Call for papers: “Failing Media”

Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference

University of Chicago, April 25–26, 2025

Keynote: Nicholas Baer (UC Berkeley)

Buffering videos, glitching apps, lagging games, outdated GPS maps, spotty Wi-Fi, AI hallucinations, mistaken autocorrections, frayed cables, and broken projectors: we are constantly confronted with media that fail. Beyond these banal encounters, there are more sinister media failures: widespread digital misinformation, discriminatory algorithms, and facial recognition tools that are unable to see darker faces. More than just frustrating disruptions, failing media reveal something about our expectations, habits, engagement with, and participation in a world that has become saturated and increasingly defined by media technologies. Failing media force us to confront our reliance and dependence on these technologies and infrastructures, prompting us to rethink their material, environmental, and phenomenological residues. This conference, taking up the topic of “failing media,” considers how media history is a landscape littered with malfunctions and mistakes.

Media history has seen no shortage of reflections on failure. Media archaeologists have long been interested in failed or obsolete media: curiosities that emerged and vanished quickly, inventions that did not work as intended, or technologies that were imagined but never realized. Historians of early cinema and visual culture have likewise attended to marginal, unsuccessful, and short-lived practices. Scholars in infrastructure studies, meanwhile, have emphasized how failure and technological breakdowns help make visible the hidden networks—submarine cables, data centers, and power grids—of our digital society. In line with these methodologies, we invite proposals that reject teleologies of progress and instead take failing media seriously for what they reveal about the history of communication, culture, and capitalism. How do breakdowns, malfunctions, and failures expose the ideologies, systems, and materialities at play in our contemporary media ecologies?

As we gather for the University of Chicago’s 20th Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference, we also want to consider how our own field has (or has not) failed “media.” The first iteration of this conference was hosted in 2003, the same year that the Society for Cinema Studies met for the first time as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. To mark this anniversary, we encourage presenters to take this opportunity to examine how “media” figures in our own disciplinary formations. What is the place of “media” in “Cinema and Media Studies”? Has this catch-all term failed the conceptual or historical nuance of its objects, which include radio, television, games, the internet, digital culture, extended reality, photography, print and telecommunications technologies, and other “non-cinema” media? How has the push for “media-inclusivity” changed our conceptions of our own objects of study, and how has it altered our disciplinary alliances with fields like art history, comparative literature, visual and performing arts, communication, and area studies? How does media archaeology itself figure in relation to cinema studies today?

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Media archaeology and film history

• Infrastructure and platform studies

• Materiality and new materialism

• Artificial intelligence and critical data studies

• Media preservation and archiving

• Media art and artistic practices

• Methodological approaches to failure

• Theories of failure, success, and perfection

• Apparatus theory, thing theory, and queer theory

• Universal design and dis/ability

• Hardware and software

• Obsolescence, repurposing, and repair

• Environment, extraction, and e-waste

• Glitch aesthetics and data-moshing

• Media literacy, content moderation, and disinformation

• Privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and hacking

• Information loss, file corruption, and the non-extant

• Networks, routes, and geographies of media

• The history or present state of “media” studies

In addition to traditional academic conference talks (15-20 minutes), we also invite proposals for artist talks and other alternative formats. Please submit a 250-word proposal and 100-word biography to Hugo Ljungbäck and Nat Modlin at failingmediaconference@gmail.com by January 15, 2025. Accepted participants will be notified via email by February 15, 2025.