Please see the Report by Susan Aasman and the video (c. 16min) for ‘Staging the Amateur Dispositif’ – a media archaeological experiment performed at the 9th edition of the International Orphan Film Symposium, EYE Film Institute Amsterdam (2014).
CFP below – of possible interest to those researching Arab amateur/social media.
‘History in the Making: Arab Media and Processes of Remembering‘ Conference organised by the Arab Media Centre Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) on Friday 24 April 2015 at the University of Westminster, Regent Street Campus, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW.
Keynote Speaker: Kay Dickinson, Concordia University, Montreal. Author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (2008) and co-editor of The Arab Avant-Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East (2013)
This one-day conference will seek to address issues raised by the place of media in history, the function of media artefacts as historical sources, and the processes involved in documenting and storing media images and accounts that will make the past accessible to future generations. A focus on history seems appropriate for what will be the tenth in the Arab Media Centre’s series of annual international conferences. We welcome papers from scholars and media practitioners that engage critically with the issues outlined above. Themes may include, but are not limited to, the following:
· Arab media history and historiography
· The place of history in Arab media studies
· Methodological questions in researching Arab history: the place of media
· Oral histories of Arab media
· Formation of film and broadcasting through colonial and postcolonial times
· Suppressed histories from the media sector
· Historicising the rise of subversive media across different political contexts
· Archiving and digitizing: who decides what and how?
· The performance of museums and libraries in preserving media artefacts
· Translation of historic media texts
· Gender, media and social history
· Media and memory studies
· Historic patterns in media coverage of Arab affairs
· Audience feedback in 20th century Arab media
PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION
This one-day conference, taking place on Friday, 24th April 2015, will include a keynote address, plenary sessions and parallel workshops. The fee for registration for all participants, including presenters, will be £110, with a concessionary rate of £59 for students, to cover all conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs. Registration will open in February 2015.
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS
The deadline for abstracts is Monday, November 3rd, 2014. Successful applicants will be notified early in mid-December 2014. Abstracts should be 300 words. They must be accompanied by the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal addresses, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter. Please send all these items together in a single Word file, not as pdf, and give the file and message the title ‘AMC 2015’ followed by your surname. The file should be sent by email to the Events Administrator, Helen Cohen, at journalism@westminster.ac.uk
For those interested in amateur media and the Middle East see the Journal of Culture and Communication CFP for a special issue on ‘Digital Intimacies: Exploring digital media and intimate lives in the Middle East’
“Over the last decade, the spread of digital technologies has profoundly reshaped intimate lives worldwide, transforming the ways in which people are involved in intimate relationships and experience love, sexuality and emotions in everyday lives. Like other places, in the Middle East, millions use the internet on a daily basis to access a variety of music and cultural products, and to communicate, create and maintain relationships with partners, family members, friends and lovers, as well as for activism. Indeed, along with providing spaces for different modes of activism and resistance, digital platforms have become critical arenas in which young people negotiate ideas and practices of love, dominant gender roles and religious and societal values. While some work has begun to critically engage with the use of the Internet for activism, very little is known of the ways in which digital platforms and different technologies (including mobile phones) can remold imaginaries and practices of love and friendship and mediate the ways in which “intimacy” is experienced and lived in the Middle East.
This special issue aims to fill the gap in the scholarship on intimate lives and digital media in Middle East by focusing on the everyday uses of digital platforms and addressing their material, gendered and imaginative implications for practices. We welcome articles from a wide range of disciplines (including and not restricted to anthropology, sociology, internet, cultural and media studies) that draw on empirically-grounded studies and that raise broader methodological and theoretical reflections. Some of the questions we hope to address are:
1. New imaginaries of love and marriage: how does people’s access to online cultural products (within Islamic and non-Islamic contexts) contribute to remoulding their romantic imaginations, conventional courtship practices and intimate desires?
2. Digital media practices: which are the actual media practices whereby young people create, maintain, and end intimate relationships through digital media? How do social media expand inter-personal communicative possibilities and wide people’s social networks beyond immediate family and community based networks?
3. Digital media in long distance relationships: how are digital media used in long-distances relationships between family members and lovers, in national and transnational contexts?
4. Digital media and social change: how do media practice challenge, reproduce and reinforce dominant social practices and gendered imaginaries? What is the impact of online practices on the way people experience intimacy in the every-day life?
5. Digital technologies, sex and sexuality: how do people have sex online? How do they produce and consume pornography?
6. The use of the internet by LGBTQ people: how do they create network, form communities and communicate online?
Deadline for submission of abstracts is 30 September 2014.
Abstracts should not exceed 500 words and should provide a short explanation of your contribution to this special issue, provide a clear description of the proposed approach, the theoretical framework and empirical data.
Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 15 November 2014
Deadline for submission of complete manuscripts: 30 March 2015
Articles should be between 6000- 7000 words long and include an abstract of 150 words, the author’s affiliation and email address and at least five keywords
Please send a paper proposal along with a short bio by 30 September 2014 to Elisabetta Costa (University College London) at e.costa@ucl.ac.uk; and to Laura Menin (University of Milano Bicocca) at l.menin@campus.unimib.it. ”
See ‘Instant Replay‘ by Margaret Talbot (The New Yorker, 11 August 2014) for a short essay on ‘justice in the age of the viral video’ and cell-phone amateur films.
