2024 University of Pittsburgh Grad Student Conference 

Film and Media Studies

“Crisis and the Everyday”

Keynote Speaker: Gil Hochberg, Columbia University

Date: September 21-22, 2024 

The twenty-first century has been marked by crisis. We are witnessing state and police violence, military occupation and imperialism ravage our world. Xenophobia, nationalism, and authoritarianism have brought democracy and the public sphere under siege. Meanwhile, environmental exploitation by corporations and states promises planetary disaster on a different level altogether. The changing climate is rewiring virus networks and larger inter-species relations as we enter a new age of global contagion. Crisis is a proliferating network of connections and chain reactions that individuals, institutions, and societies have thus far been unable to comprehend, let alone address.

Crisis is a mediated social practice brought to us by an endless stream of audiovisual material and participatory new media. While crisis often postures as a scandalous break in time, we are interested in unpacking its multi-faceted and quotidian nature as it unfolds at local, national, and transnational levels. We seek to examine the relationship between mediated representation and permanent crisis. How are the challenges that confront our moment transformed as they pass through the screen, be it on smartphones, computer and television screens, or the cinema? How is media culpable in producing, heightening and profiting from these crises, and how does it offer pathways for resistance, organization and action? What role do citizen artists, filmmakers and other media practitioners play in witnessing, documenting, processing crisis?

We are looking for research capable of considering both the real problems with which society must contend and the emergent effects of their mediated representations and dissemination. We hope that prolonged engagement with this tension will be productive. 

Submissions may include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Archival practices
• Censorship and control
• Cinema and cultural hegemony
• Cinema and mental health
• Cinema in the age of media convergence
• Cinema, disasters and the Anthropocene
• Citizenship, democracy and the internet
• Digital media and activism
• Digital technologies and new cinematic modes

• Forensic architecture
• Labour in film and television
• Media and governance
• Migrant and diasporic cinema
• Narratives of resistance
• New media and futures of documentary
• Occupation, conflicts and national identity
• Witnessing and media re-presentation

Interested graduate students should submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) – along with biographies (maximum 100 words), institutional/departmental affiliations, and current email – to pittfilmgradconference@gmail.com by July 1st, 2024. For more information, please contact the Pitt Film and Media Studies Graduate Student organization at the above email.