“In-betweenness” evades simple categorization, boundedness, and singularity, yet it brings to mind the space and moment of connection, the indeterminacy of transition, the passage between reception and meaning. For this conference, we invite contributions that engage with in-betweenness, articulating movement across boundaries and margins, lingering in liminal experiences related to disorientation, queerness, and representation. We seek papers that challenge and expand media’s historicity, conceptualizations, methodologies, and forms.

Within in-betweenness, we emphasize the terms “atmosphere” and “traces” as nodes that engage theories of political, social, and economic climates. Inviting environmental, spatial, and aesthetic dimensions, atmospheres generate rich questions about the shifting and ephemeral boundaries of media, while traces, in turn, reify transformation and feeling. Where do we trace the contours of eroding and fluctuating environments in mediated and real spaces? How do surfaces capture and display the remnants of past connections? In what ways do hybridity and intermediality offer opportunities for innovation and play? How do we find belonging at the thresholds of material and immaterial media worlds?

Asking these questions and more, we invite scholarship that centers media and mediation across disciplines and methodologies, backward-, forward-, and present-facing. Presentations may engage our ideas through topics such as, but certainly not limited to:

• ●  Hybridity

• ●  Transference

• ●  Environment

• ●  Gender and Sexuality

• ●  Representation and Identity

• ●  Margins

• ●  Textures and Surfaces

• ●  Intervals and Gaps

• ●  Processes (methods, movement, procedures)

• ●  Mood

  For consideration, please complete our submission form by July 30, 2024. Complete applications will include 1) a paper title, 2) a 300-word abstract, 3) a 100-word bio, including your name, pronouns, and institutional affiliation, if any. Participants will be notified by early August. For more information, please visit our website (https://sites.northwestern.edu/backwardglances/) or contact the Screen Cultures Graduate Student Conference organizing committee at: backwardglancesconference@gmail.com.