Landscape and Environment

Call for papers

The 24^th International Screen Studies Conference is organised by the journal Screen and will be programmed by Screen editors Alison Butler and Alastair Phillips.

From their earliest inception, film and television have been concerned with the registration of place through the unique capacity of the audiovisual moving image to convey the experience of locale over time. In recent years, screen studies has engaged with the politics of location especially through the site of the cinematic city and inter-related questions of modernity, architecture and urban cultural transformation. The main theme of this year’s Screen conference will offer an opportunity to extend critical debate into the fields of landscape and the environment. In so doing, it will offer an exciting range of inter-disciplinary perspectives in order to reflect on the real and imaginary ways that we interact with the world through the portal of the screen.

Martin Lefebvre has argued that landscape manifests itself as an interpretative gaze. It is anchored in human life not just as something to look at but to live in socially as a cultural form. Cultural geography now argues that landscape must not only be understood as the outcome of interactions of nature and culture, but that practices of landscaping such as walking, looking, driving and, of course, filmmaking might also be the origin of our ideas about what ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ actually are. If human investment toward space produces the notion of landscape, what then are the principal ways in which the moving image articulates this process? How have film and television articulated the necessary tension between embodied immersion within a specific topographical space and critical reflection on the specific historical and cultural contexts that shape global screen culture past and present?

The confirmed plenary speakers are:

Professor Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London
Professor Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent
Professor Mette Hjort, Lingnan University, Hong Kong/University of Copenhagen
Janine Marchessault, York University

The Screen Studies Conference, one of the longest running and most successful events of its kind in the world, welcomes proposals for papers/panels on any of these questions and on the following topics related to the main conference theme (as usual, proposals for other subjects beyond this focus will also be considered):

• The representation of geographically and historically specific screen landscapes
• Environmental politics and screen cultures
• Genre, narrative and the landscape
• Phenomenology and screen landscapes
• Landscape and television culture
• Journeys and landscapes: walking and travelling on screen
• The landscapes of world cinema
• Landscape and environment: autobiography, history, memory
• Screen cultures within the environment
• The dialectics of place and non-place in film and video
• Site-specific screening practices

The deadline for submitting proposals is Friday, 10th January 2014.  Submissions for pre-formed three-person panels will be considered but not prioritised. Individual papers from pre-formed panels may be accepted although the panel is rejected.

Instructions for individual proposals

Please submit your proposal on the following template, then save it with your surname as the filename, and email to screen@arts.gla.ac.uk, using the email subject line, “SSC2014 proposal”. Download SSC2014 single proposal template.

Instructions for pre-formed panel proposals

All panel members should submit a separate proposal, using the following panel template, saving it with their surname as the filename. In addition, in Section 2, they should give the name of a main panel contact for correspondence, and the title and rationale of the proposed panel. The main panel contact may forward the panel’s files in a single email, but please ensure  contact details are complete for each panel member within the attachments. Download SSC2014 panel proposal template.

If you have any queries about the submission process, please contact Heather Middleton, Screen Administrator, at screen@arts.gla.ac.uk or 0141 330 5035.