Extended deadline for 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 September 2–4, 2026

DEADLINE EXTENDED: May 1st, 2026

The conceptual vocabulary of trauma studies — testimony, belatedness, narrative rupture, symbolic mediation, ethical witnessing — took shape under conditions that assumed relatively stable relations between experience, representation, and the witnessing subject. These foundational categories continue to inform contemporary research. Yet the material and technological conditions through which trauma is encountered, circulated, and made legible have shifted considerably.

Cinema, digital platforms, networked archives, online performance, and algorithmic systems now mediate how traumatic events are seen, remembered, replayed, and responded to. Witnessing unfolds across dispersed publics and asynchronous temporalities rather than within bounded testimonial encounters. These developments do not invalidate inherited frameworks, but they generate new pressures — conceptual, methodological, and formal — that call for sustained critical attention.

Within cinema specifically, trauma frequently becomes legible not through explicit narration or thematic statement but through formal and affective means: disrupted temporal structures, durational rhythms, spatial confinement or emptiness, narrative opacity, repetition without resolution, and modes of looking that position the viewer as witness without granting mastery or closure. Here, trauma operates as a structuring disturbance — organizing the film's temporal, spatial, and affective logic rather than serving as content to be explained or overcome.

This conference invites scholars and practitioners to examine how inherited concepts function under present conditions: where they continue to illuminate traumatic experience, where they encounter limits, and where new conceptual resources may be needed. What such a rethinking ultimately requires — in terms of theory, method, or vocabulary — is itself a question the conference seeks to explore collectively.

We welcome contributions from cinema studies, performance and theatre studies, artistic research, media theory, memory studies, psychoanalysis, and adjacent fields.

AREAS OF INQUIRY

Cinema: Peripheral Traditions and Post-1980 Aesthetics

A central concern of the conference is cinema as a space where new visual and narrative grammars of trauma have taken shape across diverse cinematic traditions and modes. Filmmakers working in both established and less conventional registers have developed representational strategies characterized by slowness, minimalism, spatialized memory, narrative opacity, and fractured temporality — articulating and remembering trauma beyond classical testimonial forms.

We welcome papers addressing:

• 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 engagements with historical, political, economic, or transgenerational trauma

Comparative, transnational, and theoretical approaches are equally welcome.

Performance, Digital Mediation, and Artistic Research

We invite contributions 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

Topics of interest 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

In this area, trauma is approached not solely 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 grounded in established trauma studies, psychoanalysis, literary or historical memory research, addressing:

• Testimony and transmission
• Narrative mediation
• Belatedness and temporal rupture
• Ethical witnessing
• Collective and transgenerational trauma

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

PANEL FORMAT

The conference is organized around 90-minute panels of four speakers each:

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

This structure is designed to allow substantive presentations while prioritizing genuine dialogue and exchange. All participants may use audiovisual materials during their talks — still images, short film excerpts, or documentation clips — as part of standard conference presentation format.

CONFERENCE TRACKS

The conference is organized around two complementary tracks.

Track 1: Curated Panels Participants submit individual paper proposals. Accepted papers are 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 shared conceptual focus.

Track 2: Proposed Panels Participants 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, together with abstracts for each presentation. This track supports collaborative, collective, or ongoing research conversations and makes space for groups already working together across disciplines, institutions, or practice-based contexts.

Both tracks follow the same presentation format and review standards. Please indicate which track your submission is intended for.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

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

Panel proposals (Track 2) should include:

• Brief description of the panel's theme and rationale
• Abstracts for each proposed presentation
• Names and affiliations of all participants

All submissions 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 — 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 thematic coherence and scholarly quality of contributions.

KEY DATES

Abstract submission deadline: May 1st, 2026

Notification of acceptance:

June 1st, 2026

Conference dates: September 2–4, 2026

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

ekphrasis.teatrufilm@ubbcluj.ro