Event Announcements and CFPs
CFP: Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images Issue 1.2: Open Issue
CFP: Narrating “New Normal”: Graduate Student Symposium
Global Storytelling issue 2.1 - Special Issue on Serial Narrative: “Streaming and Seriality”
CFP: Narrating “New Normal”: Graduate Student Symposium
May 17-18, 2021
Organized by: Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images
Centre for Film and Moving Image Research (FMIR)
Academy of Film, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University
Abstracts Due: Dec 1, 2020
What is “new normal?” As the COVID-19 pandemic sickens millions, isolates billions, and brings economies to a standstill around the globe, the phrase has entered the everyday lexicon of governments, news, and social media, with many regarding the ensuing widespread shift of basic human activities online – school, shopping, work, and socializing – as a “new normal.” Yet, the phrase “new normal” itself is not new. Governments, corporations, and institutions readily deploy “new normal” to legitimize regulations, laws, and policies that ensure organizational survival in crisis, thereby relegating the people whose uncertain livelihoods they normalize as expendable. After the 2008 financial crisis, American economists declared reduced consumer spending due to chronic underemployment as “new normal.” In 2014, PRC President Xi Jinping described steadily diminished GDP growth as a more stable “新常態” — a direct translation of “new normal” that Chinese state media now regularly employ to allay public panic about economic volatility. As a malleable signifier designed to manage expectations, “new normal” weaves itself into visions of a stable post-crisis future as though normalcy requires only minor adjustment to major disasters.
Through its widespread circulation and vernacularization, “new normal” normalizes precarity and obfuscates the uncertainties wrought by crises, especially for those who cannot simply adjust. However, everyday netizens also use the narrative of “new normal” to convey their current experiences and imaginations of the future, whether hopeful or pessimistic. Novel articulations of “new normal” emerge as human activities and relationships shift online. Empowered by inexpensive technology and broadcasted to mass audiences through social media networks, ordinary people have become global storytellers with the capacity to weave affecting stories of “new normal” that effect how the concurrent epidemiological and political upheavals will shape human society.
We invite graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to present their research on digital and moving image stories and storytelling about “new normal(s).” We ask how internet users, film and media makers, institutions, governments, and other cultural organizations narrate “new normal” as a way of shaping reality, producing knowledge, and making emotional sense of drastic change. What, indeed, is “new normal?” What does it mean for something new to be normal? What stories do people and organizations tell about “new normal”? Who tells these stories, and how are these stories told?
Possible topics
- How do stories of “new normal” unfold and take shape in various media platforms?
- What roles do storytelling on digital media platforms play in ascribing meanings to “new normal?”
- How do digital media users and organizations use “new normal,” to what end, and what new meanings does the phrase signify?
Possible topics for this conference include, but are not limited to:
- Emotional experiences of “new normal” and uncertainty
- Digital media, relationships, and intimacy
- Borders, boundaries, quarantine, and social distance
- Precarity, discrimination, and disenfranchisement
- Public health and cultural politics
- Social media and community organizing
- Online activism and cancel culture
- Online learning and teaching
- Crisis economics and essential services
- Ecosystem collapse and environmental catastrophe
- E-commerce and new economies
- Global, regional, and national politics and policies
- Risk and crisis management
- State power, surveillance, and censorship
- Deglobalization, populism, and authoritarianism
Submission information and acceptance
To submit a proposal, please send an extended abstract of no more than 500 words, 2-page CV, and email address for correspondence to gstjournal@hkbu.edu.hk by December 1, 2020.
Results will be emailed by January 15, 2021. Draft full papers (approximately 6000 words) will be uploaded and shared amongst presenters before the conference. The Centre for Film and Moving Image Research (FMIR) in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University will offer need-based financial support to participants at the discretion of the conference organizers. Selected papers will be published in special issue of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images.
CFP: Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images Issue 1.2: Open Issue
Issue 1.2: Open Issue
Deadline: December 1, 2020
Contact: gstjournal@hkbu.edu.hk
Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal run by the Centre for Film and Moving Image Research (FMIR) in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University and published by the University of Michigan Press. Global Storytelling brings scholarly engagement in film and media studies back to the fundamentals of storytelling by publishing essays, short commentaries, and reviews about the stories people tell, how people tell and receive stories, and the ways that storytelling practices around the world shape human experience. Responding to the accelerating digital globalization of our contemporary era, Global Storytelling critically examines the evolving methods and ongoing global events that both convey and contextualize moving image storytelling today, yesterday, and tomorrow.
This open issue of Global Storytelling invites articles, editorials, and book reviews from film, media, communication, cultural and gender studies scholars; historians, political scientists, and sociologists; critics and curators; and policymakers and public intellectuals that engage with the affect (emotional engagement) and effect (social impact) of audiovisual storytelling. We cover a range of storytelling modes, genres, platforms, and industries — from narrative films to documentaries; TV dramas to vlogging; the multiplex to Netflix; social media influencing to esports casting; and Hong Kong to Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood — with the aim of bridging the gap between academia and the wider world and deepening our understanding of how storytelling shapes our identities and perceptions.
Submission Guidelines
- Submissions must be delivered by email to the editors of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images at: gstjournal@hkbu.edu.hk.
- Global Storytelling will only consider essays between 6,000-10,000 words long, including notes and captions.
- To facilitate the double-blind peer review process, the essay manuscript must be sent by email attachment as a Microsoft Word .doc/.docx file with all author information removed.
- Submissions must include a separate title page with author name(s), affiliation(s), abstract of approximately 250 words, 6 keywords or terms, word count, acknowledgements, biography of less than 80 words, and email address for correspondence.
- Submissions should follow the latest notes and bibliography guidelines of The Chicago Manual of Style. All bibliographic information should be in endnotes, and submissions should not include an additional bibliography. For further information, see: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html
- Submissions that meet requirements will be sent to at least two separate experts for double-blind peer review.
- Global Storytelling does not accept simultaneous submissions.
For further information, including complete submission guidelines, editorial board, and additional calls for conference papers and themed issues, please see the journal homepage: https://research.hkbu.edu.hk/project/global-storytelling-journal-of-digital-and-moving-image
Ying Zhu (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
http://af.hkbu.edu.hk/en/faculty-members/zhu-ying
Links
Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images
Open Calls and Submission Guidelines
Global Storytelling issue 2.1 - Special Issue on Serial Narrative: “Streaming and Seriality”
Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images is a new journal founded by Editor-in-Chief Ying Zhu, hosted at Hong Kong Baptist University, and published by University of Michigan.
This special issue of Global Storytelling will investigate how streaming media has impacted the production, distribution, and reception of serial narratives. Television research, beginning with Herta Herzog’s landmark study of radio listeners “On Borrowed Experience”, privileged the soap opera as an object of research due to the special problems posed by seriality and melodrama and the construction of gender within the text and within the audience. When prime-time serials Dallas and Dynasty achieved sensational success both domestically and internationally, and the fear of “Wall-to-Wall Dallas” swept Europe, important foundational works in television studies by Robert C. Allen, Ien Ang, Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, Jostein Gripsrud, Jane Feuer, Dorothy Hobson, Tania Modleski, Charlotte Brunsdon and others used television serials to consider questions of reception, cross-cultural readings, and the problematics of genre and ideology. Today, seriality is less the exception than the rule for the offerings of subscription streaming platforms in all genres and is a core industrial strategy for courting audiences in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
The development of streaming platforms and new distribution strategies in which entire seasons of new television shows are “dropped” online on one day have only complicated contemporary theorizations of the production and consumption of serialized narratives. Netflix routinely releases its first-run television serials as entire seasons, while other platforms premiere a handful of episodes simultaneously to entice viewers, then switch to a more conventional schedule of weekly single episodes. Web series such as Skam (in its various transnational incarnations) craft soap opera narratives at the intersection of fictive social media posts and videos that play in real storyworld time, weaving serial narratives into the everyday lives of audiences through their phones, tablets and laptops.
Central to this topic is the impact of different models of serial distribution. Global Storytelling calls for papers, articles, essays, and book reviews on topics related to streaming’s impact on serial narratives: the ways they affect viewers, their ability to create affect in audiences, and ways they have been affected by larger industrial and cultural trends.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
● ways serial narratives produce affect, persuade, or affect behavior of individuals and groups
● how serial narratives differ among various art forms, cultures, genres, or other types of borders
● how changes in serial narratives and their context affects their ability to respond to news and cultural events
● the nature of serial narratives and how they differ from other narrative forms
● the nature of serial narratives and how they have adapted to emergent distribution models and audience desires
● the impact of globalization on serial narratives
● the impact of the coronavirus on serial narrative production and consumption
● the effect of digital media and/or interactivity on serial narratives
● the cultural impact of contemporary serial programming in a crowded media landscape
● how fan engagement with serial narratives has changed and evolved over time
Submission guidelines for Global Storytelling are here. For this special issue, please do not submit via the journal web portal, but instead email submissions or questions directly to this issue’s guest content editors, Ellen Seiter (seiter@usc.edu) and Suzanne Scott (suzanne.scott@utexas.edu). In the subject line of your email please include “GS Serial Narrative.”
The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2021.