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Art/science lectureship at Goldsmiths, University of London

2015 March 6
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by scubitt

We are looking to appoint a full-time lecturer with a teaching and research specialism in the visual cultures of science within the Department of Visual Cultures

There’s a nexus of eco-critical scholars here and an excellent opportunity

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ATT359/lecturer-in-visual-cultures/

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CFP: The Companion to African Cinema

2015 March 6
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by Shared by Steve Rust
CFP: The Companion to African Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell)Kenneth Harrow and Carmela Garritano, editors.

Proposals due May 15, 2015 

In recent years, African film critics have begun to consider dramatic changes in African cinematic production and distribution as well as the aesthetic and narrative innovations these transformations have made possible. Critics such as Manthia Diawara, Lindiwe Dovey, Kenneth Harrow, Jon Haynes, and Alexie Tcheuyap have called for updated approaches attuned to reading these new forms of African cinematic and media production and, in the cases of Harrow and Tcheuyap, the dismantling of an outdated dominant critical paradigm.

Since its beginnings, African film studies has set out to articulate a uniquely and authentically African film language and aesthetic, recover the buried histories of African resistance, educate and politicize audiences, and give voice to Africans marginalized by dominant narratives, including Hollywood cinema. Its methods have been rooted in the hermeneutics of what Alberto Moreiras calls “locational thinking” and Achille Mbembe has described as “an intellectual genealogy based on a territorialized identity and a racialized geography,” approaches ill-suited to cinemas born under the aegis of globalized forces and post-cold war struggles.

This volume will include essays on a broad range of topics, also including “video films” and other forms of screen media. The approaches adumbrated by Moreiras’s and Mbembe’s criticisms anticipate such developments as Nollywood, a product of the structural and technological transformations of neoliberal capitalism that articulates with the entangled temporalities of our current historical moment.  If initiated by the advent of commercial video production in Ghana and Nigeria in the late 1980s, recent transformations in African cinema now include the many film innovations of independent African directors, such as the sci-fi efforts of Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu, the intense psycho-genocide film by Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza, and the poetic-realist art films of Mahamet Saleh Haroun, as well as what is coming to be termed “New Nollywood.”  In addition, there is an expanding body of genres being deployed and created that radically change conventional understandings of “African Cinema.” We also find new grids of filmmaking in which film artists like Bekolo, Sissako, Ramaka, and Teno are working both on and off the continent.

This anthology represents an exciting opportunity to analyze these new developments within the context of the overwhelmingly powerful overdeterminisms of globalization and world cinema studies and to break with the molds that have become rigidified with the received structures of received truths about African studies. We invite contributors to theorize the new, African cinema genres, as well as to analyze African film within the context of changes in the religious landscape and in economic and political configurations that have radically shifted since the 1980s. We seek work on the historiography, cinematography, and technologies that account for the field, and especially welcome approaches that are striking out in new ways, reconfiguring the cinematic critical landscape.

The anthology is scheduled to appear in 2018. Now, we are inviting short proposals of about 500 words. The deadline for receiving the proposals is May 15, 2015.

Selected contributors will be asked to send essays of between 8,000-10,000 words.

Essays might approach African film or media from perspectives shaped by any of the following:

  •       African Postcolonial theorizing, in an age of the global
  •       Adaptation or translation studies
  •       Theories of posthegemony
  •       Biopower and biopolitics
  •       Industry studies
  •       Film Festival studies
  •       Affect theory
  •       New Media studies
  •       Ecocriticsm
  •       Queer theory
  •       Urban studies

Other approaches might examine

  •       the materiality of African cinema
  •       the formation of early African cinema, excavating colonial or early cinematic endeavors, utilizing archives being recuperated in Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, South Africa, etc.
  •       the transnational dimensions of African cinematic practices

The above is only a list of possibilities; we look forward to receiving papers that ask new questions or suggest exciting and unexpected ways to read African film and screen media.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please send a 500 word proposal to Ken Harrow (harrow@msu.edu) and Carmela Garritano (cgarritano@tamu.edu) by May 15, 2015.

We welcome your ideas and questions at any time!

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CFP: Social Media in the Anthropocene

2015 March 2
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by Shared by Steve Rust

Call for Participation: Social Media in The Anthropocene

In response to emerging areas of study in the Humanities and changes in modes of academic expression, a special issue on social media is planned for the journal Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. The special issue’s focus is Social Media in The Anthropocene.

The multiple and expanding uses of social media coincide with a major shift in the academy. Readership and the role of the scholar are being reformulated across the Post-, Digital, and Environmental Humanities.1 This shift in modes of knowledge dissemination, authorship, and reception impacts both the material footprint and the content of scholarly engagement with climate change, environmental degradation, and the problematic term that attempts to sum up our current crisis, the ‘Anthropocene’.2

You are invited to participate in the special issue using several experimental activities to generate an academic paper. Together with other scholars you will test social media platforms and improve understanding of audiences of social media in relation to digital media, research in the Humanities, and resilience narratives. Reflections on the Humanities will explore social media in three ways, first as a process for generating intellectual work and ideas, secondly as a tool for writing about social media and its meaning for scholarship in the Humanities, and thirdly for reviewing using a combination of peer- and open review for crowd-sourcing commentaries and feedback on your contribution to the special issue. As scholarship increasingly ventures into popular venues for communication, complications of address, reception, and ethics ensue.

Contributions to Social Media in The Anthropocene will address some of these key tensions:

  • Boundaries between personal and professional writing
  • Sharing information and copyright
  • Veracity and visibility at odds with access and anonymity
  • Analogue à Digital: phasing out the old or hybridizing the new?

These topics resonate with research on tipping points (Gladwell, 2001) processes in social media, e.g. news gone viral, and experimental design which all contributes to the immediacy of social media and how its content is emphasised or appropriated by target audiences. This is indicative of how time dimensions affect narratives and how narratives are able to travel between media platforms and communities.

Contributors are invited to explore these processes of social media by adding to, or selecting from, a host of tools and platforms for generating content. The suggested social media tools include blogs and concept sketches (e.g. WordPress, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr), videos and podcasts (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo, SoundCloud) and forums (e.g. Facebook, Twitter).

Begin by sending an abstract (50-150 words) on ideas and social media to be used. Feel free to change ideas and tools when relevant. From this using and thinking with social media, you will develop and submit a paper by 1st of May 2015. When writing up the paper it is encouraged to link and sample how social media has been used generating ideas and text.

When writing up the paper for the special issue, the contributors are encouraged to use linkages and samples of social media since it elucidates evolution of ideas through generating, sharing and commenting work in progress as well as the importance of formats and time dimensions for narratives. Each submission will be subjected to an open peer review process, where contributors’ work is made available for a limited time for public review at an assigned website. Every contributor will be asked to participate in the open peer review process and to offer comments on a minimum of 5 other submissions. After peer review and revisions, you will submit a final paper by 1st of October, 2015. The special issue is planned for publishing April 2016.

Social Media in The Anthropocene is curated by the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) in coalition with scholars within and beyond the Humanities.
Contact information and inquiries: gardebo@kth.se

  1. See Wilko Graf von Hardenberg on ‘Digital’ for new platforms to explore within the Humanities, EHL VideoDictionary, KTH 2014. ↩
  2. See John McNeill on ‘Anthropocene’ for a critical discussion on its multifaceted and conflicting usages and meanings, EHL VideoDictionary, KTH 2014 ↩

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Conference CFP: “The Image Conference”

2015 February 27
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by Shared by Steve Rust

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Sixth International Conference on the Image. The Image Conference will be held 29-30 October 2015 at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines and perspectives and encourage faculty and students to jointly submit proposals, discussing the image through one of the following themes:

Conference Themes

Theme 1: The Form of the Image
Theme 2: Image Work
Theme 3: The Image in Society
2015 Special Focus: Media Materiality: Towards Critical Economies of “New” Media

2015 Special Focus

Media Materiality: Towards Critical Economies of “New” Media
When speaking about “new” media, the claim to newness draws meaning from what is supposed to be the peculiar nature of digital technologies. This narrative is mirrored in the analysis of a historical shift from an industrial age, based in the logic of mass factory production and uniform consumption, to an information age centered on the production and communication of information. In an industrial logic “material” referred primarily to a critique of a political economy of real objects, whereas “immaterial” referred to a politics of identity and culture.

The conference will address this theme through a series of cascading questions. For example, could the lens of “media materiality” be a productive way to view the flows of political economy, identity, and sexuality in the context of a critical analysis of what is “new” in the new media? How can one address the intersection, co-dependency, and interplay of media materiality and immateriality? And, as this question pertains to the Image Conference, how do we understand the production, consumption, and distribution of images in an age of “new“ compared to “old“ media? How might we frame critical economies of “new” media in relation to the legacy, rebirth, and re-imagination of “old“ media?

Proposal Submissions and Deadlines

The current review period closing date for the latest round of submissions to the Call for Papers (a title and short abstract) is 5 March 2015*. Please visit our website for more information on submitting your proposal, future deadlines, and registering for the conference.

If you are unable to attend the conference, you may still join the community and submit your article for peer review and possible publication, upload an online presentation, and enjoy subscriber access to The Image Journal.

*Proposals are reviewed in rounds adhering to monthly deadlines. Check the website often to see the current review round.

Conference Highlights

Plenary Speakers
In addition to numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners, the 2015 conference will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field. This year’s plenary speakers include:

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Modern Culture and Media, History of Art and Architecture, Brown University, Providence, USA
Jesse Drew, Cinema and Technocultural Studies, University of California, Davis, USA

Current List of Accepted Proposals
Deciding on whether to attend a conference is an important decision in your academic career, and many times your peers can play an important role in helping you to take that vital step in your research progression.
To view the current list of accepted proposals to date, click here.

Accommodations
Staying at the conference hotel is a great way to meet fellow delegates and to ensure an easy trip to the conference venue each day. To view details on conference accommodations, click here.

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Conference/Book CFP: Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos

2015 February 24
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Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 27-29 August 2015

Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos seeks to counteract pervasive mythologies of the Arctic as a blank space or desolate end of the world. Instead, the conference seeks to engage with how past, present, and future power dynamics shape this circumpolar region, its indigenous populations, and relationship to the rest of the world through documentary filmmaking. The conference and proposed edited volume examines the Arctic as a profoundly transnational and heterogeneous space through the rubric of Arctic documentary (including film, video, television, digital media, and installation art).

Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos reflects the state of the field by calling on the expertise by a range of established and emerging film scholars from Europe, Canada, and the United States. The conference seeks to juxtapose different forms of filmmaking not typically placed in dialogue, and whose interrelations are overlooked. We are as interested in presentations on films made in the eight Arctic countries (Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, USA), as we are in documentaries made by non-Arctic countries, and in early cinema as much as digital media. Through this practice, we seek to uncover a counter-history that reveals the complexity of Arctic visual, cultural, ideological, and political representation in a globalized and international world. Given its importance in the history of cinematic representations of the Arctic, the conference will focus on documentary cinema broadly conceived.

Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos will be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on August 27-29, 2015. Confirmed participants include scholars of documentary, media, ethnographic, and circumpolar indigenous cinemas who will address particularly significant aspects of Arctic documentary cinema from the early 1900s to today. These aspects include environmental documentaries, explorer films, indigenous media, and political filmmaking, as well as production and distribution trends of the Circumpolar North.

Please submit a title, 500-word abstract, and biography by April 1, 2015 to arcticdocumentary@gmail.com. Participants will be notified in late April. Selected book-length chapter contributions (7,000-8,000 words) will be due to the editors December 1, 2015.

Lilya Kaganovsky
Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media and Cinema Studies
Director, Program in Comparative & World Literature
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Scott MacKenzie,
Dept of Film and Media Studies,
Cross-appointed to the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies,
Queen’s University,
Kingston, Canada

Anna Westerstahl Stenport
Associate Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Media and Cinema Studies
Director of the European Union Center
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Noelle Belanger
Conference Program Coordinator

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Conference CFP: The Real and the Intermedial

2015 February 22
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by Shared by Steve Rust

THE REAL AND THE INTERMEDIAL

October 23-24, 2015. International Film and Media Studies Conference, Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

The official language of the conference is English.

Conference website: http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/the-real-and-the-intermedial

Following up on the themes introduced in our previous conferences dedicated to “film in the post-media age”, the“cinema of sensations”, “rethinking intermediality in the digital age”, and “figurations of intermediality in film”, we invite you to address one of the most puzzling phenomena of contemporary media and film: the intertwining of the illusion of reality with effects of intermediality, connecting the experience of a palpable, everyday world with artificiality, abstraction and the awareness of multiple mediations. While on an ontological level the concept of the “real” has been radically challenged by the advent of digital technology in photography and the movies, we find that new, audiovisual media have also effectively reshaped our sense of reality, and have expanded the areas of our sensual reach into the world. In our post-postmodern age, the question of the “real” is back with a vengeance regarding all aspects of media. The digital image, as a “graphic mode” has not only brought back painting reinstating “the ‘artist’ as the source and origin of the movie” (T. Elsaesser), but in cinema, television and new media, we also have diverse and astonishing examples in which hypermediacy fulfils “the desire for immediacy” (J. D. Bolter), and we see productive intersections between the emphasis on the senses, on the physical-biological, socio-political “reality” of existence and conspicuous, intermedial stylization.

The photo-graphic effect of stillness in the moving image and its fundamental relation to indexicality is exploited to the full in the so-called “slow cinema” canon, as we see in the breathtaking films of Pedro Costa, Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr, Alexander Sokurov, Lav Diaz, for example. Or we may think of cases in which painterly images of ethereal beauty are created alongside violent, shockingly naturalistic scenes in the films of Carlos Reygadas, Kim-Ki Duk, etc. Jean-Luc Godard’s new movie, Goodbye to Language, a bold incursion into the use of 3D, renders scenes of nature and the texture of everyday things in vivid, artificial imagery. (Even the recent teaming up of David Attenborough and Björk for such a new media Gesamtkunstwerk experiment as Biophilia, emphasizes this duality.)
Cultural differences, subjectivity, a sense of history and place are often articulated through techniques of intermediality in avant-garde experiments, documentary practices or fiction films alike. As a rule, the “haptic” image can be seen as the gateway to a myriad of connections between cinema and the other arts. In certain cases, a reflexive foregrounding of mediality and constructedness has become not an instrument of ironic detachment but of a search for authenticity: all of which may also bring into focus the co-experience of “the real” with the “intermedial”.

We are especially interested in the following topics (but welcome any paper that proposes a relevant approach to either keywords of the conference):

  • “Reality effect”, hybridity and media reflexivity in film, television, and new media.
  • Intermediality and inter-sensuality in film: e.g. the represented and sensed body as a site of intermedial relations, haptic “texturality” and interartiality.
  • Figurations of intermediality as imprints of (and meditations upon) history and time, cultural and personal identity.
  • “Analogue” versus “digital” viewed in terms of the “real” versus the “intermedial”.
  • Painterly stylization and “reality effect” in slow cinema.
  • Inflections of realism and intermediality within the post-communist cinema of Central and Eastern Europe.
  • Magical realism in world cinema.
  • The merging of the “representation” and the “real” within the rhetoric of intermedial cinema (e.g. the tensions underlying “poetic realism”, techniques of figuration and disfiguration, the various forms of media collage or the tableau vivant in cinema).
  • Intermediality theorized or analysed from the perspective of phenomenological or postphenomenological points of view.

Confirmed keynote speaker

  • LÚCIA NAGIB, Professor of Film, Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading, Director of International Engagement, Department of Film, Theatre and Television, editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (2013), Theorizing World Cinema (2012), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009), author of World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011), as well as several seminal articles on Brazilian, German, French, and Japanese cinema.
  • further keynotes to be announced.

Submission of proposals

We invite proposals both for individual papers and pre-constituted panels. Panels may consist of 3 or 4 speakers.

Deadline for the submission of proposals: May 25, 2015.

We will get back to you with our decision by June 1, 2015.

Please fill in one of the SUBMISSION FORMS below:

INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSION

PANEL SUBMISSION

For additional information you can contact the organizers directly at this e-mail address:

2015.real.intermedial@gmail.com

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NASA Releases Timelapse Videos of the Sun

2015 February 20
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by Shared by Steve Rust

REPOSTED from NASA.gov

“February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO, which provides incredibly detailed images of the Earth-facing side of the sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image almost once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

In honor of SDO’s fifth anniversary, NASA has released two videos showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. The first is a time lapse of the past five years. Different colors represent different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light, ultraviolet light, and visible light, which in turn correspond to solar material at different temperatures.  Additionally SDO returns solar magnetic field data that helps scientists study solar activity.

The second video showcases highlights from the last five years. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun’s surface.

The imagery in both videos is an example of the kind of data that SDO provides to scientists. By watching the sun in different wavelengths – and therefore different temperatures – scientists can watch how material courses through the corona, which holds clues to what causes eruptions on the sun, what heats the sun’s atmosphere up to 1,000 times hotter than its surface, and why the sun’s magnetic fields are constantly on the move. SDO also measures fluctuations in the sun’s extreme ultraviolet output, which provides the majority of energy for heating Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“There have now been more than 2,000 scientific papers published based on SDO data,” said Dean Pesnell, project scientist for SDO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “SDO has also led to wonderful international collaborations, with the data being shared and used all over the world.”

Five years into its mission, SDO continues to send back tantalizing imagery to incite scientists’ curiosity. For example, in late 2014, SDO captured imagery of the largest sun spots seen since 1995 as well as a torrent of intense solar flares. Solar flares are bursts of light, energy and X-rays. They can occur by themselves or can be accompanied by what’s called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, in which a giant cloud of solar material erupts off the sun, achieves escape velocity and heads off into space. In this case, the sun produced only flares and no CMEs, which, while not unheard of, is somewhat unusual for flares of that size. Scientists are looking at that data now to see if they can determine what circumstances might have led to flares eruptions alone.“

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CFP: “Split Waters: Examining Conflicts Related to Water and Their Narration”

2015 February 17
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by Shared by Steve Rust

*Split Waters: Examining Conflicts Related to Water and Their Narration*

*Call for Papers*

Conflicts over water may happen between people, social groups, public entities, whether users in the typical sense, or not. If in many cases water conflicts engender violence, even more frequently they impact social and individual life less evidently, and at times they occur in the context of, and to exasperate, ongoing violence that is not necessarily related to water per se. As often as not, apart from availability and allocation issues, water conflicts originate from, or are inflamed by, changes in cultivation patterns or market dependability, migration fluxes, social relations, organization of labor, issues of minority or multiple identities, geo-political factors, and several other seemingly unrelated events. While the contexts where water conflicts occur are extremely varied, the ways in which they are made part of the public domain, and how they are understood by the current scholarship, appear to be overly homogenized.

read more…

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