March 4-5, 2016
The recent passing of Chantal Akerman dealt an irrecoverable blow to the history of cinema. For nearly the past half-century, Akerman continually produced provocative work that meditated on concepts of home, belonging, and identity, while consistently investigating these via contemporary formats and technologies. Her latest and final film, No Home Movie, found Akerman probing these issues anew; reconciling distances through the use of Skype, developing her self-understanding through conversations with her mother, amongst others. This conference, designed to celebrate Akerman's memory, focuses on one of her most consistent and deeply examined themes: displacement.

Like Akerman, our conference aims to challenge the monolithic understanding of displacement, and embrace its multifaceted characteristics. Thus, while we welcome proposals on issues of physical or geographical displacement à la diasporic or exilic narratives, media coverage of displaced peoples, or historically displaced filmmakers, we also seek papers that cover media's own relocation from analog to digital, temporal displacements through processes of restoration or remediation, or spectatorial displacement as methods of film viewing continually change. Of particular interest to this conference are ways in which displacement has impacted the development of cinema history, and ways in which it is centrally important to our contemporary understanding of film as a medium and a cultural institution.

Additionally, proposals dedicated to the concept of displacement within the works of Chantal Akerman are welcome. Please send abstracts of approximately 350 words with 100-word bios to the conference committee at displacednyu@gmail.com by 30 December 2015.

Potential topics can address, but are not limited to, the following:

Physical Displacement:
● Narratives of displacement and/or displaced people; representations of displacement in cinema be they of geography, socioeconomic status, gender, identity or others
● Exilic or diasporic filmmaking; filmmakers or film theoreticians who have been historically displaced
● Displaced spectatorships, from the cinema to the mobile device
● Temporal displacement and the recontextualization of lost or forgotten films that are newly restored
● Moving images displaced to the museum, the increasing role and presence of video and installation art
● Transnational cinema: displacement of the means of production in the 21st Century, i.e., the importance of Nollywood and other centers

Conceptual Displacement:
● Schools of theory displacing past philosophies, i.e. the significance of the recent affective turn
● Translation, dubbing, and issues of displaced meaning centered upon language
● Film's displaced technology in the digital turn
● Displacing attention: glitches, scratches, and visualizing film's materiality
● Intertextual displacement and processes of appropriation or remediation
● The displacement of content and issues of censorship, intranationally and transnationally