Call for Papers: Global Snapshot: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Media, Performativity, and Global Communities

Call for Papers: Global Snapshot: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Media, Performativity, and Global Communities

May 14-15, 2022 | Zoom

A Collaboration Between the UCSB Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Research Focus Group “What Is a Shakespeare?: Shakespeare and Global Media”

Many scholars have questioned what the rise of globalization, facilitated through new forms of technology, could mean for our ability to study and reach larger audiences. While some media practitioners and researchers have struggled to keep pace, changes to global technologies also present the benefits of accessibility and creativity. Due to the impacts of Covid-19, global media has become an ever more vital avenue for continuing typical social practices in scholarship and artistic endeavors like conferences and performances. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to interrogate the methodologies that have arisen with media development around the world. What is “global media,” and how have its various implementations influenced research and other endeavors? How can acts of formal or everyday performance combine with or be adapted to reach diverse audiences? What do we gain or lose by using various forms of media rather than being in person, or through the labor of keeping up with global media’s rapid developments? Where do ideas of permanence and freedom factor into these developments?

Topics could include but are not limited to the following:
-social media (Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and scholarship
-film adaptation
-recorded performance and ephemerality
-performance transference between time, space, and/or culture
-everyday performance as viewed or implemented through a technology-focused lens
-reenactments brought into the present through globalization and technology
-interdisciplinarity in global media practices
-new ways of archiving and utilizing technology
-fandoms on the internet
-Zoom and its creative uses
-Shakespeare’s global (post)colonial legacies
-ways in which global media charts globalization’s impacts on race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class
-the emergence of and historical developments in global media as contingent, developing sociocultural modes of communication
-queering global media
-new materialist approaches to technology and media
-transnational performance and globalization

To apply, please send a brief (no more than 300 words) abstract and your CV to GlobalSnapshot2022@gmail.com by April 1, 2022. In your abstract, specify if your contribution will take the form of a traditional academic paper, presentation, or performance. We also welcome proposals for roundtables, curated panels, and creative interventions. Please limit your length to 15 minutes per presentation.

UCSB is located on unceded Chumash land in Isla Vista, California.