News/Research

BCNM SCMS 2021

18 Feb, 2021

BCNM SCMS 2021

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies' annual online conference takes place this year March 17-21, 2021. We are so pleased to have such an incredible contingent representing BCNM at this forum. The conference seeks to promote the field of cinema and media studies among its practitioners, to other disciplines, and to the public at large, in part through public recognition of award-worthy achievements and other significant milestones in the field.

This year our Designated Emphasis students Leah Simon, Julia Irwin, Tory Jeffay, Nicholaus Gutierrez, Harry Burson will join faculty Jacob Gaboury and Abigail De Kosnik, and alumni Bo Ruberg, David Humphrey, Alenda Chang, Irene Chien, Chris Goetz, and Renee Pastel in presenting their work.

Read on below for the incredible panels you can attend!

Media, Politics, and Militainment

Chair: Isra Ali, New York University

Leah Simon, University of California, Berkeley, “‘What Can a Camgirl Do With a Gun?’: The Production of Military Images in the Age of Hot Girl Heuristics”

Isra Ali, New York University, “Progressive Militarism: Dress Code”

Hanah Stiverson, University of Michigan, “From Pepe to the Punisher: The New Right-Wing Iconography”

David Rodriguez Martinez, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, “Savages and Saviors: the Re-emergence of Western Tropes in Contemporary War Films”

Cinematic Market Places: Exhibition, Promotion and Restriction

Chair: Julia Irwin, University of California, Berkeley

Deron Overpeck, Eastern Michigan University, “‘As Pretty a Piece of Price-Fixing as I Ever Saw’: Exhibitor Battles in the Post-Paramount Marketplace, 1950-1953”

Carolyn Jacobs, Yale University, “‘Don’t Take Them to Movies:’ Child Spectators and the Fear of Contagion, 1916”

Julia Irwin, University of California, Berkeley, “A Fineness of Touch, a Dispensation with Sight: The Films and Exhibition Practices of Lillian and Frank B. Gilbreth”

Derek Long, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘Who’ll Top the List?’: Centralizing the Management of Local Exchanges in Early Hollywood”

What are the Politics of Documentary Today?

Chair: Tory Jeffay, University of California, Berkeley

Mads Outzen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, “Facing Terror: On the Ethical Potential of Survivor Testimony in Documentary Film”

Wakae Nakane, University of Southern California, “The Political Aesthetics of Essay Film: Cinematic Introspection in Hara Masato’s The First Emperor (1973)”

Laurel Ahnert, Northeastern University, “Post-Truth Documentary? Examining the State of Documentary Media in an Era of Post-Truth Politics”

Tory Jeffay, University of California, Berkeley, “‘Flat-Out Fucking Formalism’: Strong Island as Trans-of-Color Critique”

Histories of Technology

Chair: Amy Skjerseth, University of Chicago

Nicholaus Gutierrez, University of California, Berkeley, “The Ballad of Morton Heilig: On VR Historiography and the Making of a Myth”

Amy Skjerseth, University of Chicago, “Sound Revisions: How the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument Redrew the Map of 1980s MTV”

Braxton Soderman, University of California, Irvine, “Intelligent Visions: Television, Platforms, and the Intellivision Game System”

Amaru Tejeda, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Claiming Space with Alkaline: The Battery as Media Infrastructure and Cultural Object”

ROUNDTABLE: Queer Theories of Computing

Chair: Scott Richmond, University of Toronto

Kara Keeling, University of Chicago, “Notes Towards a Trans* QueerOS”

Shaka McGlotten, Purchase University—SUNY, “Black+Queer Data: Capture, Evasion, Occlusion”

Paige Treebridge, DePaul University, “Queering Social Engineering”

Whitney Pow, Northwestern University, “c://Folder/File: A Trans of Color Computer History”

Jacob Gaboury, University of California, Berkeley, “On Uncomputable Numbers”

Fan Studies After 2020: New Speculations on the Power of Participatory Transformation

Chair: Regina Lee, University of Washington Seattle

Co-Chair: Alexis Lothian, University of Maryland College Park

Alexis Lothian, University of Maryland, College Park, “An Archive of Whose Own? White Feminism and Fan of Color Critique in Fanfiction’s Digital Infrastructure”

Regina Lee, University of Washington, Seattle, “‘Toward Equitable Assessment of Summative Social Media Projects: Fannish Approaches”

Abigail De Kosnik, University of California, Berkeley, “Thinking Fandom and Piracy Together: Researching Inequitable Distribution and Reception”

Brienne Adams, University of Maryland, College Park, “Grief and Respite: An Exploration of Black Fans’ Affective and Transformative Works”

Between Cacophony and Ordered Flow: Sound in Emerging East Asian Broadcast Media

Chair: Evelyn Shih, University of Colorado Boulder

David Humphrey, Michigan State University, “Outside the Frame: Live Laughter and Early Japanese Television”

Julia Keblinska, University of California Berkeley, “Noisy Environments and Leaky Infrastructures: Television, Cinema, and the Chinese City”

Jina Kim, University of Oregon, “Creating Sounds of Furious Anger and Tears of Longing in South Korean Serialized Radio Dramas of the 1960s”

Evelyn Shih, University of Colorado Boulder, “Innervation Generation: Noise and "Cool" TV in the 1970s Literature of Taiwan and South Korea”

Diversity Beyond Representation: Critical Video Game Studies at a Crossroads

Chair: Christopher Patterson, University of British Columbia

Co-Chair: Tara Fickle, University of Oregon

Respondent: Alenda Chang, University of California, Santa Barbara

Tara Fickle, University of Oregon, "'The Support to his Carry': Gendered fan labor in South Korean esports"

Christopher Patterson, University of British Columbia, “Digitized Brownness: Playing Empire and Resistance in Video Games”

Soraya Murray, University of California, Santa Cruz, “Video Games and Representation: Methodologies of the Hollow and the Loaded”

Working Conditions: Labor and Materiality in Games

Chair: Alenda Chang, University of California, Santa Barbara

Co-Chair: Jeff Watson, University of Southern California

Alenda Chang, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Is Weather a Spoilsport? A Thermodynamic Theory of Play”

John Vanderhoef II, California State University, Dominguez Hills, “The Writer Will Do Something: Exploring the Labor Conditions and Creative Affordances of Video Game Writers”

Aaron Trammell, University of California, Irvine, “Reviewing Utopia: The Digital Labor of Analog Game Reviews”

Identifying Technologies

Chair: Irene Chien, Muhlenberg College

Heather Nolan, University of California, Davis, “Inscribing the Invisible: The Mediation of the Body by Mindfulness Devices and their App Interfaces”

Irene Chien, Muhlenberg College, “Gamic Authenticity in Asian/American Cooking Video Games”

Megan Perram, University of Alberta, “Writing New Bodies: Critical Co-design for 21st Century Digital-born Bibliotherapy”

Xin Peng, University of Washington, “Color-as-Hue and Color-as-Race: Early Technicolor, Orientalism, and The Toll of the Sea (1922)”

Watching Television

Chair: Michael Kackman, University of Notre Dame

Michael Kackman, University of Notre Dame, “The Whole World Is Watching: Televisuality, Cultural Studies, and Technologies of Witness”

Itay Harlap, Tel Aviv University, “An Arabic Campfire on Shabbat Eve: Television and Nostalgia in the Documentary ‘Arabic Film’”

Karen Williams, Fordham University, “You Too: The Dangerous Intimacies of Netflix's Direct Address”

Renée Pastel, Boston College, “Fact-Checking Fiction: Historical “Fake News,” Assumptions of Knowledge, and Second-Screen Viewing”