CALL FOR PAPERS
Cinema Studies Student Conference
“After After”, February 24th-25th, 2023
How do we build after our foundations have been shaken? How do we create images after the afterimage? When four graduate students came together to plan a conference, we realized that we shared a methodological and utopian vision for our field. We have been trained to dismantle images, methods, and structures, but what we long for is to create, sketch, build, make, affirm and fabulate. We cherish the tactics of critique and deconstruction that came after the foundations, but we now find ourselves reaching for different tools, ones that can help us draw a new blueprint. With “After After,” we wish to create a venue for scholars who are also interested in generative, affirmative, and speculative methodologies for the study of cinema and media.
How do filmmakers invent aesthetic universes? How do activists use images to affirm struggles and communities? How do digital media practitioners build interactive worlds? How do film historians preserve the present and create futures with the knowledge stored in our archives? How do you lovingly attend to your object while not losing critical sight? How do you manifest negative concepts and utopias that don’t exist yet? How do you create?
The Cinema Studies Student Conference at New York University invites graduate students to create the “After After” with us in-person on February 24th and 25th, 2023. We are seeking submissions that engage with media in a generative way, intersectionally informed by Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, AAPI studies, Latinx Studies, and other academic fields. Besides paper submissions, we welcome archival projects, as well as theory-driven film, art, new media, and performance works. Topics may include but are not limited to those listed below.
– Loving your object
– Research-creation/Theory-practice
– Remixing/Remediation
– Utopias/Heterotopias
– World-building
– Speculation/fabulation/imagination
– Histories and futures of activist media
– Media scholarship after socialism
– After after the canon
– Working through trauma
– Creative labor and laboring to create
– Reparative readings
– Generative formal analyses
– After the act of archiving and preservation
Please submit an abstract (250-300 words) and a short bio (~100 words) to NYUafterafterConference@gmail.com no later than December 31, 2022. If you are submitting a film, art, or performance work, please include documentation (stills, video, etc.) in addition to the abstract. Links are preferred over files.
Participants will be notified in January. We look forward to reading your proposals!