New Creative Praxis in Film and Television planned for May 6-7, 2022 marks Istanbul Bilgi University’s fourth annual event dedicated to women and media. Conference website: https://ftvconference.bilgi.edu.tr/en/creativepraxis/

Inspired by the principles of gender equality and sustainability – two of the core principles of İstanbul Bilgi University – the first in this conference series was Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television in April 2019, with a book from Palgrave Macmillan published in November 2020. Then came the March 2020 virtual conference Gender Equality and Sustainability: Agnès Varda’s Sustaining Legacy, with proceedings volume The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy in Cinema and Visual Arts (2021) forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Finally, the Teaching Women’s Filmmaking in April 2021 featured Catherine Grant’s keynote and video essay as anchoring pieces for a prospective Open Screens special issue under peer review currently.

For 2022 we seek contributions from scholars and practitioners around the world that explore strategies, best practices, and past experiences when new forms with hybrid ways of storytelling on a variety of digital platforms transform the hierarchical relations of production.

We invite submissions focusing on the intersectionality expressed in subversive media practices that engage new digital technologies. We are particularly interested in how marginalized groups (i.e. LGBTQIA, Black diaspora, religious minorities, indigenous peoples, etc.) experiment with new forms of expression in contemporary digital and transnational media. We also welcome and encourage practitioners to submit their creative media work that may have been “abandoned” or “unfinished” to play up the complex, emotional, and often invisible labor in the making process. Such practices call for re-thinking creative subversion in praxis and the subjectivity that emerges from it.

The two-day conference will be held online, and aims to include practice-based work as well as traditional academic papers and roundtables. Regardless of format, each presentation will be limited to 15 minutes. Contributions will be considered for published proceedings, whose format will be finalized after the conference.

The presentation format for creative film and media practices will consist of up to 10 minutes for screening the work (an excerpt may be selected if the full work exceeds this limit), followed by 5 minutes of commentary from the creator(s). The submitted work must not have been curated by any academic publications.

The committee is pleased to welcome award-winning filmmakers, scholars, and educators Dr. C.A. Griffith and Dr. Karen Pearlman as the featured keynote speakers for the two-day conference.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Web series and streaming television
  • Smartphone filmmaking
  • Intersectional gaze
  • Intersectionality in filmmaking
  • Auto-ethnography and film forms
  • The meanings of subversive praxis
  • Hybrid forms and the future of gender equality
  • Transnational production of global feminist subjects
  • Gender and sexuality in new media forms
  • Digital distribution of analog media from the predigital era
  • Archiving praxis
  • Digitalization, restoration and preservation
  • Gender and sexuality in abandoned, unfinished, works-in-progress
  • Collective and collaborative authorship
  • Practice based research
  • Gender in film and television production
  • Pedagogies of gender and creative praxis

Alternative Formats might include, but are not limited to:

  • Audiovisual Essays/Videographic Criticism
  • Desktop Documentary
  • Practice-based Research: Experiments, Tests, Tinkering
  • Experimental Film
  • Virtual Installation
  • Interactive Games
  • Audio Documentary/Soundscape
  • Multimodal/Crossmedia study
  • Platform/Social Media manipulation
  • Documentary
  • Abandoned, unused, found footage
  • Making Ephemera/Documents, “Notes Towards a project in progress,” Outlines, Production Notebooks, Locations photos

Submission Requirements

  • A traditional paper proposal must include a 300-500 word abstract, a bibliography with up to 5 entries, and a brief author bio.
  • Roundtable, preconstituted panels, and collective authorship panel proposals must include a ~500 word abstract describing the goal of the panel, a bibliography/filmography with at least 5 entries, and bios and contact information for each of the 3-5 participants. Please indicate clearly in the proposal which panelist is the primary correspondent.
  • Alternative submissions must include a link to the complete work/advanced work-in-progress (with password if access is restricted), an abstract, a bibliography/videography for prior scholarship cited in the work and related scholarship, as well as a brief creator bio.

Please direct all inquiries and submissions to Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan no later than December 1, 2021 / 12.00 AM GMT. | nilufer.arslan@bilgi.edu.tr

Organizing Committee

  • Dr. Feride Çiçekoğlu | Istanbul Bilgi University
  • Dr. Beth Tsai | University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Dr. Colleen Kennedy-Karpat | Bilkent University
  • Dr. Diğdem Sezen | Teesside University
  • Dr. Ebru Thwaites Diken | Istanbul Bilgi University
  • Dr. Estrella Sendra Fernandez | SOAS University of London
  • Dr. Katie Bird | The University of Texas at El Paso
  • Dr. Şirin Erensoy | Istanbul Bilgi University
  • Res. Assist. Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan | Istanbul Bilgi University