[Air-L] CFP: Panel on Media Festivals and Urban Spaces

[Peaslee, Robert]

[with the usual apologies for cross-posting]

Colleagues,

Please consider the following call for abstracts:

Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, MA, March 21-25, 2012

Panel proposal: The "Host City": Media Festivals and Urban Spaces

This panel invites papers on relationships between film and media
industry festivals and the urban, sub-urban or rural communities that
claim them.

As film and media festivals of all stripe proliferate around
the world, a variety of stakeholders jockey for position and advantage
in the geographical and cultural contexts chosen to host them. Many of
these events are well-established and have assumed a defensive position
aimed at maintaining brand identity and prestige. Others are ascendant,
still others nascent at best. Each of these communities, however, have a
unique relationship to their event(s), and each of these relationships
provides fertile ground for investigating the role of media festivals in
promoting discourses of community identity, establishing infrastructural
networks, reifying the importance of being mediated, utilizing the
"local" to speak "globally", and a variety of other processes. Case
studies on particular events/locations, comparative analyses, and
attempts to theorize the event-location relationship are welcome, among
other approaches.

Questions addressed might include:
- how do local communities create and grow a successful media festival? - how do
established festivals deal politically, economically, structurally with
host communities?
- what benefits or challenges accrue for host communities?
- what is the role of the festival in supporting both the community and the industry of which it is a part, and are these imperatives always in a state of cooperation?
- what does it mean to be a "host city"?
- what is the nature of the mediation occurring around festivals (as opposed to that deriving from other events)?
-- how do we approach theoretically and epistemologically the festival/community
relationship?
-- how do historical/archival approaches to yesterday's festivals help us understand today's?

Submissions are welcome on these and related questions, and international foci are encouraged. Please send abstracts of 250 words plus a short bio to robert.peaslee at ttu.edu by August 15, 2011.

Contact: Robert Peaslee robert.peaslee at ttu.edu
Deadline:  August 15, 2011

Cheers,
r
--
Robert Moses Peaslee, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Electronic Media & Communication
Texas Tech University

Research Chair, AEJMC Visual Communications Division
Editorial Board, American Communication Journal

College of Mass Communications, TTU
Box 43082
Lubbock, TX 79409, USA

e: robert.peaslee at ttu.edu
p: 806.742.6500, x. 283
f: 806.742.1085

Chain of many mirrors, the cinema is at once a weak and a robust mechanism: like the human body, like a precision tool, like a social institution. And the fact is that it is really all of these at the same time.                                                                                                                     - Christian Metz