[Frames(Windows(Mirrors))]

Call for Papers | NYU Cinema Studies Student Conference | February 19-20, 2021
nyuconference2021@gmail.com
Frames, windows, mirrors is a set of related, multivalent concepts that have each worked as figurative anchors at critical junctures in film and media history. From the Lacanian mirror and its role in psychoanalytic film theory to Mary Ann Doane’s work on spectatorial desire and “window” of cinema, these persistent metaphors have come to organize much of how we analyze visual media. But these concepts also refer to literal, material structures: the frame can denote the physical bounds of a screen, or a frame of film that holds a light-etched picture of the moving world; the window can be a glassy “aperture”, something that allows light to penetrate and permeate a space or surface; even the glossy abyss of a dormant digital screen has prompted that new cliché of a black mirror. These terms are also verbs, tied to actions that raise questions of intent, agency, and/or subjection: what does it mean to frame, to window, to mirror?
In light of the COVID-19 crisis, these concepts seem ever more prescient as public space and presence are endlessly reconfigured in this year of cataclysmic shifts. How can we use these organizing concepts to read the continuities and discontinuities of the everyday? How can we rethink and reframe these conceptual figures in innovative ways so that they resonate with our current realities and possible futures? In which ways do these terms illuminate the correlations between our embodied existence and our mediated experiences? What are the politics and ethics involved in the act of exposing and in the gesture of concealing? Is a grammar that unconditionally favors transparency and visibility always desirable?
We welcome submissions from any discipline, and encourage interdisciplinary approaches. In addition to traditional paper submissions, we gladly accept practice-based projects such as theory-driven films, performance-based pieces, and archival research.

Special themes may include (but are in no way limited to):

Protest and Surveillance: How have Black Lives Matter activists adapted organizing strategies in the wake of quarantine? How has heightened (awareness of) police violence led to a renewed conversation about surveillance, and how has this shaped the way that information–about violent incidents, protests, mutual aid, redistribution, and more–is shared, or not, via smartphones and social media? How did the George Floyd protests hold up a mirror to ever-present structures in US society and beyond?

Environment and Presence: How has this year reconfigured our conceptions of and attachments to shared time and space? With the varying affects of intimacy and alienation in virtual gatherings, are we oriented differently towards the natural world and the shared (or divergent) experience of its cycles (circadian; seasonal)? Has this year’s necessary virtuality changed what it means to inhabit or be present in any given environment?

Film-Philosophy: How productive is the intersection of diverse philosophical frameworks and cinematic practices when reflecting on the disruptions, ruptures, and fractures experienced this year? If both philosophy and cinema share the task of “reflection”, how can we renew their dialogue? How can we reflect on previous modes of reflection? How can we bring into visibility and audibility the blind spots and silences embedded in dominant discursive practices?

Gamification: How do digital games push people to turn everyday activities into games? How are we using screens to monitor this activity and compete for points or notoriety on the internet? A few pieces of technology, applications, and games that are involved in Gamification are (but not limited to) the Peloton, Pokemon Go, Xbox Live, The PlayStation Network, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Casual iPhone games, The Fit Bit, any fitness apps.

Curation and Collectivity: How have arts organizations, festivals, collectives, and creative platforms innovated new forms of programming in this virtual moment? What new possibilities for presenting and experiencing art, culture, and sociality have emerged? What happens when the screen becomes theatre, gallery, festival ground, and nightclub all in one? Proposals related to virtual festivals, online exhibitions, various live streams, and streaming platforms welcome.

Framing History: How are pundits, news stations, online journals, screenwriters, filmmakers creating narratives that construct our culture–that tell us how to mirror what they say to do? Some topics to consider: CNN’s vs. Fox News’ coverage on current topics, contagion films, tech terror documentaries such as The Great Hack (2019) or The Social Dilemma (2020), short stories about isolation, poems about the pandemic.
Please submit an abstract (250-300 words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) to nyuconference2021@gmail.com no later than December 20th, 2020. If you’re submitting a film, art, or performance work, please include documentation (stills, videos, etc.) in addition to the abstract. Links are preferable to files.
We look forward to seeing your proposals on our screens!

Unhinging the National Framework: Platform for the Study of Transnational Life Writing
Fifth Annual Symposium

Friday 4 December 2020 9.00 – 17.00
Location: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Main Building 5A00 + online via Zoom Webinar
Free of charge, but please register before 1 December. How to register: https://clue.vu.nl/en/newsagenda/news-archive/2020/okt-dec/201204-unhinging.aspx

Program

Keynote speakers:

Prof. dr. Halleh Ghorashi, Professor of Diversity and Integration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dr. Anna Poletti, Associate Professor Comparative Literature, Utrecht University
Prof. dr. Gloria Wekker, Professor Emerita, Gender and Ethnicity, Utrecht University

Speakers:

Dr. Vera Alexander, Senior Lecturer in European Cultures and Literatures, Groningen University
Prof. dr. Susan Legêne, Professor of Political History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dr. Vilan van de Loo, independent writer and researcher.
Prof. dr. Giles Scott-Smith, Professor of Diplomatic History, Leiden University

Speakers and abstracts (in order of appearance)

Anna Poletti, Associate Professor Comparative Literature, Utrecht University

Autobiography, mediation and transnationalism: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains

Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison is a hybrid work of life writing, composed on illicit mobile phones and secretly transmitted to a team of translators and supporters via WhatsApp. Documenting and theorizing the violence of Australia’s indefinite mandatory detention in camps on remote Pacific nations of people seeking asylum, No Friend But the Mountains is a uniquely transnational intellectual and aesthetic project. Its composition was enabled by digitally networked technologies that were able to evade the blanket of censorship imposed on Australia’s offshore detention centres by Government policies that limited access to the prisons by journalists, human rights organizations, and international monitors. The book’s title—a Kurdish saying that refers to the powerful connection between the Kurdish people and the mountains of their homelands—signals that the writing and thinking of the book is imbedded in and enabled by Boochani’s identity as a Kurdish journalist forced to flee Iran. At the same time, No Friend But the Mountains is a work of theory and life writing that is profoundly transnational; it responds to and seeks to understand the logics of the nation state, citizenship and border policing as techniques of power that produce new forms of violence which transcend national boundaries and jurisdictions, creating complex networks of implication, responsibility, and hierarchies.
Drawing on my arguments about autobiography and mediation in my recent book (Stories of the Self (NYU Press, 2020)), a forthcoming collection of essays I commissioned on No Friend But the Mountains for Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and my experience teaching the book in an international classroom in the Netherlands, I will examine No Friend But the Mountains as a work that exemplifies therole of media technologies in the act of living—and the emergence of—transnational life.

Vera Alexander, Senior Lecturer in European Cultures and Literatures, Groningen University

Figures of Mobility and the Crisis of Connection

In this presentation I locate life stories of mobility in an ongoing crisis of connection and connectivity. I read figures of mobility such as the visitor, the tourist and the refugee as ambivalent signifiers of place and belonging that problematise any simple dichotomy of Self versus Other and Here versus There. Making reference to contemporary poetic travel writings by Warsan Shire and Kapka Kassabova as well as photography and other media, I argue that the relational nature of life narratives needs to be considered not only in binary terms of social connections between human beings, but as a triad that embraces the precarious relationship that connects human beings to place as well as notions of time
and duration. Place relations are subject to utopian idealisation and polarised affective projections as they are constitutive of identity construction. Since these are subject to constant change and reconfiguration, the notion of mobility and its obverse, stagnation, need to be reconceptualised as fundamental dynamic aspects of belonging.

Giles Scott-Smith, Professor of Diplomatic History, Leiden University

Between Colonial and Post-Colonial? Ivan Kats and the Perils of Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Indonesia

Is it possible to overcome colonial legacies if you promote post-independence cultural autonomy? Ivan Kats was a Flemish/American cultural entrepreneur who developed a profound interest in Indonesia and the development of its national cultural identity. From the 1960s to the 1990s he pursued a book publishing project through his Obor Foundation, that looked to bridge the ethical gap between the resources of Western cultural imperialism and the poverty of the post-colonial culture industry. This presentation places Kats as a ‘double personage’ (Bourdieu) between different worlds, to explore both his projects and motivations.

Gloria Wekker, Professor Emerita, Gender and Ethnicity, Utrecht University

Families navigating Empire

In my presentation I will present excerpts from recent, autobiographical work, which emphatically is work – in – progress. These excerpts will eventually become part of a mixed genre work, based on historical and anthropological knowledge, on non- fiction and fiction. This type of work is currently understood under several different headings, among which “critical fabulation” is prominent. It is a term used by Saidiya Hartman, signifying a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. Central in my presentation will be different migrations within my multi-ethnic Surinamese family, which encompasses enslaved people, Jewish plantation owners, Native Surinamese. I will talk about transnational, geographical migrations but also about migrations of the heart, where individuals overstepped ethnic boundaries which had long been understood as foundational to empire, to plural societies, which needed to be governed as if the boundaries around different ethnic groups were “natural”. Concretely I will read prose and poetry and reflect on the nature of “critical fabulation”.

Vilan van de Loo, independent writer and researcher
Exploring the New Political Correct: Colonial Violence in Aceh

Central in my presentation is the possibility of creating a transnational understanding of heroism. To answer this question I will focus on the military Aceh expedition of 1904. Nowadays the Dutch East Indies seems to be reduced to a narrative of military violence during the process of decolonisation, although there is an awareness of the tradition of colonial violence as well, especially in Aceh. The framing of both histories of violence is the same: the officers of the KNIL were more or less war criminals, and the Acehnese were helpless victims. This leads to a postcolonial selfimage of superiority among the Dutch: ‘look how good we are to be able to see how bad we have been’. With the exploration of contemporary sources and with the use of a specific military view, the original framing is now fading. My presentation will focus on a new way of looking at the history of the military Aceh expedition of 1904, commanded by Frits van Daalen (1863-1930). I will place this new approach in the context of the early twentieth century’s national need for colonial heroes—from which the Acehnese were excluded. I will also discuss how this related to the making of a civil servant (Van Daalen became governor of Aceh) and take a look at the vulnerable position of Van Daalen. As the highestranking Indo-European officer he stood out. What do we see, if we look at the expedition through his eyes, and what does that mean in the way the colonial past is judged? Would it be possible to create a transnational understanding of heroism during this expedition?

Halleh Ghorashi, Professor of Diversity and Integration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

BLM: A transnational movement that changed the Dutch landscape

In this lecture I will discuss how Black Lives Matter, as a transnational movement, has changed the Dutch landscape regarding the existence of institutional racism and cross-racial solidarities. In the last 25 years, I have been engaging with the life experiences of refugee and migrant women (through various forms of narratives methodology). In these studies these women narrate a strong presence of exclusionary mechanisms (both blatant and subtle) within the Dutch context. Yet, until recently, the existing implicit and growing explicit forms of racism in the Dutch public space had not led to a public recognition of the existence of structural forms of racism in the Netherlands. In an earlier work, I showed the historical and societal reasons behind the denial of racism in the Dutch context despite the fact that racist acts and statements in the public space had gained a strong presence. I argued that this was partly based on the historically rooted idea of the superiority of Dutch culture in the Dutch migration discourse (which Wekker conceptualized as cultural archive) and its link to the categorical framing of migrants as ‘a problem’ in Dutch society. This history together with a positive self-image of the Dutch as progressive had made it almost impossible for people to accept the notion that racism was part of the Dutch self-image. But something shifted with the arrival of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the Netherlands. I argue that Dutch society can take advantage of this momentum to transform its non-reflective progressive image into critical self-reflection and actions aimed at the inclusion of diverse groups by addressing institutional racism beyond “good intentions”.

CALL FOR PAPERS | SPELLBOUND: MAGIC AND SPIRITUAL RITUALS, KUNSTLICHT VOL. 42 NO. 1-2.

Registration life stream conference ‘Cultural Perceptions of Safety’ open

On Thursday 21st and Friday 22nd of January 2021, the Humanities Faculty of the Open University of the Netherlands in collaboration with the Huizinga Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Cultural History, organizes the international conference ‘Cultural perceptions of safety. Reflecting on modern and pre-modern feelings of safety in literature, philosophy, art and history’.
This two-day conference will bring together scholars from eight different countries and various humanities disciplines to pursue fluctuations in conceptualizations, expressions and feelings of safety over time as well as in cultures of surveillance and safety practices. Speakers will address a variety of topics, ranging from narratives and visual discourses of (un)safety, to representations and imaginations of places and spaces of safety and regulations to ensure safety.
You can now register for the online conference. The conference is open to scholars, PhD’s and research master students from all humanities disciplines and those from other disciplines that are interested in the study of cultural perceptions of safety. You can register for the complete conference program or certain timeslots via the website. For registration and the full conference program go to the https://www.ou.nl/en/web/cultural-perceptions-of-safety.

Confirmed keynote speakers

Prof. dr. Nils Büttner
Nils Büttner is a professor ordinarius of Art History at the State Academy of Arts Stuttgart and member of the Centrum Rubenianum vzw. He specialises in the visual culture of Germany and the Netherlands from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. He has published monographs on Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as a History of landscape painting and books on the history of drawings and prints. He has also written numerous catalogue essays and has served as a curator for several museum exhibitions.
Prof. dr. Eddo Evink
Eddo Evink is Professor in Philosophy at the Open University in the Netherlands and Assistant Professor in History of Modern Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His main areas of research contain phenomenology, hermeneutics, metaphysics, philosophy of the humanities and philosophy of art. He recently published Transcendence and Inscription. Jacques Derrida on Metaphysics, Ethics and Religion, Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2019.
Prof. dr. Beatrice de Graaf
Beatrice de Graaf is professor of History of International Relations and Global Governance at the University of Utrecht. Her research focuses on how states and societies try to maintain high levels of security and how these attempts relate to core values and institutions (democracy, freedom, rule of law, constitutional and responsible government). She studies the emergence of and threats to such security arrangements from the 19th century until the present, including in times where both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of these arrangements were at risk. She currently leads the “Securing Europe” (SECURE) project, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant. Beatrice is a member of The Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and is a fellow in the ISIS Files project/Program on Extremism at the George Washington University.
Dr. Debra Benita Shaw
Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London where she teaches Architecture and Photography. She is a critical posthumanist concerned with issues of gender, social structures and the politics of space and has published widely in the fields of cultural and urban theory, science and technology studies and science fiction criticism. She is the author of Women, Science and Fiction (2000), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2008), Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space (2018) and is the co-editor of Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice (2016). She is a founding member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at UEL and principal editor of the Radical Cultural Studies book series for Rowman & Littlefield International.