Call for Papers

CFP: Popular Culture and Politics: Perspectives from Canada

Eds. Tim Nieguth (Laurentian University) and Shauna Wilton (University
of Alberta)

We invite scholarly contributions for an edited volume on the
relationship between popular culture and politics. Political culture and
political traditions have long occupied a central place in Canadian
political science. Not surprisingly, their study has been characterized
by theoretical, conceptual and methodological diversity. Canadian
inquiries into the relationship between culture and politics have run
the gamut from civic culture to fragment thesis and formative events
approaches. They have covered an equally varied field of subject
matters, ranging from the emergence of post-materialism and a decline of
deference to the nature of Canada’s founding traditions.

Despite this considerable (and fruitful) diversity, Canadian studies of
culture and politics have tended to focus on explicitly political ideas,
beliefs and attitudes, their transmission, and their transformation.
Canadian political scientists have paid relatively little attention to
popular culture and its interconnections with the political. While the
political implications of popular culture have not escaped academic
analysis, they have typically been scrutinized through the lenses of
media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

The proposed volume is based on the notion that popular culture matters
to understanding politics. Popular culture matters politically, for
instance, because it can transport particular notions of politics,
society, and the nature of power and identity. In consequence, popular
culture can serve as a vehicle for the reinforcement of or resistance to
dominant political values and ideologies. Popular culture can also serve
as a site for engagement with particular values, attitudes or beliefs –
an engagement that forms part and parcel of individual and collective
identity formation processes.

We welcome submissions of original, previously unpublished work on any
aspect of popular culture and politics, including (but not limited to)
the following broad themes:

- Political sociology
- Collective identities
- Political economy
- Geopolitics

Please submit paper proposals of about 500 words to
tnieguth@laurentian.ca by way of Microsoft Word attachments. Proposals
should clearly explain the paper’s relevance to a Canadian audience.
Please include a short biographical statement and full contact
information with your submission.

Submission deadline: June 15, 2009.

For further information, please feel free to contact the editors at:

Tim Nieguth
Department of Political Science
Laurentian University
935 Ramsey Lake Road
Sudbury, ON, P3E 2C6
Tel.: (705) 675-1151, ext: 4329
Email: tnieguth@laurentian.ca
– 

CFP: Islam and gender in Asia and the diaspora

This Special Issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies (JIWS) solicits articles on Islam and Gender with a focus on Asia. Submissions will address women’s lives, gender dynamics and Muslim women’s movements, including both formal movements and subtle, informal,everyday acts of resistance. The special issue will include a broad range of discussions on how Muslim women strategize and negotiate their lives and/or movements to accommodate and/or resist Islamic dominance in terms of the nation state, constitutions and dominant cultural norms. We are seeking articles that tackle the above stated issues, specifically covering the regions of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, S.E. Asia and any Muslim demographic from the pertinent region as well as the diaspora, including refugee populations.

Scholars and activists are invited to submit unpublished manuscripts that are currently not under review. Please consult the JIWS web site (www.bridgew.edu/jiws/) for submission guidelines including length, format and bibilographical/referencing styles. Forward all submissions via email attachment to the special issue editors, Huma Ahmed-Ghosh at (ghosh[at]mail.sdsu.edu) or Rahat Imran at (rai[at]sfu.ca) by April 1, 2009.

CFP: Emergent cinemas and the new cinematic strategies and forms

This is a call for papers to be presented at the annual Film Studies Association of Canada / Association Canadienne d’Études Cinématographiques (FSAC/ACEC) conference to be held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, May 29-31, 2009. Details about this conference can be accessed at <http://www.filmstudies.ca/>.

This panel proposes to analyze the new strategies of film production and cinematic forms of emergent cinemas – non-western (Asian) and peripheral economies (African, Latin American) – have been adopting and changing the conception of contemporary world cinema. In the last few decades, a rebirth and flourishing of cinema has been taking place in parts of East Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Cinemas from all over the world (Iranian, Mexican, Chinese, Argentinean) have experienced increasing popularization and internationalization of film production with a combination of national and international funds. How can independent and local films survive in an international globalized production?

Filmmakers have been shaping a global grammar of cinematic storytelling and have developed screenplays on an international basis to respond to international grants and audiences especially those from the film festivals. Independent scriptwriters and directors are often granted funding and training on the basis of their scripts from organizations, such as the Sundance Film Institute, Ibermedia and other similar laboratories in Europe. The financial capabilities of digital film have provided a rebirth to Third World cinematography. The DV (digital video) revolution has been a prerequisite for emerging independent filmmakers.

Globalized filmmaking production raises questions such as auteurism, localness, cross-cultural influences, and national cinema. Cross-cultural productions appeal in terms of socio-political themes. From a Western perspective third cinema tends to be more personal, more experimental, and more theoretical. What kind of topics are being dealt in this globalized production, are they embodying global as opposed to local? Should we reevaluate the idea of peripheral cinema?

The papers could be focused on, but not limited to, topics such as:

-       Internationalization of screenwriting

-       Digital video and Intermediality in contemporary “third” cinema

-       Independent film in an international production

-       Authorship and localness in cross-cultural production

-       Third World cinema in a globalized age

-       Post-colonial contexts and transcultural perspectives

-       Cultural borders of nation-states and national cinemas

Please send presentation proposals of 250-300 words as document Word

attachments to Hudson Moura (hudson_moura[at]sfu.ca). Deadline:

January 5, 2009.

Call For Papers: Screen culture: intermediality and interculturality

The 2nd conference—Intermediality and Interculturality—will be held at the School for the Contemporary Arts-SFU on March 12, 2009. This year the focus will be on screen culture.

Screen culture has become an integral part of modern society. New technologies, digital screens and computer networks, comprise important tools of communication, art and culture experience. We are living in a world saturated by mass media, linked by images and texts through screens. Screen culture transforms cultural habits and values and also influences our ways of telling stories and creating cultural identity. How does screen culture affect societies around the world in the age of globalization?

This conference will address screen culture through intermediality practices and interculturality experiences.

The objective of intermediality is to question existing media forms by the encounter of various media (radio, TV, film, and also theatre, literature, painting, music, etc.) within a single media, creating a third discourse. In this way, intermediality shows a media crisis that one single media is no longer able to express. Intermediality evokes tensional differences between media (a medium is always in relation to another medium), modes (text, image and sound) and frames (interactions of different screens). Intermediality erases and fragments the traditional subjectivity of modernity by which one could represent the world.

At the same time, interculturality, as an experience of living between two or more cultures, conceives new forms of knowledge and thinking. More and more artists and filmmakers envision their works in an in-between space of perception and experience.

Technological devices and personal media players (ipods, cell phones, etc.) have proliferated screens in public and private spaces. The re-representation of one medium by another (videogame, emulations, youtube, etc.) has constituted the new urban landscape. Screens are also creating a new and fast mode of cultural consumerism by “bites,” the so-called snack culture.

How do digital media practice (the internet, media installation and interactive performances, interactive broadcast, cd-rom, expanded cinema) as well as conventional media (film, TV, video, photo) and art forms (theatre, literature) integrate into screen culture in contemporary global society? How do societies accept and integrate this new reality of screen culture into their political, cultural, art and media practices?

We hope that a wide range of scholars and artists will address this issue from varied perspectives and disciplines. For instance, Laura U. Marks and Patricia Gruben from the School for the Contemporary Arts, Jim Bizzocchi from 
School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Dara Culhane from Sociology and Anthropology Department, Helen Hok-Sze Leung from Department of Women’s Studies, Stuart Poyntz from School of Communication, Paul St Pierre and Peter Dickinson from Department of English, SFU, as well as Charles Menzies from the Anthropology Department, UBC, have confirmed their participation.

We welcome papers from scholars from media and cultural studies, new media, visual art, cinema, philosophy, sociology and literature, as well as artworks from filmmakers, videomakers and photographers in order for them to share their experiences.

This conference invites proposals for presentation dealing with some aspect of screen culture. The papers could be focused on, but not limited to, topics such as:

1.     The emergence of the screen society

2.     Media literacy

3.     Internet community networks

4.     Embodiment of the screen

5.     Reality vs. virtuality

6.     Intertextuality and screens

7.     Diasporic virtual communities

8.     Representation of nation and cultural borders

9.     Snack culture

10.  Art and globalization

 

Please send presentation proposals of 250-300 words as document Word attachments to Hudson Moura (hudson_moura[at]sfu.ca). Deadline: February 20th, 2009.

 

Hudson Moura, PhD

Sessional Lecturer

School for the Contemporary Arts

Simon Fraser University

Vancouver, BC, Canada