The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) in conjunction with its global university and institutional partners is proud to announce the Inaugural North American Conference on Media, Film and Cultural Studies taking place in Providence, Rhode Island, United States on September 18 – 21, 2014 at the Providence Marriott Downtown.
The First North American Conference on Media, Film and Cultural Studies promises to be a remarkable cross-cultural and interdisciplinary event, which will encourage academics and practitioners working in the fields of media, film, and cultural studies to meet and exchange ideas and views, and share their ideas and work.
Our two conference themes of “Individual, Community, Society: Conflict, Resolution & Synergy”, and “Borderlands of Becoming, Belonging, and Sharing” promise to encourage original and exciting new research paths, and we look forward to receiving your proposals, and to seeing the interdisciplinary synergies that develop at the time of the conference.
Keynote Speakers
- Jenna Stern – Actress (theatre, TV and film)
- Professor Stuart D. B. Picken – Chair, Japan Society of Scotland & Chair, IAFOR IAB
- Professor Yuriko Saito – Professor of Philosophy, Rhode Island School of Design, USA
Conference Themes
“Individual, Community & Society: Conflict, Resolution & Synergy”
Conflict from earliest times has been a characteristic of the human condition. The struggle between our individual selves and our social selves arises from what makes us unique on the one hand, being challenged by our being part of an interdependent structure of relationships on the other.
The specific blend of experiences, abilities, attitudes, and aspirations, that helps to define us, can sit sometimes uncomfortably alongside our commitments to those closest to us, our communities and our cultures. This can lead to conflict at different levels.
Conflict within communities and societies is inevitable given that these groups are based on commonality of geography, values, attitudes, and beliefs that help to differentiate one from another. The dialectic engendered by diversity, however, although it may lead to conflict, can play an important role in the expansion of ideas in communities and societies. One major challenge of modern society is to harness the synergy that emerges from the interactive dialectic generated by these differences.
The Media Arts have long recognized these differences and frictions when they try to explain conflict through the systematic exploration of ideas, words, and artistic expression, and the media has used narratives to great effect in both drama and documentary. By proposing such a wide-ranging 2014 conference theme, the organizers hope to encourage exciting new avenues of research, inspire the creation of new explanatory concepts, and provide a context for academic and personal encounters. The resultant exchanges it is hoped will stimulate synergies that cross national, religious, cultural and disciplinary divides, a bridging idea central to the global vision of IAFOR.
“Borderlands of Becoming, Belonging and Sharing”
Local, national and global cultures have been transformed by an intensification of human migration, mobility and multi-culture with multiple and complex claims of home, identity and belonging. Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of the borderland has become a critical conceptual rubric used by cultural researchers as a way of understanding, explaining and articulating the in-determined, vague, ambiguous nature of everyday life and the cultural politics of border-knowledge, border crossings, transgression, living in-between and multiple belongings. Borderlands is also about a social space where people of diverse backgrounds and identities meet and share a space in which the politics of co-presence and co-existence are experienced and enacted in mundane ways. This conference, which focuses on the borderlands of becoming, belonging and sharing, is therefore about examining how the culture of everyday life is regulated and contested across diverse political, economic and social contexts, and whether and how it creates spaces of belonging with others.
The aim of this conference theme is to open up discussion, critical reflection and analysis about emerging social, political and cultural identities that are formed at the intersection of multiple and multi-sited belongings and their expression and about the possibility of making them shared across differences.
NACMFCS2014 Conference Sub-Themes
This theme welcomes papers that focus on the following sub-themes:
- Trans-cultural displacement/belonging
- Belonging and the intersections of gender, race, religion, sexuality
- Seeking refuge, unruly belonging(s) and border politics
- Trauma and joy of becoming and belonging
- Communication, new technologies and belonging
- Cultural narratives of belonging/not belonging
- Cultural politics of survival/transgression
- New imaginings/formations of home
- Citizenship beyond borders
- Multicultural exhaustion/renewal
- Belonging in the Anthropocene
- Multiple and complex belongings
- Re-locating culture across borders
- Convivial cultures and the imagined communities
- Creation of shared space(s) of multiple belongings
The organizers encourage submissions that approach the conference themes from a variety of perspectives. However, the submission of other topics for consideration is welcome, and we also encourage sessions within and across a variety of disciplines and fields related to Media and Communication Studies, Film Studies and Cultural Studies.
Publishing Opportunities
Authors of accepted abstracts will have the opportunity of publishing their associated paper in the official conference proceedings, and a selection of papers will be considered for inclusion in the internationally reviewed IAFOR journals associated with the conference.
International, Intercultural, Interdisciplinary
The IAFOR North American Conference on Media, Film and Cultural Studies 2014 is organized as part of a five week series of academic events in the US organized by IAFOR. Those attending the conference will have the opportunity of attending The IAFOR North American Conference on the Arts and Humanities 2014 (NACAH2014) for no extra charge.