Call for Papers - Texas Studies in Literature and Language Special Issue

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Call for Papers - The Velvet Light Trap Issue #82

Media Dialogues

Submission deadline: August 1, 2017

In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin posits that media are dialogic—that is, constantly in conversation with one another, relating to each other and altering each other. In contrast to dialectic paradigms, the dialogic doesn’t seek a closed resolution, but rather encourages communication as an ongoing process. For the 82nd issue of The Velvet Light Trap, the editorial board seeks submissions focusing on media dialogues—studies of how entities in media industries and cultures interact, how they are positioned, how they communicate, what they learn from each other, and what new issues their dialogues may introduce to the wider environment. Often it is the case that a study will hone in on a singular figure, concept, technology or industry. While this approach is certainly valuable in the focus and detail it can yield, it may overlook or overshadow the connections, histories, and circumstances which influenced that singular case. An excessive focus on individual actors, singular narratives, and institutional boundaries (whether these are industrial, national, or vernacular) may obfuscate the myriad continuities, hybridities and networks of collaborative meaning-making that shape media cultures. In short, we seek papers exploring and investigating processes rather than results. We invite submissions that primarily consider the links between media entities—conversations that are just as essential to the work as the individual players are. We may find this dialogues on a large or minute scale across a wide array of media fields. As such, we conceive of the dialogic within film and media studies broadly, and invite submissions from a range of potential approaches, topics, and areas of emphasis. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

Textual dialogues: historically significant dialogue exchanges within a text; between characters in a narrative; aesthetics of the voice; between sound and image; interactive structures within the text; between text and audience; etc.

Production dialogues: between and amongst above- and below-the-line workers; between producers and directors; between producers and studios; between performers and producers; between technologies and practitioners; etc.

Industrial dialogues: between exhibitors and distributors; between different media industries, as in global or cross-media productions or adaptations; state-of-the-industry analyses, and analyses of state-of-the-industry conversations; between production cultures and economic contexts; etc.

Intellectual dialogues: correspondence (real or imagined) between theorists; interventions or explorations in the space between disparate literatures; intellectual histories of terminology; debates in media historiographies; etc.

Public dialogues: between media makers and audiences; between different publics about media objects, technologies, industries, business models, or ethics; reconsiderations of public media systems and infrastructures; between social networking site owners and users; etc.

Dialogues at intersections of identity: conversations at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, regionalism and nationalities; etc.

Submissions should be 6,000–7,500 words (approximately 20–25 pages double-spaced), formatted in Chicago style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The journal’s Editorial Board will referee all submissions. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. All submissions are due August 1, 2017.

About the Journal

The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media studies. Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas-Austin coordinate issues in alternation. Our Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Richard Allen, Ben Aslinger, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Mark Betz, Corey Creekmur, Michael Curtin, Kay Dickinson, Bambi Haggins, Scott Higgins, Mary Celeste Kearney, Jon Kraszewski, Lucas Hilderbrand Roberta Pearson, Nicholas Sammond, Jacob Smith, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas. VLT's graduate student editors are assisted by their local faculty advisors: Mary Beltrán, Ben Brewster, Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes, Lea Jacobs, Derek Johnson, Vance Kepley, Shanti Kumar, Charles Ramírez Berg, Thomas Schatz, and Janet Staiger.

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Call for Papers - The Velvet Light Trap Issue #81

The Velvet Light Trap Issue #81 – Power, Freedom, and Control in Gaming

Game studies is no longer an ‘emerging’ field and video games can no longer be considered a ‘new’ or niche medium. The commercial video game industry is now over 40 years old and games are an increasingly intrinsic part of the symbolic terrain of culture. The continued economic growth of the global video game industry is well documented and staggering, and this is reflected in the growing body of academic work that engages with the multifaceted ways that games are designed, created, received, and played. In recent years, scholars have productively moved away from the hotly contested theoretical divisions between ludology and narratology that defined early game studies. Yet, at the same time, games scholarship continues to privilege digital gaming, in the process often sidelining or excluding from academic discussions the vibrant range of game design paradigms and player practices in non-digital gaming, such as board games, card games, and role-playing games. This issue of The Velvet Light Trap considers the place of gaming within media studies and the potential value of utilizing a cultural studies framework for understanding issues of power, freedom, and control in game studies.

As the game industry has matured alongside information and communications technologies, methods of production and industry lore have become normalized as the scope and diversity of games being produced becomes ever more richly nuanced. Triple-A franchises, such as Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, and Madden NFL, are gaming blockbusters, with production teams of hundreds, production budgets of millions, and revenue in the billions. The success of the mainstream industry combined with digital distribution has also opened up niches for thriving independent and underground game scenes, where titles as varied as Undertale, Depression Quest, The Stanley Parable, and Papers, Please, have interrogated the act of play itself while expanding conceptions of what forms and functions games can take.

The increasing complexity of the globally networked gaming industry demands scholarly engagement from a variety of perspectives. The scholarly turn to games and gaming is producing a groundswell of work that parses the disparate yet often interrelated patterns of more micro-level historicity and phenomena, such as game aesthetics and narrative engagement; player identity and communities; emergent cultures and practices the circumscribed agency of designers; and issues of local production, histories, and archives. Scholarship on analog formats like role-playing games and board games have foregrounded the importance of looking beyond the digital, highlighting the economic and cultural contexts of a broader range of gaming and play practices.

This issue of The Velvet Light Trap seeks to build upon this body of research and further consider how games reproduce popular ideas about identity, including issues of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, ability, etc., through characters, gaming worlds, play, design, and performance. Which voices, perspectives, and sensibilities are privileged in gaming culture, and how can the gaming industry become more inclusive and self-reflective about the practices it engages in and choices it makes? How are communities traditionally marginalized in the gaming economy asserting greater agency? How are issues of power, freedom, and play negotiated, challenged, or reinscribed in the various games and gaming practices marking today’s increasingly expansive media and cultural landscape?

Other possible areas of inquiry in digital and analog gaming include but are not limited to:

• Theories of play
• Gaming pedagogy
• Archive/Collection
• Game design (development & production); designer agency
• Labor, locality, and the global commercial market
• Global gaming (Non-U.S. products or cultures)
• Marketing and distribution
• Games as ancillary merchandise
• Games as parts of transmedia franchises
• Metagaming and paratextual engagement
• Adaptation (game to film/TV; film/TV to game)
• Gamer culture and identity 
• Gender and #Gamergate
• Celebrity
• Digital access and class privilege
• Ludic cartographies
• Mobile apps
• Virtual Reality
• Mods & Freeware

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in Chicago Style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a separate one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by translations. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to vltcfp@gmail.com by January 15th, 2017.

About the Journal

TVLT is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media. The journal draws on a variety of theoretical and historiographic approaches from the humanities and social sciences and welcomes any effort that will help foster the ongoing processes of evaluation and negotiation in media history and criticism. While TVLT maintains its traditional commitment to the study of American film, it also expands its scope to television and other media, to adjacent institutions, and to other nations' media. The journal encourages both approaches and objects of study that have been neglected or excluded in past scholarship.

Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Texas at Austin coordinate issues in alternation, and each issue is devoted to a particular theme. VLT's Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Richard Allen, Ben Aslinger, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Mark Betz, Corey Creekmur, Michael Curtin, Kay Dickinson, Bambi Haggins, Scott Higgins, Mary Celeste Kearney, Jon Kraszewski, Lucas Hilderbrand Roberta Pearson, Nicholas Sammond, Jacob Smith, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas. VLT's graduate student editors are assisted by their local faculty advisors: Mary Beltrán, Ben Brewster, Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes, Lea Jacobs, Derek Johnson, Vance Kepley, Shanti Kumar, Charles Ramírez Berg, Thomas Schatz, and Janet Staiger.

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Call for Papers: The Velvet Light Trap

Call for Papers

The Velvet Light Trap Issue #80: “Production Cultures”

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In the introduction to their edited book on production studies, Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John T. Caldwell argue that “the off-screen production of media is itself a cultural production, mythologized and branded much like the onscreen textual culture that media industries produce.” This has never been more true than in the current moment.

The production process – aided by the proliferation of social media – has become increasingly visible. Long before movies, games, comic book issues, or television series are released, audiences have already been exposed to, and have opined over, casting choices, false starts, locations, script drafts, and various other aspects of the production process. Additionally, the development of cinematic universes has caused the cultures of production to become increasingly complex, resulting in productions that are both more global and transmedia-minded. This raises new questions about power and labor as new relationships are forged between production capitals, and workers who have traditionally functioned independently of each other must come together to create transmedia stories. In addition, the newly-heightened visibility of the production process, and the consolidation of the production studies field, emphasizes the need to reexamine and evaluate production cultures of the past.

This issue of The Velvet Light Trap seeks historical and contemporary studies of media production. Submissions should engage with the above issues of increased complexity, visibility, and ubiquity, in addition to new questions. We invite scholars to submit work that not only deepens our current understanding of production studies, but also challenges our assumptions about what production cultures are, and the types of questions that should be asked about them. We would also ask scholars to consider how issues of gender, race, and sexuality function beyond the screen and contextualize these issues within the production process.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Relationships between producers and consumers
• Negotiating professional identity
• Evolution of production
• Production communities
• Creative hierarchies within cinematic universes
• Industry lore related to specific productions
• Issues of gender, race, sexuality, and/or disability
• Labor relations, unions, and guilds
• Below-the-line labor
• Failed productions/Fired producers
• Disputes between producers and creators
• Unpaid labor and intern culture
• Contracts and other legal issues
• Labor of practical effects
• Genre-specific work identities
• Video game production cultures
• Stunt work
• Production and publicity of star texts
• Gender and exploitation in music cultures
• Production of user-generated media
• Cultures of documentary film production
• Cultures of live production (sports, news, live musicals)

Submission Guidelines:

Submissions should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in Chicago style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The entire essay, including block quotations and notes, should be double-spaced. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by translations. Photocopies of illustrations are sufficient for initial review, but authors should be prepared to supply camera-ready photographs on request. Illustrations will be sized by the publisher. Permissions are the responsibility of the author. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. Submissions are due August 15 September 30, 2016.

About The Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film & Television:

The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, blind peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media studies. Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas-Austin coordinate issues in alternation. Our Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Ben Aslinger, Miranda Banks, Caetlin Benson-Allot, Mark Betz, Corey Creekmur, Michael Curtin, Kay Dickinson, Bambi Haggins, Scott Higgins, Lucas Hilderbrand, Mary Kearney, Jon Kraszewski, Roberta Pearson, Nic Sammond, Jacob Smith, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas. For more information, please visit the journal’s website at http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/journals/the-velvet-light-trap.

www.utexaspress.com

The Velvet Light Trap Call for Papers

Call for Papers

The Velvet Light Trap Issue #78: “Considering Kids’ Media”

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The Payne Fund studies of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to discover—with questionable scientific rigor—whether attending the movies was emotionally and physically harmful to children. Was it the case that disturbing scenes and sensory reactions to light and sound caused children to become nervous, agitated, and upset? Although the Payne studies were controversial and inconclusive, they reflected a general concern about the effect of films on children’s well-being that would influence media regulation and discourse for years to come. Many popular and academic conversations about kids and media are still dominated by the belief that children are vulnerable, developing bodies in need of constant oversight. David Buckingham famously defined these discourses as pedagogical and protectionist, and argued that they can limit the study of kids’ media. Like Buckingham, we see potential pitfalls with the pedagogical and protectionist approaches, including regressive views of audiences; arbitrary boundaries between adult and child cultures; and a neglect of formal analysis and historical inquiry. Significant work has been done in a number of disciplines that seeks to address these challenges and concerns, but there is more to add to the film and media studies conversation that recognizes the complexity of children’s media and the cultures surrounding them.

For this issue, The Velvet Light Trap seeks historical and contemporary studies of kids’ media: that is, media aimed exclusively at kids, media produced with kids in mind as part of the larger audience, or media made by kids themselves. Submissions should add to the study of kids’ media as a creative, social, and cultural phenomenon by moving beyond the protectionist and pedagogical binary. We welcome topics that reflect the agency of young people, acknowledge the complexity of these media texts, and expand film and media histories. We will consider papers that concern people under the age of 18—teens, tweens, “young adults,” infants, and everyone in between—and topics with a national, regional, or international scope. The following subjects offer some topic areas, though submissions are not limited to the following:

• Issues of gender, race, and the queering of childhood
• Children as producers of content, online and in film or TV narratives
• New research methodologies: issues when studying kids or using kids as co-researchers
• Merchandising, toy culture, franchising, and paratexts of kids’ media
• Traditional kids’ media forms and genres—fairy tales, animation, fantasy, etc.—and their boundaries and hybridity
• Child stars and the stars of children’s shows or films
• Sites of kid fandom and kids’ fan culture
• Age and age differentiation within the realm of kids’ media
• Texts with crossover appeal to multiple age demographics
• Industrial studies of kid-focused networks, studios, websites, etc.
• Children’s film festivals and other sites of exhibition
• Historiographic inquiries into the conditions affecting children’s media: technological change, taste cultures, distribution and exhibition practices, external censorship, self-regulation, etc.
• Institutional and educational media

Submission Guidelines:

Submissions should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in Chicago style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The entire essay, including block quotations and notes, should be double-spaced. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by translations. Photocopies of illustrations are sufficient for initial review, but authors should be prepared to supply camera-ready photographs on request. Illustrations will be sized by the publisher. Permissions are the responsibility of the author. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. Submissions are due August 15, 2015.

About the Journal:

The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media studies. Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas-Austin coordinate issues in alternation. Our Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Richard Allen, Ben Aslinger, Harry Benshoff, Mark Betz, Michael Curtin, Corey Creekmur, Kaye Dickinson, Bambi Haggins, Lucas Hilderbrand, Scott Higgins, Mary Celeste Kearney, Jon Kraszewski, Nicholas Sammond, Jacob Smith, Beretta Smith-Shomade, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas, and Michael Williams. For more information, please visit the journal’s website at http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/journals/the-velvet-light-trap.

www.utexaspress.com

A Call for Papers from Journals

The Velvet Light Trap, a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media studies, has a Call for Papers: The theme is “Case Studies in Technological Change.” August 17 is the deadline, and submissions may be sent to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com.

CFP: VLT #76 - Case Studies in Technological Change

To paraphrase Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery in Film History: Theory and Practice, media depends on machines. Technology contextualizes industrial and stylistic change, reveals and obscures sites of cultural negotiation and meaning, and enables new modes of media production, circulation, and reception. The significance of technology to media studies has only become more acute with the proliferation of digital technologies, which have changed the methods and tools of our scholarship—to say nothing of the object of that study.

Too often, however, scholarship relegates technology to the background, rendering it less an object of study in and of itself than a cause of, or context for, broader situations. While useful and often necessary, this tendency can have unintended consequences. It risks the assumption that technological changes automatically engender concomitant changes in our “real” object of study, when representations and practices that endure despite technological change offer equally important insight. Similarly, focusing on broader trends may steer us away from failed efforts at technological change, where entrenched structures of cultural or industrial design are exposed and tested, while treating technology as the agent of change can ignore the roles of cultural and industrial demands in technological advancement or stasis.

This issue of The Velvet Light Trap specifically seeks case studies of historical and contemporary technological change that privilege technology itself as the object of study. We wish to focus the issue’s attention on specific technological changes in context rather than theories that explore how technology in broad terms is changing media and culture. We especially welcome studies that reexamine accepted histories of technological change, reveal little-known changes worthy of attention, or show important continuities despite technological change.

For those interested, please send anonymous electronic submissions between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in Chicago style, along with a one-page abstract by August 1, 2014. To submit a manuscript and/or any questions, please email thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com.

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In related news, the coeditors of The Velvet Light Trap in the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin will host the 2014 Flow Conference (September 11–13). Conference participants will examine topics connected to the current state of TV and media through roundtable discussions and new plenary sessions devoted to three specific themes: “Television: Looking Back,” Television Restoration: Pragmatic Realities and Implications for Media History,” and “TV Or Not TV: The Future of the Television Industry.” Information on registration, the program schedule, and more details can be found on the conference site.

Follow The Velvet Light Trap on Twitter @VelvetLightTrap.
Follow the Flow Conference on Twitter @Flow_2014.

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