[Reader-list] Post-graduate student Seminar: Frames of Reference 2013

[Shilpa Phadke]

Frames of Reference 2013

Annual student seminar conducted by the School of Media and Cultural
Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

16th & 17th December

Call for Papers

Seeing through the Screen

The screen has emerged as the fulcrum of our extensively-mediated,
hyper-connected lives. For far too long, screens have been conceived as
enablers of the act of seeing; a membrane through which one’s gaze must
pass before traces of meaning and pleasure can be accessed.

As a verb, ‘to screen’ is a Janus word, a contranym, which can mean ‘to
reveal or to show’ and also ‘to screen from or to hide’. From being a
facility through which one had to pass in order to allow meaning-making
processes to be activated, screens are increasingly serving as locations
within which the processes of fashioning, stabilising, and even subverting
ideas are firmly embedded. In the arc of transformative experiences, a
critical point of inflexion has been the metamorphosis of the role of the
screen from being a membrane of access to a nerve centre of affect.

The ‘screen’ hence not only connotes cinema and television but also newer
modes of viewing and interacting, such as mobile phones and tablets, and
newer viewing environments enabled by content aggregation sites,
peer-to-peer file sharing protocols, multiplayer online games, etc. This
year, which marks a century of cinema in India, at Frames of Reference,
weseek to explore how the shifting trajectory of the screen has affected
cultural practices and technologies of image production, distribution and
consumption. If one were to see through the screen today, how would one
understand film, video, and broadcasting as cultures?

In a context shaped by a multitude of screens, how are different approaches
to moving image production reconfigured? How do the changing significations
and the inherent dialectics of the screen fashion and refashion our ideas
of belief, certainty and doubt with respect to such production practices?
What does the near collapsing of distance between the viewer and the screen
mean for subject-object dialectic – how do we form relationships with and
via the screen, with whom or what, and how does this affect interaction and
interactivity?

We are as much inclined to examine our fragmentary experiences of the
screen as its
totalising tendencies. This seminar calls for papers that interrogate the
idea of the screen at this crucial moment of rupture in the ways in which
it is constructed and construed.
Papers can be submitted addressing the themes below but need not be
restricted to them:

1. Screen and Storytelling: Narratives, tropes, archetypes.
2. Screen and Celluloid: Film history, archiving, practices and politics of
conservation.
3. Screen, Subjectivity and Spectatorship: Audiences, markets, newer modes
of viewing
and discussing cinema, television and other audio-visual texts.
4. The Gendered Screen: Sexual identity, gendered subjectivities,
pornography,
relationships.
5. Screen and the State: Discourses of nationalism, development, progress
and
modernity.
6. Screens as Intimate Interfaces: Affective relationships with the screen,
haptic
technologies.
7. Digital Samizdat: Censorship, piracy, subcultures on the web
8. Screen and Producers: Crowdsourcing, crowd-funding.
9. Governing through the Screen: Surveillance, evidence, transparency.
10. Monopolies and Screen: Content production, distribution infrastructure,
reception
devices

Email your abstracts (not exceeding 300 words) to for.smcs at gmail.com
Please send us the following details along with your abstract:
1. Full name
2. Current institutional affiliation
3. Mobile phone number
The last date for the submission of abstracts is September 15th 2013.

Rules & regulations:
Selected participants will be provided hospitality but will be required to
cover their own
travel costs. Co-authoring of papers is allowed. But hospitality will be
provided only for one
participant.

Frames of Reference is a student seminar. We require all participants to be
students at a
postgraduate level or above. Documentary evidence (such as ID card or
bonafide certificate from the institution) will be required.

For more details please visit www.smcs.tiss.edu/for2013 or contact: Sriram
(+91
9769920049), Eleanor (+91 9833771923)