CFP - Fembot Unconference: Multiplying Standpoints and Participatory Feminism

July 18-19, 2013

White Stag, Portland, Oregon

The Fembot Collective, and its peer-reviewed journal Ada, value and feature intersectionality in terms of content, membership, editorial practices, and organizational structure. This unconference addresses issues related to our networks and their geographical and institutional limitations at a critical juncture in Fembot’s history. In order to ensure that our politics are mirrored in our practices, we have invited five consultants (see below) with demonstrated expertise in participatory media theory and production to provide guidance in thinking about these issues.

Day one will initiate a series of discussions organized around questions of accessibility, participation, strategies of inclusion, editorial bias, and the crafting of Ada Issue Four which will address these issues in journal form. Day two will be dedicated to a hack-a-thon -- a full-day session that will convene a group of technologically proficient programmers and designers to collaborate on building a digital tool that emerges from the previous day’s conversations. The hack-a-thon in particular will allow us to build beyond the humanities and social sciences to feminists working in computer science and high-tech industries.

This event is free and open to the general public.

 Consultants

 Brittney Cooper (Rutgers)

 Michelle Habell-Pallán (U of Washington)

 Margaret Rhee (UC Berkeley)

 Kristen Warner (U of Alabama)

 To find out more or register to attend, please email Bryce at bpeake@uoregon.edu.

Sponsored by: The Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon in Portland, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Journalism and Communication, and UO Libraries

U.S. Department Of Education Q&A Webinar

Q & A webinar announced from the International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office at the U.S. Department of Education!
 
The Fiscal Year 2013 competition for the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Program was announced in the Federal Register on May 2, 2013. The due date for submitting applications will be June 3, 2013. The DDRA Program highlights are as follows:        

• Institutions apply for grants to provide fellowships for doctoral students. 
• Doctoral students who receive fellowships conduct research in other countries, in modern foreign languages and area studies, for periods of 6 to twelve months.  
• Institutions are not required to match or cost share. 

 An additional information webinar has been scheduled for the Fiscal year 2013 DDRA competition. This will be a Question and Answer session on:

• Tuesday, May 28 2pm EST 

To register for this webinar, and for additional information on how to apply to the program, please go to http://www2.ed.gov/programs/iegpsddrap/applicant.html
For more information, please click HERE.

CFP-Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality

Deadline: May 30th, 2013
Media Fields Journal
University of California, Santa Barbara

This issue of Media Fields investigates the connections between media, space, gender, and sexuality, seeking conversations that center on these interrelations and negotiations. We invite papers that raise questions of how media spaces construct gender, and how gender, in turn, constructs media spaces; how spaces condition and are conditioned by gender performances and sexual practices; and how gender legibility limits (or allows) access to various media spaces.

Film and media scholarship historically came of age through its study of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and media. Much has been written about the status of women as objects of the cinematic gaze, as well as about the status of female and queer-identified subjects as media producers. Yet, in more recent times, issues of gender and sexuality have once again become marginalized in academic discourse, revealing the need for new explorations that coincide with the impact of the “spatial turn.” In this age of conflict, dissent, surveillance, and migration—when the study of media is often also the study of the precariousness and dynamism of the spatial—it is particularly important to trace the interconnections between space, media, and gender.

We are inspired by the work of those film and media scholars who have explored such interconnections. Lynn Spigel’s seminal book on the gendered discourse surrounding domestic television viewing provides us with one useful example, as does Lucas Hilderbrand’s forthcoming work on the culture of gay bars after Stonewall. While Spigel, Hilderbrand, and a few others have studied the connections between gender, space, and media in their own work, few media studies journals have made this topic a primary focus. Following this, we seek scholarship that deals with space in a range of ways—essays might discuss online spaces that allow for specific negotiations of gender or sexuality, or with gender embodiment in physical spaces of various scales, from the very local (the living room, for example) to the global.

Essays might also draw upon feminist interventions into Marxist/historical materialist theories of space, as well as engaging the intersections between gender, race, and class. These important intersections exceed the now rather pejorative label “identity politics”—a label that we feel is often deployed in order to debunk the continued relevance of gender and sexuality to any scholarly conversation. While we do indeed call for political approaches to gender and space—essays informed by the agendas of feminist and queer activism—we stress that gender and sexuality are not merely areas of special interest, but are instead structuring principles of discrimination that permeate our lives on a number of registers.

Thus, our approach is multivalent. We invite submissions that consider this complexity, possibly addressing the following topics:

• Transnational Queer and Feminist Media: How are flows of bodies, labor, capital, and images gendered and sexualized?
• Queering Questions of Scale: How does heterosexism delimit notions of nation, state, and the transnational?
• Gendered Spaces of Conflict and Dissent: How do media contribute to the gendering of the different spaces of war and dissent as well as of the subjects who are involved?
• Gender, Sexuality, and Online Spaces: How are social media practices and spaces gendered and sexualized?
• Queer/Feminist Gaming: representations of gendered and sexualized spaces in mainstream video games, gendered geographies of video game production,  gendered spaces of gaming culture
• Spaces of Surveillance: How is surveillance fundamentally gendered, sexualized, and spatialized? How does voyeurism continue to bolster certain experiences of space and place?
• Gendered Infrastructures: How are media infrastructures gendered, and why does this matter?
• Gender, Sexuality and Access: How do gender and its legibility (e.g., normativity) result in certain types of access to particular spaces?

We are looking for essays of 1500-2500 words, digital art projects, and audio or video interviews exploring the relationship between gender, sexuality, and space. We encourage approaches to this topic from scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, architecture, art and art history, communication, ecology, geography, literature, musicology, sociology, and other relevant fields.

Feel free to contact the issue co-editors, Hannah Goodwin and Lindsay Palmer, with proposals and inquiries.
Email submissions, proposals, and inquiries to submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org by May 30th, 2013.

CollegeImprovment.org Cash Scholarship

ANY College Student (grad or undergrad) may apply for the May 31st, 2013 deadline.  It is a new year and applicants are needed for College Improvement's Cash Scholarship. 

Students may apply directly and get details at 
http://www.collegeimprovement.org/collegescholarship.html.

Brantlinger-Naremore Essay Prize Competition - DEADLINE EXTENDED

 DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MAY 25th

http://cmclgrads.blogspot.com/2013/04/brantlinger-naremore-essay-prize-open.html

CFP - Second Chances, Final Glances: Media Afterlives

Second Chances, Final Glances: Media Afterlives
University of Pittsburgh, October 18-19, 2013
Hosted by the Film Studies Graduate Student Organization (FSGSO)

Keynote by Homay King, Associate Professor of History of Art and Director, Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College. King teaches Film Studies and her fields of specialty include American cinema, film theory, psychoanalytic theory, and feminist film theory and criticism. King is author of Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Projection, and Enigmatic Signifier (Duke University Press, 2010). 

If obsolescence is both a condition and consequence of media culture, how can we approach and articulate the relationship between oldness and newness, obsolescence and innovation, with regard to changes in cinematic form, technology, and scholarship? This conference reconsiders obsolescence as a strategic anachronism, focusing not only on technological formats but also on genres, critical approaches, and texts. To address the allure of the “now” which pervades approaches to everything from Blu-ray technology to Speculative Realism, we affirm the need to turn back in order to imagine what lies ahead.

When an idea, object, medium, or thinker passes into obsolescence, what anxieties or nostalgias does it engender? How are communities formed by shared investment in the displaced, and how are they stimulated by the possibilities of reappropriation? What explanatory frameworks and affective experiences apply when the genealogies of obsolescence are primarily material (e.g. celluloid or 8-bit video games) or discursive (e.g. forgotten critics and faded schools-of-thought)? What can a technology or idea’s reemergence tell us about the context in which relevance is regained?

As technologies, formats, exhibition sites, kinds of objects, and even particular critical archives go out of (and, perhaps more importantly, back into) favor or fashion, they acquire a different aura, such that what’s relegated to the margins of the market economy is often central to alternative circuits of the antique, the collectible, kitsch and camp, etc. By exploring transformative moments and practices of moving image production and reception as well as theory and criticism, Second Chances will engage notions of obsolescence and reemergence that determine how we contextualize, historicize, and promote our scholarly projects.
Possible topics may include:

• Form/content relations: obsolescent platforms and platforms for obsolescent texts.
• “No one reads ____” : recuperations and other engagements with “passé” thinkers, concepts, or methods.
• Outmoded genres and aesthetic/narrative conventions in film and TV.
• Racialized and gendered implications of progress, anachronism, and futurity, particularly via critiques of neoliberalism, and interventions from queer theory, critical race, and feminist film/media scholarship.
• Dead or dormant production cycles and their imagined audiences.
• “Unofficial” or forgotten archives: their discovery, organization, and research.
• Preservation practices and the politics of conservation.
• Abandoned/neglected exhibition sites and practices.
• Unusable/unplayable audio and video playback and projection formats.
• Found footage, “obsolete technologies,” cinematic detritus, and residual media.
• Stars and obsolescence: celebrity cycles and finitude.
• Time and media formats (e.g. film, video, TV, digital): ephemerality and duration.
• Media archaeology and historical methods.
• Changing technologies and policies in screen translation (dubbing and subtitles).
• Obsolescence and ontology (being-toward-death).

We welcome approaches from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to: Film and Media studies, Art and Art History, Visual Culture, Feminist and Queer Studies, Communications, Critical Theory, Literature, Musicology, and Philosophy.

Interested graduate students may submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) – along with institutional/departmental affiliations and current email – to pittfilmgradconference@gmail.com by June 14, 2013. For more information, please contact the FSGSO by email at the above address.