Crushed Silos: The Video Essay, Film, Writing, and Technology: NeMLA Hartford, CT 17-20 March, 2016

full name / name of organization: 
Rebecca Fine Romanow/University of Rhode Island
contact email: 

Call for Papers: Roundtable
Crushed Silos: The Video Essay, Film, Writing, and Technology

47th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 17-20, 2016
Hartford, CT

Biemann explains that the video essay reflects the "wider development of new media, the Internet and digital image production . . . [to] emphasize or mutate the characteristics of the essay while opening up new possibilities for a critical engagement" between the essay and visual arts. In this, the video essay represents an active place where the barriers between disciplines is merged and converging, and where pedagogical practices, as well as analytical examination, can take place across academic borders.

This roundtable will explore the significance of the video essay as an emerging tool "where any discourse can transform into any other discourse, where it can . . . be grafted onto anything and placed anywhere else" (Huber, qtd. in Grigar). We will examine the ways in which the video essay has challenged the syntax, forms, and expectations of both narrative and documentary film, as well as the video essay's emergence in popular cultural expression on sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Finally, this roundtable will explore the video essay's place in the classroom where it "offers diverse ways of knowing and representing the world by suspending conventional modes of perception" (Springgay19) and conventional modes of content delivery and student expression.

Dimitrakaki says that "video essays . . . are a hybrid practice . . . they see the moving image in the digital age as a historically prioritized mediator of a global condition and try to do with it what popular visual culture cannot" (207). As the video essay gains ever increasing traction on the disciplines of art, film, composition, and computer sciences, it marks out a place where the disciplines converge and academic silos vanish.

Submit 300-word proposals online at NeMLA's website at:
https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15902

Deadline: September 30, 2015

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