"This one day conference seeks to place the 30 year long ‘My Little Pony’ series within critical, cultural and creative contexts, exploring the brand from a multi-disciplinary range of perspectives. 300 word abstracts are invited." The conference will be held at University of Brighton – Grand Parade on Saturday 28 June 2014.
Please send abstracts and enquiries to Ewan Kirkland at e.kirkland [at] brighton.ac.uk.
Deadline for abstracts: 28 May 2014
The journal Networking Knowledge is publishing a special issue on the ‘cinematic dispositif’ in light of the transformative effects of digital culture. This would include the following topics:
New theorisations of cinematic spectatorship
New philosophies of bodies/spaces/screens
The effect of new modes of distribution in cinematic viewing
Influence of communications technologies and social media
Forms of interactivity and cinematic immersion
New filmmaking practices and tools
Trans-media effects
Issues for film criticism, journalism and writing
Debates around the future of Film Studies as a discipline
Analysis of practices designed to preserve a ‘traditional’ understanding of cinema.
They invite articles by postgraduate and early career researchers, which are 5,000 to 6,000 words long. Please send abstracts of up to 300 words along with a 50-word biography by April 1st 2014 to dario.llinares at falmouth.ac.uk and Sam Ward aaxsjw at nottingham.ac.uk. Articles will be due on 1st August 2014. Please contact the editors for any further information.
The theme of this conference incorporates comics production as part of but also outside of institution. Comics are unique in the mass media because the individuals who produce and distribute the products are usually fans: from creators to comics shops owners and comicon organizers. Papers are enocouraged on all aspects of production: from the multinationals and media conglomerations to small scale production such as fanzines and independent presses. Related aspects of the industry are also of interest, for instance censorship and copyright issues, promotional practices (comicons, comics distribution, historical practices eg: the change in distribution from newsagents to comics shops to collecting and comics promotion). It also has long been argued that comics are a medium with the potential for anarchy, whose narratives often push against cultural boundaries and whose graphic nature can render them a target for moral panics and political objections. Although the exhibition will clearly concentrate on the collections of British-published comics held in the library, contributions in this section which deal with these themes across any national culture or period are welcome. Proposals for specific panel topics are also needed.
Send a 300 word abstract to: d.huxley@mmu.ac.uk and j.ormrod@mmu.ac.uk by 17th January 2014
A holiday that has worked its way into several fandoms (and built up one of its own), Festivus, will once again be celebrated worldwide on 23 December. Originally created by Daniel O'Keefe in the 1960s, the holiday gained mainstream popularity after being featured on the television sitcom Seinfeld.
Hosted by the School of Political, Social and International Studies at the University of East Anglia, the first Fan Studies Network will feature an international cohort of over 30 speakers. There will be themed panels on spaces and performance, transculture, gender, “classic” fandoms, textualities, and celebrity. There will also be a participatory “speed geeking” session, featuring a number of scholars sharing research in its early stages.Keynote address by Professor Matt Hills.
Politics, law and constitutional questions often feature prominently in Doctor Who stories, whether in the form of the Time Lords’ guardianship of the universe, the Doctor’s encounters with British Prime Ministers, or the array of governance arrangements in Dalek society. The show’s politics is also an adventure through time, from the internationalising moralism of the Barry Letts-Terrance Dicks years, the dark satire of Andrew Cartmel’s period as script editor and the egalitarianism of the Russell T. Davies era. Abstracts should be 250 words in length, and should be accompanied by a 100-word biography of the author. Deadline for receipt of abstracts 17 January 2014.
Media production and culture are intricately connected. The conference follows three areas of enquiry in media, communication and cultural studies: relations between producers and audiences; theories, methods and practices; and creative content for contemporary mediascapes. Please submit abstracts of 300 words in English by December 9th 2013.
The goal of this project is to bring scholarly attention to the disciplines' interaction, engagement, and interaction with fans who are publics. The purpose of this special issue is to integrate stakeholder and publics theories with those of participatory cultures and media studies/fan perspectives; to add new, fresh insight into the public relations discipline’s concepts of publics and segmentation; and to apply new research and understandings of publics.
Submission deadline: 1st February 2014. Anticipated publication date: During the 2014 calendar year
In the contemporary media landscape the fan is an active player who participates, creates and collaborates in the construction of any type of media content.Through a multidisciplinary approach to Fandom Studies, this session aims to explore questions such as: What is the role of fans in the commercial communication of brands? In which ways can the fandom of a particular fictional work contribute to the expansion of the original text? What types of works and sources are used by fans in order to construct their own messages? The deadline for the submission
of abstracts is the 31st October, 2013. If you are interested, please send a 300-word abstract with your name and university affiliation to jlozano@uloyola.es.
The Southwest Popular Culture and American Culture Association (http://southwestpca.org) invites paper or panel proposals on any aspect of stardom or fandom for their annual Conference. This is a great conference for fan studies scholars, grad students, and researchers from other disciplines doing related research to share their thoughts and inspire each other.
