FIRST FORUM CONFERENCE 2025—CALL FOR PROPOSALS 

DIVISION OF CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

OCTOBER 17TH AND 18TH 2025

This year’s keynote presentation will be given by Dr. Silpa Mukherjee (University of California, San Diego).

SPEED

The contemporary moment is often thought of synonymously with the idea of speed. The 20th and 21st centuries were marked by rapidly ascending rates of movement: the movement of capital, of goods, of ideas, and of information, as illustrated by the works of Arjun Appadurai, Manuel Castells, and others. While the information economy’s accelerated pace points to a culture of speed, it is also marked by an increased sense of fatigue, meaninglessness, and ennui. The solutions posited for either of these pronouncements—a radical suspension of our current pace, or an even greater impetus towards a high-speed culture. Amid these diagnoses and concomitant prescriptions of our current moment, we ask you to explore instead—what happens if we engage with speed as an experience, ontology, infrastructure, aesthetics, value, fantasy, consciousness, affect, or, as a way of being? Rather than thinking of acceleration as a fact of modernity, or slowness as its natural or logical alternative, we invite papers that destabilize and explore understandings of speed in the present moment, and conceptions of speed past. 

We contend that art, images, and media objects offer us ways to dismantle speed as an ontologically stable category and as a unified mode of experience. Such objects often defy the notion of speed as a linear spectrum, challenging the binary opposition of fastness and slowness as fundamentally disparate. Further, they open up new ways of engaging with the speed of our world(s)—sometimes through forms of sluggishness or boredom. We ask, for example: does the speed we have come to associate with computation exist on the same spectrum as the temporality of burnout? Of micro-trends? How do we think about bodily experiences of speed—on roller coasters, high speed trains, and the DMV, where the promise of speed clashes with the sluggishness of bureaucracy? Does speed imply a positive movement toward improvement/development, or a negative impulse toward extinction? Here, the notion of speed reveals itself as a concept that defines and creates the contours of temporality, spatiality, and ways of being and feeling in the world.

We invite papers and creative projects that emerge from a range of disciplines and methodologies, across the humanities and social sciences that consider, but are not limited to, the following:

• early cinema and speed

• (non) theatrical exhibition and their relationships to temporality

• degeneration and rot

• boredom and burnout 

• chaos aesthetics

• MDMA, club cultures

• slow violence

• slow death

• developmentalism and progress

• live-streaming genocide

• action films/bodies/affects

• roller coasters and amusement parks

• slow cinema and somnolent audience

• transportation

• zine culture/pamphleting

• shipping/logistics, amazon/temu

• gentrification

• futurism

• video games and the experience of speed

• fast-fashion, microtrends 

• sports media, the olympics

• cyberpunk and steampunk discourses

• mid-century car cultures

• accelerationist aesthetics

• race cars and F1

• early railway cultures and phantom rides

• aerial vision

• bureaucracy

• film festival circuits 

• micro-perception and deep, planetary time

• speed of computation

• zoom

Please submit an abstract (~300 words) and a short biography (150 words). Conference presentations will be 15-20 minutes. Applicants must submit their materials by August 26th, 2025, to firstforumgradconference@gmail.com. Please include “Name + First Forum 2025 Submission” in the subject line. Alongside traditional academic papers, we welcome non-traditional projects, including but not limited to video essays, short films, and art exhibitions.