Category: Conferences

CFP: Contemporary Screen Narratives

Contemporary Screen Narratives: Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts

Conference to be held on 17 May 2012

Hosted by Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham

Keynote speakers: Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell

This one-day conference looks to trace connections between the narratives of contemporary screen media and their contexts of production, distribution and consumption. We refer here to narrative as the presentation and organisation of story via the semiotic phenomena of image, sound and written/spoken word. We anticipate that speakers will explore ways in which stories and their on-screen telling are informed by contemporary industrial and technological conditions. We invite contributions from postgraduate and early-career researchers working across screen-based narrative media, such as film, television, comics, literature, video games and other areas of new media. We are interested to receive all paper proposals pertinent to the conference topic, though we particularly welcome those that engage with the following themes and questions:

Industrial determinants. In what ways are stories and their telling contingent on the production cultures, distribution methods, revenue models and governmental policies that configure a given creative industry?

Digital Technologies. How has the construction and/or reception of narratives been influenced by digital production equipment, distribution tech, online platforms and consumer hardware devices?

Seriality and Transmedia: In what ways do serial narrative forms, whether disseminated within a given medium or across multiple media, reflect industrial and technological contexts?

Audio and Visual Styles: How are the sounds and visions of contemporary screen narratives informed by conditions of production and reception technologies?

Paratextual Surround: In what ways do promotional materials, practitioner discourses, fan cultures and critical/journalistic responses discursively frame screen narratives?

Send abstracts of 250 words to both:

Anthony Smith – aaxas4@nottingham.ac.uk

and

Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur – aaxac2@nottingham.ac.uk

Papers should not exceed twenty minutes in length.

The deadline for proposal submission is Monday 13 February 2012.

Deadline for proposal submission is now: 4 March 2012.

(Original CFP here: http://contemporaryscreennarratives.tumblr.com/)

CFP: Comics and Politics

Comics and Politics

7th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Comicforschung (Society for Comics Studies)

at the Institute for Media Culture Studies, University of Freiburg

September 27-29, 2012

comfor2012.comicgesellschaft.de

We invite abstracts for each of the following three parts of the conference: Talks on the main conference topic, Comics and Politics (1); reports on ongoing research projects for any aspect of comics studies for open workshop sessions (2); as well as posters on any topic concerning comics studies (3).

1. Call for Papers on Comics and Politics

Comics interact with politics and the political in several obvious ways: As a format of artistic expression, as a sometimes popular, alternative or marginalized genre, and not least as an element of new media, comics feature specific political dimensions that are not always sufficiently covered by concepts developed for the description of politics in other art forms. While several studies have dealt with particular instances, the special role of comics as archive, player, playing field, and constituent of political processes has rarely been examined under a common perspective.

The 7th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Comicforschung thus invites contributions from different disciplines and starting points that deal with any of the many constellations of comics and politics. Some of these views might, for instance, connect to recent thoughts on an ‘ethical turn’ in cultural studies, or equally to contemporary questions and theories from pictorial studies.

Contributions might address any of the following three broad subjects, among others:

I. Comics Activism: Criticism and Propaganda

Political elements in comics are most conspicuous where they are dealt with topically and explicitly: In depictions, evaluations, negotiations and interventions of political issues. Such comics come in many different forms, from propaganda with a clear political, religious, or cultural agenda, through satirical, subversive, and socially critical work, up to and including alternative media and grey publications. Along with other fictional or documentary comics on contemporary or historical political issues, they also add to an archive of political topics and discourses. Some prominent examples here might connect to Postcolonial or Gender Studies, which have sometimes been somewhat neglected in existing comics studies.

Contributions to this area might, for instance, deal with contexts of publication, habits of reading, dimensions of social effect, as well as topical content and delivery of political concepts in comics. Some objects for research might include cultural treatments of political processes (such as comics ‘about’ the Third Reich, the Cold War, 9/11, etc.); as well as comics that are actively engaged in political debate (such as comics ‘in favour of’ Christian fundamentalism, alternative energy sources, equal rights movements, etc.); but also and not least comics that are foremost conceived and produced as parts of official or alternative political discourses (such as comics ‘in’ politics: the report of the 9/11-commission, military informational and instructional material, etc.).

II. Comics under Control: Censorship and Comic Codes

From a different angle, comics appear as objects of political processes: Where they have been regarded dominantly as children’s and youth literature, they have variously come under the gaze of different concepts of education and socialization, and have been discussed as paradigmatic ‘new media’ – both in apocalyptic warnings of destructive media or as positive vehicles of integration. In other contexts, comics have been described as subversive and alternative forms of communication: Underground Comix and other formats often deliberately play with a performative self-marginalization, employing ostentative obscenity, phantasmagorical depictions of violence, pornography and other echoes of content excluded in controlled media.

Contributions to this area might, for instance, deal with explicit calls for censorship (such as those connected to Wertham’s Seduction of the Inncocent or the Comics Code Authority) through circumstantial pressure on forms and contents (such as modified imagery in recent Barks- and Hergé-publications) up to texts that offer self-reflective commentary on their own limits (perhaps most prominently in Maus’ differentiated self-commentary on the limits and discomforts of its animal allegories). In all of these, political control of media can also be read as a political view of media: In these discourses, comics are first described as harmful, deviant, dangerous, or as productive, useful, educational, in order to justify calls for their restriction or propagation. Can Wertham’s condemnation of comics also count as one of the first detailed, if controversial, analyses of comic books and panel structures?

III. Comics as a Political Art Form: Aesthetics and Ideology

Beyond the explicit treatment of the political in comics, and the explicit treatment of comics in political discourse, many further questions concern the political dimension of specific aesthetics, imageries, and media dispositives in comics. Connecting to models of cultural criticism (from Benjamin and Adorno through to Didi-Huberman, Rancière, or Badiou, or particular theories of pictorial ideology by the likes of Oudart or Heath, and many more), contributions to this area might deal, for instance, with basic constituents of comics and their mimetic conventions, structural effects, processes of narrativization and fictionalization, body imaginations and genre traditions. The very division of the sensual realm into writing and image can no less avoid political relevance than the many issues surrounding a just and justifiable depiction of realities and intentions.

This opens up questions about the formal semantics of the art form, some of which are again dealt with explicitly in comics. Are comics systematically, or are particular comics especially, politically resistant, by the very means of their artistic practice? Or does their connection to mass production and mass media ground them in politically affirmative mainstream cultures? Which concepts might be employed to describe such a basic political dimension of comic book aesthetics?

2. Call for Papers for the Open Workshop

Beyond the discussion of each year’s special topic, the German Society for Comics Studies aims to further co-operation and dialogue in all areas of comics research. The 7th Annual Conference will therefore re-introduce an open workshop format that allows researchers to present and gather feedback on on-going projects within comics studies in all stages of development, and without any thematic restrictions – not limited to comics and politics. The invitation stands for colleagues in all phases of academic careers to discuss any projects on which they are currently working, be it as BA, MA or PhD candidates, established institutional researchers, or free scholars.

3. Call for Papers for the Poster Section

The third part of the conference will, for the first time, present a poster section. Ongoing as well as concluded research projects on all topics – not limited to comics and politics – can be presented on posters. Posters will be on exhibition for the whole time of the conference, and a special poster session will give the authors an opportunity to explain and discuss their work in detail.

We invite short abstracts (1) for 30-minute talks on any topic concerning comics and politics, or (2) for 20-minute presentations in the Open Workshop, or (3) for contributions to the Poster Section.

Please clearly mark your abstract as (1), (2) or (3), and include a short biography and bibliography. Abstracts are welcome by email, as pdf or rtf files. Deadline: February 1, 2012.

For further information, please see comfor2012.comicgesellschaft.de .

Contact:

Dr. Stephan Packard
Juniorprofessor für Medienkulturwissenschaft
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Werthmannstraße 16 79098 Freiburg
Tel. +49-761-203-97842
stephan.packard@medienkultur.uni-freiburg.de

Thank You

THANK YOU

This is just a quick thank you note to everyone involved with last week’s two overlapping events: the theme week on “Popular Seriality” at In Media Res, and the conference we hosted on “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle.”

First, thanks to my co-curators at In Media Res: Frank Kelleter, Ruth Mayer, Jason Mittell, Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, and Daniel Stein. Because of them and the external commenters, the theme week — in addition to being a lot of fun —  provided lots of food for thought and continuing conversations. Thanks also to Karen Petruska from In Media Res for guiding us through the process of setting up the theme week. And while the theme week is officially over, everything will remain online (here) and open for further comments and discussions. So if you’ve got something to say about the topic of popular seriality, it’s not too late!

Thanks as well to everyone who made the conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated” such a success: our keynote speakers Jason Mittell (who, in case you missed it, has posted his talk here) and Lynn Spigel; fellow speakers Regina Schober, Bettina Soller, Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, Florian Groß, and Christina Meyer; my co-organizers Ruth Mayer, Vanessa Künnemann, and Florian Groß; and our great assistants Felix Brinker, Svenja Fehlhaber, and Hannah Pardey! Thanks also to our sponsors: the US Embassy in Berlin, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikaforschung, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Campus Cultur, and the Freundeskreis der Leibniz Universität Hannover. Thanks, finally, to everyone who attended, asked stimulating questions, and helped generate interesting discussions!

Cultural Distinctions Remediated

Our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” begins today, December 15, 2011. Jason Mittell will start things off this evening (6:00 pm in the Niedersachsensaal at Königsworther Platz 1) with a talk on “The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television” (see also here for a preview). Tomorrow, there will be six talks divided into two panels (see here for the full program, with links to all individual abstracts). And Lynn Spigel will wrap things up on Saturday morning with her talk on “Designer TV: Television and the Taste for Modernism in Mid-Century America”.

Lost in Media: Conference in Weimar

On November 25-26, 2011, the Bauhaus University Weimar will be hosting the conference “Lost in Media,” where the focus will be on the television series Lost as a form of reflection and projection of media change. Among the speakers, two members of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Practice” will be giving talks at the conference:

Jason Mittell, Fellow of the Research Unit, will be giving a keynote address entitled “Getting Lost in Transmedia: The Perils and Possibilities of Mapping an Island Across Media,” and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann will be speaking on “Watching Lost and Exploring Outbidding (Überbietung) as a Serial Form.”

For further information and the full conference program click here. Here is the conference description:

Kaum eine Fernsehserie lässt sich aus so vielfältigen Perspektiven betrachten wie LOST. Die Serie bringt eine weitläufige wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung hervor, die um die Komplexität ihrer narrativen und zeitlichen Struktur kreist oder sich mit der Tatsache beschäftigt, dass kaum eine Serie bisher so massiv ihre Expansion in andere Medien vorangetrieben und so konsequent Genre-Grenzen unterlaufen hat. Zudem bildet sich um LOST eine sehr aktive Fangemeinde, die nicht nur auf die quasi-religiösen, quasi-philosophischen Eschatologien der Serie reagiert, sondern Lost auf einer Vielfalt neuer digitaler Medienplattformen rezipiert und dort mit den Themenkomplexen der Serie interagiert.

Gerade wegen ihrer thematischen und ästhetischen Reichhaltigkeit wird die Tagung eine ganz spezifische Interessenlage an die Serie herantragen. Es soll darum gehen, LOST als eine Agentur der Reflexion und der Projektion des (medialen) Wandels zu untersuchen. Dabei nimmt LOST allerdings auf faszinierende Weise eine widersprüchliche und ambivalente Rolle in Bezug auf Mediatisierung und medialen Wandel ein, die ein zentrales Motiv einer wissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung und der besonderen Reflexionsleistung der Serie darstellen: Während auf vielfältige Weise Effekte des medialen Wandels mit der Serie verknüpft sind – z. B. transmediales Erzählen, neue televisuelle Rezeptionsformen, TV III-Age  – und die Serie in der Narration und Ästhetik Effekte des vernetzten, nicht-linearen Erzählens und der Genreüberschreitung realisiert, verweist die Serie selbst jedoch nicht unmittelbar auf die Mediatisierung, die sie symbolisiert und auch verursacht.

Diese konkrete Fragestellung ist eingebettet in eine generelle Vermutung zum Verhältnis des Fernsehens und des (medialen) Wandels, wonach das Medium eine dreifache Funktion im Geschehen des Medienwandels seit 1950 und insbesondere in der aktuellen Gegenwart erfüllt. Es beobachtet – erstens – den Wandel und macht ihn so auf strukturierte Weise sichtbar. Diese Beobachtungen stellt es dann dem Sinnhaushalt, dem Selbstbeschreibungs- und Selbstverfertigungszyklus der Gesellschaft zur Verfügung. In dem Umfang, in dem es dabei – zweitens – insbesondere den Medien eine z.B. technologische, institutionelle oder epistemische Mitwirkung oder gar Urheberschaft am beobachteten Wandel beimisst, ist es selbst Agent des Wandels und beobachtet sich selbst auf diese Funktion hin. Schließlich ist es – drittens – dem beobachteten Wandel bzw. seinen Folgen wiederum seinerseits ausgesetzt und muss die Formen und Formate seiner Beobachtungen ständig den Wirkungen des beobachteten Wandels aussetzen, muss den Wandel an sich selbst mitvollziehen. Insbesondere der Fernsehserie, auf Grund ihrer Fiktionskraft und spezifischen Temporalität, kommt dabei, so die These, eine herausgehobene Position zu.

Am Beispiel von LOST soll dieser These nachgegangen werden. Angesprochen ist dabei vor allem der mediale Grenzgang der Serie selbst, deren Ausweitung in andere Medien nichts weniger aufwirft als die Frage nach dem Status ihres Herkunftsmediums Fernsehen innerhalb der rezenten multiplen Medienlandschaft, aber auch etwa ihre komplexe Temporalität, welche die Theoretisierung televisiver Zeitlichkeit und auch Historizität vor neue Herausforderungen stellt.

Kontakt: Dipl.-Kulturwiss. (Medien) Daniela Wentz, daniela.wentz [at] uni-weimar.de

Weitere Informationen zum Projekt:

http://www.mediatisiertewelten.de/projekte/die-fernsehserie-als-reflexion-und-projektion-des-wandels/

Conference Poster, Program, and Paraphernalia

Here is the final poster (above) that Florian Groß and I put together for our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle.” As mentioned before, artist James Hance graciously allowed us to use his “Dark Starry Knight” for our conference materials. For this we are very grateful. (And if you like his artwork, please consider making a donation to the fund that James has set up to help pay the medical bills for his daughter Maddy.)

Here (below) is the final program as it will be printed (as a 6-sided folded flyer):

 And here’s the inside view:

Click to enlarge. (And see here for links to abstracts for all the presentations.) Finally, in case you missed it, here’s the unofficial promo video for the conference:

Conference Program: “Cultural Distinctions Remediated”

“Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle”

Leibniz Universität Hannover, American Studies, 15-17 December 2011

Like any discursive phenomenon, categories of cultural distinction (such as “high” art, “low” culture, or the less well-researched area of the “middlebrow”) require the substrate of some medium or medial field—be it language, mass media, or new media—in order to articulate the differences upon which they turn. Cultural clout or capital, for example, is accumulated, and the conditions of such accumulation are defined and regulated, in media ranging from the popular press to specialized academic and legal treatises. At the same time, the categories of cultural distinction not only take shape within media but apply as well to concrete media and media products. Individual novels, films, and music productions are classed according to oppositions such as high vs. low, art vs. kitsch, quality vs. trash, mainstream vs. alternative, while at times whole media are more generally relegated to a lowly status (such as was the case with “primitive” or pre-classical cinema or with the videogame in the eyes of many today) or, on the other hand, accorded a higher one (e.g. the “graphic novel” vis-à-vis the pulpy comics from which it evolved). Clearly, these examples attest to the fact that cultural distinctions are negotiable and historically indexed, but more importantly, they point to the role of media transformations in the historical revision and renegotiation of distinction categories. Notions of film-as-art, for example, first emerge (in the film-aesthetic writings of Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg) in the 1910s, amidst the sweeping and uncertain changes of the “transitional era” between early and classical cinema, and the aesthetic revalorization of the popular medium finds its most pronounced expression (with the likes of Rudolf Arnheim) in the wake of the film-technological transition from silent to sound cinema. Similarly, the rise of so-called “Quality TV” takes place at a highly overdetermined moment of media change, one marked by digitalization, convergence trajectories, the rise of alternative delivery media, and a general reorganization of the televisual landscape. The conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” aims to shed light on such processes of transformation, in which the medial “double articulation” of distinction categories—i.e. the fact that they are both articulated in media and apply to media—is most crucially at stake, by looking critically at what happens when existing media and attendant categories are “remediated” by newer ones: How are categories of cultural distinction transformed, or how do they relate to a transformed media landscape? These questions will be pursued across a wide range of media and from comparative (both cross-medial and historical) perspectives.

Program (links lead to abstracts):

Thursday, 15 December 2011, 6:00 pm (Niedersachsensaal)

Welcome: Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)

Keynote I

Jason Mittell (American Studies, Film & Media Culture, Middlebury): “The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television”

Moderation: Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)

Friday, 16 December 2011

Panel I, 10:00 am – 12:30 pm (Room 103)

Regina Schober (American Studies, Mannheim): “Imagining the World Wide Web: Cultural Constructions of Virtual Space across Media”

Bettina Soller (American Studies, Göttingen): “Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction: Collaborative Writing and the Solitary Genius”

Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (Media Studies, Göttingen): “Desperately Seeking the Mainstream: Independent Games and the Cultural Logic of Distinction”

Moderation: Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover)

Panel II, 14.30-17.00 (Room 103)

Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover): “‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?”

Christina Meyer (American Studies, Osnabrück): “Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics: Reading Nell Brinkley’s Newspaper Romance Serials”

Shane Denson (American Studies, Hannover): “Lady Gaga’s Mainstream Queer: A Serial Media Remix”

Moderation: Vanessa Künnemann (American Studies, Hannover)

Saturday, 17 December 2011, 10.00-12.00 (Raum 103)

Keynote II

Lynn Spigel (Screen Cultures/Communication, Northwestern University): “Designer TV: Television and the Taste for Modernism in Mid-Century America”

Moderation: Shane Denson (American Studies, Hannover)

Conclusion

Jason Mittell, “The Complexity of Quality”

Abstract for Jason Mittel’s keynote at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television

Jason Mittell (American Studies, Film & Media Culture, Middlebury)

In much popular and scholarly discourse about television, there is a slippage between the terms “quality television” and “narrative complexity.” The former is a well-worn signifier demarcating both an aesthetic judgment, and an assumed set of textual norms and mode of address—in the vein of Bourdieu, it is a classification that classifies the classifier. Narrative complexity, as I and other scholars have been exploring, is a textual mode that highlights particular storytelling structures, industrial formations, and strategies of consumption, but it need not inherently point to an evaluative hierarchy. In this talk, I will tease out the differences and overlaps between these two cultural categories, arguing that by dispensing with the rhetoric of quality television, we can use narrative complexity as one (of many) measures of aesthetic evaluation that might present a more nuanced way of discussing televisual taste and value.

Regina Schober, “Imagining the World Wide Web”

Abstract for Regina Schober’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Imagining the World Wide Web: Cultural Constructions of Virtual Space across Media

Regina Schober (American Studies, Mannheim)

From the early days of the internet, there have been attempts to understand and represent this newly emerging medial realm within other media, from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) to Martin Dodge’s and Rob Kitchin’s Atlas of Cyberspace (2001) to David Fincher’s recent film The Social Network (2010). What all these examples have in common is that they represent the new digital media within another, more traditional medium. In my paper I will examine a variety of such representations of the internet and discuss the aesthetic and cultural processes involved in such inverted “remediations” (Bolter & Grusin). With particular focus on the World Wide Web and its inherently multimodal nature, I will explore how this essentially hybrid configuration characterized by a complex and interactive set of highly heterogeneous data content in dynamic flow has been defined, conceptualized, and evaluated in the process of intermedial transformation.  How can media products which take up such aesthetic features and transform them within their own medial framework be critically assessed, accounted for, and categorized? In reference to some exemplary medial conceptualizations of the internet, I will discuss the question of whether certain media or medial configurations are more pertinent for such adaptations than others and if there are specific elements that can be identified in these transformation processes. In a second step, I will reflect on the cultural implications at work in such ‘translations’ of the digital. Which image of the internet as ‘new territory’ is portrayed in these cultural representations and how do these attitudes, implications, and ideologies expressed in cultural constructions of the World Wide Web relate to prevalent technological and cultural discourses of the 21st century?

Bettina Soller, “Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction”

Abstract for Bettina Soller’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction: Collaborative Writing and the Solitary Genius

Bettina Soller (American Studies, Göttingen)

When literary critics turned to questions of authorship and hypertext, they rapidly created a canon of texts worthy of discussion. The predominant concept of the singular author as the sole originator of ideas and the authority over text has strongly been shaped by literary studies and has also been applied to new media. Popular forms of collaborative writing that exemplify the more radical changes in questions of authorship in digital projects like Wikipedia or fan fiction writing are still marginalized in literary theory. It seems that, like in print media, the higher the values that are associated with a text or product, the less collaborative authorship is seen as a legitimate category. Especially advocates of a strong canon have used different forms of authorship as categories for cultural distinction. While the ‘solitary genius’ has been hailed as the producer of ‘high’ art or academic achievements, collaborative authorship has been devalued, not only by academia, but also by the public imagination. Therefore, traces of collaboration have been erased or veiled from literary texts as well as other media texts such as films or TV series that are produced through collaborations of a team of writers and producers, or with the help of spouses, friends, and editors. The performance of authorship by the producers of texts as well as the construction of authorship by texts’ recipients generally conforms to the idea of a singular author, while many actual practices include collaborations. Especially the forms of digital writing that make public the processes of collaboration that are involved in other media as well, illustrate how the development of non-evaluative concepts of collaborative authorship will enrich theoretical discourse.