cfp.english.upenn.edu

44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 21-24, 2013
Boston, Massachusetts
Host Institution: Tufts University

Title: Photography and Culture

Social-networking sites like Instagram highlight the significant cultural roles that photographs play and how their use is in a state of rapid flux. Despite these changes in the proliferation and presentation of images, photographs still reflect a habitual and evolving preoccupation with representation, documentation, sharing, establishing difference, and creating meaning. This panel welcomes papers from various disciplines and studies of culture and seeks to explore comparative practices with regard to photography – from its beginning to its most contemporary manifestations. Send 300 word abstracts and brief biographical information to Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez at Carrie.Collenberg@williams.edu by September 30, 2012.

Topics relating to photography may include but are not limited to:
- social-networking sites (Facebook/Instagram, etc.)
- new technologies (cell-phones, picasa, etc.)
- new media (filters, aps) and their relationship to nostalgia, sharing, etc.
- cultural memory, personal memory (albums), testimony, trauma, etc
- narrative (media, literature, any written word, etc.)
- film and internet
- the digital divide
- collections, museums, exhibitions, archives, databases, stock photos, distributors
- photographs as waste, thrift-stores, flea-markets, etc.
- the representation of individuals, portraits, people, family, groups, etc.
- the representation of events, history, travel, etc.
- case studies of one image or group of image/photographer, etc.
- contrasting or specific cultural or social-historical approaches
- personal relationships to photographs – vanity pictures, family albums, childhood, etc.
- changes in production and proliferation over time and their cultural implications
- cultural capital and economics