Mediums: 20th & 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh
The Department of French and Italian, University of Pittsburgh March 24 – 26, 2022 Call for Submissions Mediums
Almost sixty years have passed since Marshall McLuhan coined the prescient phrase, “the medium is the message.” The current era is characterized by incessant flows of multimodal texts, images, and sounds, transmitted and consumed across an array of platforms. These new media create networks, bringing people together, but they also polarize communities by manipulating and distorting discourse. How do more traditional forms of cultural production, such as literature, art, and film, depict the rise of social media and digital technologies? How do different media (print, visual, digital, and sound) inform critical debates on race, gender, sexuality, migration, nationality, and environment?
As host of the colloquium, the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh welcomes proposals on literatures of French expression, as well as film, graphic novels and comics, theater, music, danse, photography, and other visual arts. We also encourage submissions that consider the interdisciplinary frames of our research and teaching networks at Pitt: gender and sexuality; nation/transnation; environment; and film & media. Finally, because academic life and work have been turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are organizing a hybrid conference, including formats designed to accommodate in-person and remote participation. As such, we invite proposals that rethink ways to conduct and share scholarly research, especially within the changing modalities of new media and technology. Additional plans for the hybrid conference include sessions devoted to undergraduate students; teaching and research “slam” presentations; and virtual mixers for participants with shared interests.
We encourage individual proposals and complete panels. In addition to the above-mentioned networks, the organizing committee will welcome particularly, but not exclusively, proposals that take up the following themes:
- news media; state media; media and francophonie
- race, racism, antiracism
- class and social relations; inequality and precarity
- crisis, conflict, and war; humanitarianism
- neoliberalism; markets; money
- migration; borders; security
- materiality; archives
- affect and emotion
- climate change; global warming; the Anthropocene
- urban and rural spaces
- velocity, speed, acceleration
Proposals for individual (250 words and brief bio-bibliography) and complete panels (500 words and brief bios) can be submitted in English or French by email to this address: FFSC2022@pitt.edu before September 15, 2021. N.B. If your proposal is accepted, please indicate if you intend to present in person or virtually.
“Meet the Author”
Do you have a forthcoming or recently released book (monograph or edited volume) on the conference topic? Would you like to host or participate in a discussion of your book? As part of the variety of formats planned for the conference, we will run eight to ten “Meet the Author” sessions of 90 minutes each. We invite you to submit a brief description of your book and a bio (200 words total), in English or in French, by email to the conference address: FFSC2022@pitt.edu before August 30, 2021.