CFP: Screen conference 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS


Screen Studies Conference 2014
University of Glasgow
27-29 June 2014

Landscape and Environment


Deadline for proposals: Friday, 10th January 2014.

 From their earliest inception, film and television have been concerned with the registration of place through the unique capacity of the audiovisual moving image to convey the experience of locale over time. In recent years, screen studies has engaged with the politics of location especially through the site of the cinematic city and inter-related questions of modernity, architecture and urban cultural transformation. The main theme of this year’s Screen conference will offer an opportunity to extend critical debate into the fields of landscape and the environment. In so doing, it will offer an exciting range of inter-disciplinary perspectives in order to reflect on the real and imaginary ways that we interact with the world through the portal of the screen.

Martin Lefebvre has argued that landscape manifests itself as an interpretative gaze. It is anchored in human life not just as something to look at but to live in socially as a cultural form. Cultural geography now argues that landscape must not only be understood as the outcome of interactions of nature and culture, but that practices of landscaping such as walking, looking, driving and, of course, filmmaking might also be the origin of our ideas about what ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ actually are. If human investment toward space produces the notion of landscape, what then are the principal ways in which the moving image articulates this process? How have film and television articulated the necessary tension between embodied immersion within a specific topographical space and critical reflection on the specific historical and cultural contexts that shape global screen culture past and present?      

The Screen Studies Conference, one of the longest running and most successful events of its kind in the world, welcomes proposals for papers/panels on any of these questions and on the following topics related to the main conference theme (as usual, proposals for other subjects beyond this focus will also be considered):

• The representation of geographically and historically specific screen landscapes
• Environmental politics and screen cultures
• Genre, narrative and the landscape
• Phenomenology and screen landscapes
• Landscape and television culture
• Journeys and landscapes: walking and traveling on screen
• The landscapes of world cinema
• Landscape and environment: autobiography, history, memory
• Screen cultures within the environment
• The dialectics of place and non-place in film and video
• Site-specific screening practices

To submit a proposal, please visit the conference website.