Due 6/15 | Moving/Pictures
Program in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh
Keynote Speaker: Haidee Wasson of Concordia University
Date: September 23-24
The University of Pittsburgh Film and Media Studies Program is pleased to announce “Moving/Pictures,” its eleventh Annual Graduate Student Conference.
Conventional historiographical and theoretical assumptions in film history and media archaeology have often belied the stability of their apparatuses, objects, and spaces of reception. Yet even in the “classical” period, scholars have unearthed a fluid moving image ecology that has been easy for us to overlook in favor of a supposedly canonical and rigid exhibition/apparatus structure. Along with Charles Acland, Ariel Rogers, Alison Griffiths, and others, Haidee Wasson has worked in the past decade to turn the field’s attention to film and media’s longstanding formal, cultural, and technological history in classrooms, museums, prisons, planetariums, shopping centers, airplanes, trains, and elsewhere. This turn has encouraged us to consider the cinema theater as but one site in a panoply of historically contingent spaces of media encounter.
Rather than treating the proliferation of moving image media in diffuse and dispersed spaces as a contemporary phenomenon abetted by the digital, Moving/Pictures encounters the cinematic as a media ontology permanent only in its flux. Seeking scholarship on exhibition practices, portability, technology, reception, transportation, architecture, and the general relationship of media to its locations and spaces, the conference calls on participants who take seriously the transience of film and media. The transience of media across borders takes on new forms and shapes, forcing us to contend with even more global multiplicities of moving image contexts. In the dialectic between the stability of the “picture” and the unfixedness of “moving,” this conference seeks a productive scholarly tension.
- Exhibition Histories
- Theories and Spaces of Reception
- “Useful Cinema”
- Nontheatrical Cinema
- Television and New Media outside the home
- Stereoscopy and the Sensorium
- Urban/Rural Geography
- Distribution Networks
- Film Promotion/Exhibitional Decoration
- Travelling Cinemas
- Cinema and the Body
- Haptics and Movement
- Museums, Film and Musealization
- Avant Garde and Video Art Practices and Spaces
- Borders and Transience
- International Media Flows
- Global Exhibition Networks
- The Museum as a Cinematic Space
- Film Curatorship
- Portable film and media technologies
- Paratexts and Paratextual Film Cultures
- Guerilla and Underground Cinema
Interested graduate students should submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) – along with biographies (maximum 100 words), institutional/departmental affiliations, and current email – to pittfilmgradconference@gmail.com by June 15th, 2022. For more information, please contact the Pitt Film and Media Studies Graduate Student organization at the above email.
Accessibility arrangements: The Conference has traditionally been an in-person event, giving participants the opportunity to connect with their peers. However, academic travel presented a challenge to graduate students of all abilities well before the COVID-19 related restrictions emerged. Considering the steady improvement of COVID-conditions in the USA, we are planning the conference as an in-person event with some papers delivered through synchronous Zoom presentations. Successful applicants will be encouraged to visit the University of Pittsburgh and give their papers in-person, but we hope to accommodate a number of remote speakers through this format.
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