7th Annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival

30th to 31st March 2019
University of Pennsylvania

CFP Deadline: 30 November 2018

CAMRA at Penn is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the 7th Annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival which will take place on March 30-31, 2019 at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) provides a creative, collaborative space to explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal strategies in research and to interrogate their social implications. SSMF is a hybrid between a traditional academic conference and a film/ media festival fostering the intersection of art and science across disciplines since 2013.

Rendering Matters of Concern and Present Histories is the theme of SSMF2019, and scholars, educators, artists, activists, visual legal advocacy and digital humanities groups are welcome to participate. This year, SSMF will feature works rendering matters of concern and the present histories of indigenous people, persons under any form of detention, diasporic communities, LGTB+ collectives, and environments in conflict.

The categories for submission are: 

  • Film
  • Audio (sound art, podcast episode, audio walk, soundscape)
  • Photo essay
  • Panel-style presentation
  • Performance
  • Immersive media (Virtual reality, augmented reality)

As a collaborative designed to explore and challenge research as praxis, CAMRA’s Screening Scholarship Media Festival proposes rendering as those manifold possibilities by which scholarship becomes legible, audible, sensible and noticeable to multiple registers. This year’s SSMF aims to create a unique dialogue on multimodal research and a hub for experimentation on a broader, domestic, and international stage.

Nowadays, the production and distribution of academic knowledge across multiple formats are paramount. The intensified relations between contexts of research, modes of scholarship and new media affordances have transfigured the modalities involved in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of paper-based scholarship. In this sense, the acceptance of non-textual submissions by peer-reviewed journals, the production, and defense of films as dissertations, and the establishment of experimental and sensory lab centers in academic institutions are prompting scholarship to be performed otherwise.

The outcomes of these entanglements in which scholars, communities and new media affordances strive to collaborate no longer stand as mediated representations of reality. Instead, they have become tactics and poetics through which matters of concern and present histories get diffracted as exchangeable figures of affect, resilience, advocacy, and existence.

Deadline for submissions is November 30, 2018, noon (EST). Submit at www.camrapenn.org/ssmf

SSMF is a program of CAMRA, the Collaborative for the Advancement of Multimodal Research Arts. CAMRA fosters interdisciplinary collaboration through diverse networks of graduate and undergraduate students, media-makers, scholars and educators within and beyond the University of Pennsylvania.

Above text and image adapted from email.