaella Carrà)

·Women in media industries (directors, writers, actors, transnational 
mobility)

·Writing in cinema (screenwriting, revising, translating, subtitling, 
adaptations)

·Reception (transnational, intermedial, critical, popular)

·Plurimediality and transmediality (cartoons, comics, graphic novels, 
/fotoromanzi/)

·Political cinema (reality, history, fiction)

·Archives and digital resources

·Cinema and the digital humanities

·Plurilingualism in cinema

·Landscape, environment, urban and rural in cinema

·Comedy and transnational reception

·Italian cinema and Latin American cinema

·Italian cinema and post-socialist cinemas

·Postcolonial Italian cinema

·Italian cinema in dialogue with other art/cultural trends (theatre, 
visual arts, literature)

·Italian cinema and the labor world/labor activities

  * Form(s) in contemporary cinema
  * Critical Posthumanism and Italian Cinema
  * Housing and the home in Italian cinema and television

·Cinema schools in Italy (history, curricula, international students’ 
careers) (e.g. Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, other CSC 
schools).

The languages of the conference are English and Italian. *Proposals for 
virtual papers will not be considered.*

Please send an abstract of 250 words plus a short bio of 100 words for 
single papers, or 350 words for panels (including the aims of the panel 
and summaries of each contribution specifying the names of filmmakers, 
artists, films, media etc.) followed by individual titles, panelists’ 
bios, current academic affiliation, and emails for pre-constituted 
panels with 3 speakers, or roundtables in Italian or in English in a 
word.doc format, *no pdf*. We invite proposals for 20-minute 
presentations(inclusive of film clips). We welcome presentations using 
both conventional tools and video-essay commentaries.

Abstracts for consideration should be submitted to Flavia Laviosa at 
(flaviosa /at/ wellesley.edu) <mailto:(flaviosa /at/ wellesley.edu)>.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is*5 January 2022*. 
Notification of acceptance of abstracts will be sent out to authors by 
*15 January 2022.***

Participants will receive a complimentary copy of JICMS and will be able 
to purchase Intellect publications at a special conference discounted price.

Conference registration fee includes: 2 lunches, opening and closing 
receptions.

The deadline for inclusion in the conference program is *15 March 2022*. 
Please, make every effort to pay conference fees before this date.

€ 200 regular rate (€ 100 for 1 day)

€ 150 student rate (€ 75 for 1 day)

The registration fee will be paid to AUR and the website will be 
available in January 2022.

In case of withdrawals the registration fee will not be reimbursed.

In case of cancellation of the conference the registration fee will be 
reimbursed.


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