Re-thinking Trauma: Cinema, Performance, and Mediation - International Conference
Ekphrasis Center for Transdisciplinary, Liberal Arts and Creative Technologies Research

 Department of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2nd to 4th of September 2026

Trauma theory emerged within a historical and conceptual framework that assumed relatively stable relations between experience, representation, and witnessing (as an ethical and narrative position). Questions of testimony, narrative rupture, belatedness (the delayed emergence of traumatic meaning), and symbolic mediation shaped the field’s core vocabulary and continue to frame contemporary trauma research.

At the same time, the conditions under which trauma is encountered and transmitted have changed substantially. Cinema, digital platforms, online performance, networked archives, and algorithmic circulation now structure how traumatic events are seen, remembered, repeated, and responded to. Witnessing increasingly takes place across dispersed publics and uneven temporalities, rather than within discrete testimonial scenes. These shifts do not render earlier trauma theories obsolete, but they do place new demands on them.

In cinema in particular, trauma often becomes legible not only through explicit themes or narrated events, but through formal and affective structures: disrupted temporalities, durational rhythms, spatial emptiness or confinement, narrative opacity, repetition without resolution, and modes of looking that position the viewer as a witness without offering mastery or closure. In such cases, trauma is not presented as something to be fully explained or resolved, but appears as a structuring disturbance that organizes the film’s temporal, spatial, and affective logic.

This conference brings together scholars and practitioners to rethink trauma in relation to both contemporary media environments and to our changing ways of understanding the world. Rather than positing a break with established frameworks, we seek to examine how inherited concepts operate under present conditions: where they continue to illuminate traumatic experience, where they encounter limits, and where additional conceptual tools may be required. What such a rethinking might ultimately entail—whether in terms of theory, method, or vocabulary—remains an open question that this conference seeks to explore collectively.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners working across cinema studies, performance and theatre studies, artistic research, media theory, memory studies, psychoanalysis, and related fields, the conference aims to consider how trauma is currently conceptualized, represented, mediated, and experienced across theory and practice.

Cinema Focus: Peripheral Traditions and Post-1980 Aesthetics

A central focus of the conference is cinema as a site where new visual and narrative grammars of trauma have emerged across a wide range of cinematic traditions and forms. In films working within both established and less conventional modes, filmmakers have developed representational strategies marked by slowness, minimalism, spatialized memory, narrative opacity, and fractured temporalities, articulating and remembering trauma beyond classical testimonial forms.

We welcome papers on:

• Eastern European, Soviet, Chinese and other post-socialist cinemas
• peripheral or small-nation film cultures
• slow cinema and durational aesthetics
• documentary, hybrid, and experimental film forms
• cinematic treatments of historical, political, economic, or transgenerational trauma

Comparative, transnational, and theoretical approaches are equally encouraged.

Performance, Digital Mediation, and Artistic Research

We invite work examining how trauma is addressed through performance practices, streamed or digitally mediated theatre, immersive or site-specific projects, audiovisual installations, participatory documentation, VR environments, and other practice-based modes of inquiry. Presentations emerging from artistic or practice-as-research projects are welcome, provided they engage critically with methods, contexts, and theoretical questions.

Platforms, Circulation, and Contemporary Memory

Possible topics include:

• online mourning rituals and mediated grief
• trauma on social media and activist platforms
• algorithmic circulation and affect economies
• digital archiving and memory infrastructures
• AI-generated testimony or memorial forms

Here, trauma is not approached only as representational content but as something shaped by technologies of visibility, repetition, filtering, and reception.

Classical Trauma Discourse in Contemporary Dialogue

We also welcome contributions rooted in established trauma studies, psychoanalysis, literary or historical memory research that address:

• testimony and transmission
• narrative mediation
• belatedness and temporal rupture
• ethical witnessing
• collective and transgenerational trauma

Papers that place these frameworks into dialogue with contemporary media environments and practices are particularly encouraged.

Panel Format

The conference will be organized around 90-minute panels, each featuring four speakers:

• 15-minute presentations per speaker
• followed by a 30-minute moderated discussion with the full panel and audience

This structure is designed to allow substantial presentations while prioritizing genuine dialogue and exchange.

All participants may use audiovisual materials during their talks, including still images, short film excerpts, or documentation clips, as part of a standard conference presentation format.

Conference Tracks and Submissions

The conference will be organized around two complementary tracks, reflecting different ways of assembling panels and fostering dialogue.

Track 1: Curated Panels

Participants may submit individual paper proposals. Accepted papers will be reviewed by the organizers and grouped into thematically coherent panels. This track follows a conventional conference format, with panels curated to encourage dialogue across approaches while maintaining a shared conceptual focus.

Track 2: Proposed Panels

Participants may also submit proposals for complete panel sessions organized around a shared theme, question, or problem. Panel proposals should include a short description of the panel’s focus, along with abstracts for each presentation. Proposed panels should engage clearly with the conference theme and contribute to its central questions. This track is intended to support collaborative, collective, or ongoing research conversations and to make space for groups who already work together across disciplines, institutions, or practice-based contexts.

Both tracks follow the same presentation format and review standards. The distinction lies in how panels are assembled: through organizer curation (Track 1) or participant-initiated thematic grouping (Track 2).

When applying, please do mention which track your submission is to be considered for.

Submissions

Presentations may take the form of:

• Academic research papers (theoretical, historical, or analytical)
• Practice-based or artistic research presentations reflecting critically on creative projects and methodologies

Individual paper abstracts should be 250–300 words and include:

• Title of the proposed presentation
• Indication of whether the paper is primarily theoretical or practice-based
• Short biographical note (ca. 100 words)

Panel proposals (Track 2) should include:

• A brief description of the panel’s theme and rationale
• Abstracts for each proposed presentation
• Names and affiliations of all participants

All submissions will undergo peer review.

Publication

Selected papers will be invited for publication in a peer-reviewed special edition of the journal Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media. Ekphrasis is a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the study of cinema, performance, and visual culture, indexed in major humanities databases including ERIH PLUS. Further publication formats, including the possibility of an edited volume, may be explored following the conference, depending on the thematic coherence and overall scholarly quality of the contributions.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: April 3rd 2026
• Notification of acceptance: June 1st 2026
• Conference dates: September 2nd to 4th 2026

Selected Indicative Bibliography:

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale UP, 2021.

Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam UP, 2005.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton, 1961.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong UP, 2008.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, W. W. Norton, 1978.

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton UP, 1992.

Organizers

Dr. Doru Pop – Babeș-Bolyai University

Dr. Lucian Ţion – Babeș-Bolyai University
Teodora Crișan-Matcăbojă – Babeș-Bolyai University

Adrian Tătăran – Babeș-Bolyai University

Submissions and inquiries:

teodora.crisan@ubbcluj.ro

popdoru@gmail.com