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The preliminary schedule for the Nonhuman Turn conference, where I’ll be presenting a paper on Lady Gaga, is now online, as I just learned from Adrian Ivakhiv (who has also just posted the abstract for his talk, “Process-Relational Theory and the Eco-Ontological Turn: Clearing the Ground between Whitehead, Deleuze, and Harman.”) For the sake of convenience, I have taken the liberty of embedding the schedule here.
The program for the conference “Networks in American Culture / America as Network,” where I’ll be talking about Serial Figures as Mediators of Change, is now online: here. And here is the description of the symposium, which looks like it will be a great event:
Networks in American Culture / America as Network
March 16-17, 2012, University of Mannheim
Keynote Speakers
Jay D. Bolter (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Brown University)
Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago)
In recent decades “network” and “networking” have emerged not only as popular buzzwords but also as key concepts in a variety of academic disciplines. The model of the network is used to describe a broad range of social, economic, media technological, and biological phenomena including social interactions, the global flows of goods and capital, the structure of the internet and social media platforms, as well as the neural organization of our brains. The concept of the network typically serves to analyze processes of multilateral interconnection and the complex systems of order they give rise to. While the study of networks has proliferated in the information, social, and natural sciences, literary and cultural scholars to date have been hesitant to develop a critical network theory.
This conference brings together German and U.S. American scholars to explore the contributions that network analysis can make to the field of American Studies. Forging connections between new media, literary, cultural, and science studies, the papers probe the theoretical and political implications that networks and networking possess as metaphor, interdisciplinary paradigm, aesthetic strategy, and communicative practice.
Organizers:
Prof. Dr. Ulfried Reichardt
PD Dr. Heike Schäfer
Dr. Regina Schober
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/)
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
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!
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”.
Television scholar Jason Mittell, who is currently spending a year in Göttingen as a fellow in the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Practice,” will–as readers of this blog will already know–be giving one of two keynote lectures at our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated,” December 15-17, 2011 (our other keynote speaker is Lynn Spigel).
Now, over at his blog Just TV, Jason has a new post on Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine’s new book Legitimating Television: Media Convergence & Cultural Status. And included in this “unofficial review” (as he puts it) of Newman and Levine’s book is also what would appear to be an (unofficial?) preview of Jason’s talk in Hannover. I recommend reading the review in full, but I wanted to highlight those points that give us an idea of what kind of ground we can expect Jason to be covering in his keynote, “The Complexity of Quality.”
Jason writes, “this response [to Newman and Levine’s book] will be part of a larger argument I’ll be making in a presentation next month at the conference Cultural Distinctions Remediated at University of Hannover, so I will point toward larger arguments still to come, and welcome feedback to help me craft that talk.”
So what can we look forward to in Mittell’s keynote? Jason identifies what he takes to be a central problem in Legitimating Television: namely, a “false dichotomy” that he sees Newman and Levine putting forward in their book. According to Mittell:
“The book links the discourses of legitimation to structures of gender and class, highlighting how television has traditionally been feminized and stigmatized as lowbrow, arguing that recent legitimation practices work to masculinize and “class up” television. While I think this is correct, I do not see it as a self-evident problem to be avoided at all costs like Newman & Levine seem to, as suggested by the book’s final words: “We love television. But legitimizing that love at such a cost? Paying for the legitimation of the medium through a perpetuation of hierarchies of taste and cultural value and inequalities of class and gender? No” (171). Implied in this conclusion and their analysis throughout is a choice: we (as scholars, critics and viewers) can either embrace legitimation and its concomitant reinforcement of cultural hierarchies, or we can reject it, with the latter framed as the more politically progressive choice.”
Later, and here’s where we get an indication of – some very interesting – things to come at his talk in December, Jason writes:
“What I wanted from the book that I did not get was a third way to discuss television’s cultural legitimation, moving beyond either accepting legitimation discourses of quality television and progress, or rejecting them as illegitimate or ungrounded. (In my talk at Hannover, I hope to offer such a third approach, specifically concerning cultural evaluation.)”
I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that these are exciting prospects; I very much look forward to hearing Jason’s argument and his vision of/for this “third way.”
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:
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:
“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
Moderation: Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)
Friday, 16 December 2011
Panel I, 10:00 am – 12:30 pm (Room 103)
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?”
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
Moderation: Shane Denson (American Studies, Hannover)
Conclusion