Sydney Screen Studies Network 2017 Program – Call For Papers

We are currently seeking proposals for our 2017 program: Intersections in Film and Media Studies. Sydney Screen Studies Network (SSSN) invites scholars working across film, television, video, and internet genres to explore the state of contemporary screen studies and screen culture. Developments in digital technologies, as well as rapid changes in production, distribution and consumption patterns, mean that ‘cinema’ is an increasingly fluid term that moves across platforms, genres, and textual boundaries. Screen culture is also an inescapable part of the contemporary media environment, with a plethora of media objects moving across a variety of screens, technologies, and devices. Cinema and screen studies likewise possess a fluidity that encourages interdisciplinary approaches and collaboration.

This program will explore the transitional nature of contemporary screen studies and the movement of scholarship, theory and ideas across its boundaries. The program is interested in three core areas of study:

  1. Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to screen media
  2. Intersections in screen media
  3. The value of a single-discipline approach

Potential seminar topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to screen media
  • Applying a single discipline to study a screen object not in that discipline (e.g. using film studies approaches to television or applying video games scholarship to YouTube)
  • Investigations of screen media interactions and crossovers (e.g. cinematic television, televisual YouTube)
  • In what ways are different screen-based media texts informing and shaping one another?
  • What are the boundaries of film/television/video/YouTube?
  • How are screen-based media texts being confined to specific mediums of distribution and consumption?
  • In response to the convergent media environment are texts adhering to particular media-specific conventions in order to delineate themselves?
  • Can we continue to define what is cinema? What is television? etc.
  • How are audiences of screen texts responding to the fluidity of screen media genres?

All seminar presentations will be considered for an edited special journal issue, pending  editorial approval. We particularly encourage postgraduate and early career researchers to apply.

Seminars will be held every alternate Wednesday in the teaching semester, from 5pm to 7pm (Room 327, Robert Webster Building, UNSW Kensington Campus).

Please send proposals including a title, an abstract (200 words), and a short biography to sydneyscreenstudies@gmail.com by Sunday 19 February, 2017.

For any queries or further information on the Sydney Screen Studies Network, please direct your questions to the above email address or visit sydneyscreenstudies.wordpress.com.