CFP: Extreme Weather and Global Media

Subject: Call for Papers for 2014 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference

In the two decades bracketing the turn of the millennium, large-scale weather disasters have been inevitably constructed as media events. As such, they challenge the meaning of concepts such as identity and citizenship for both locally affected populations and widespread spectator communities. Mediathons of weather coverage justify an ongoing state of heightened security and our avid interest in them betrays the fact that so many of our own economic and social systems don’t make sense to us anymore and are now conceptually akin to “mysterious” (and at times dangerous) nature. In this context it is crucial to examine how “extreme” weather events illuminate the affective and ideological positions that media (in particular television) both foster and reflect. Any such studies must also account for increasing intermediality and the ways in which television paradigms continue to shift and influence the distribution and consumption of extreme weather. Seeking to better understand the political implications embedded within public affective responses as well as official narratives, this panel will consider weather media (particularly as an under-studied mode of television output) as part of a representational matrix through which audiences re-assess the security of late capitalism and social democratic logics.

Please send 300 word abstract and short bio by July 15 to Diane Negra (diane.negra@ucd.ie) and Julia Leyda (j-leyda@sophia.ac.jp).