Hello everyone,

The organizing committee is excited to share the call for papers for the 2023 First Forum Graduate Student Conference, hosted by the Division of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. This year's theme is Losers!

CFP TEXT:

First Forum 2023–Oct 27th and 28th

“In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey”--Beck, “Loser”

It is difficult to imagine that there are winners anymore. But they do exist: the wealthy sheltered in steel skyscrapers, the elite in marbled governmental halls, corporations who profited off the COVID-19 pandemic. In the day-to-day of a pre-/post- apocalyptic world, Losers are necessarily placed in the context of knowing who has died and who has survived in late capitalist hegemony. They experience life as it really is.

The losers of the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies’ First Forum committee invites you to lose with us at First Forum 2023.

Centered around the figures of Losers, First Forum—the University of Southern California’s pre-eminent graduate student media studies conference—asks: what does winning and losing mean when things fall apart? Losers encompasses all aspects of loss/losing: from transness sequestered through fascist legislation, to the grief of love lost; from the literary losers of the picaresque to multi-billion dollar fad weight-loss diets. The Loser is a singular figure that encapsulates subjugated peoples: it is both an immensely personal purview and an inter-way of being that connects and relates disparate groups. Losers the world over are defined by loss, by their categorical opposition to winning and having won.

We invite analysis that also anticipates the power of loss. While losing/Losers may be seen as an entirely negative phenomenology, we at First Forum ask for participants to also consider the positive implications and manifestations of marginality/loss/errata: can we win by losing? What is lost through winning? Is the Loser already a liberated figure or one on the verge of freedom? Unburdened to maintain the status quo, the Loser faces impulses of revolution or adaptation, an always-already counter-cultural specter feared and reviled; the Loser is not necessarily a powerless figure.

Participants are encouraged to submit abstracts for 2023’s First Forum which explores, challenges, furthers, or contradicts the wide range of meanings suggested by the term Losers as it relates to a wide array of fields: cinema and media studies, literature, communication, gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and science and technology studies, critical theory, and philosophy.

Topics may or may not relate to:

• amnesia/recollection/aphasia

• trans autonomy & (dis-)empowerment

• (dis-)ability/debility

• aging/accidents

• lost media/lost in transit/lost in translation

• decay/decline/degradation

• grief/mourning/melancholy

• burnout/quiet quitting/wage theft

• Fans/dying stars/end of an era

• lo-fi/lo-rez/poor images

• SSRIs/k-holes

• losing your marbles

• doomscrolling/attention economies

• video games/professional sports

• punk rock/sellouts

• the Kafkaesque/red tape/lost paperwork

• revenge of the nerds/geek culture

• dispossession/exodus/exiles/diasporas

• loser lit—Pessoa, Bernhard, Pynchon, Burroughs, etc.

• memes/message boards/downvotes

• puberty

• impostor syndrome

• abortion access/bodily autonomy

• climate change/deforestation/mass extinction

• afrofutures/afropessimism

Submissions should include an abstract (-300 words) and a short biography (-150 words). Conference presentations will be 15-20 minutes. Applicants must submit their materials JULY 21st to firstforumconference@gmail.com. Please include “Name + First Forum 2023 Submission” in the subject line. We warmly welcome non-traditional projects, including but not limited to, video essays and art exhibitions alongside traditional academic papers.