For those who need to care about such things, here are some upcoming calls for papers in cognate fields (and yes, I am aware that this is a poor excuse for a blog entry):

Theorizing Fan Fiction and Fan Communities (essay collection)

Calling all academic bloggers:

Lore: An E-journal for Teachers of Writing seeks submissions for the Digressions section of the Fall 2004 issue. In the past year or so, blogging has become something of a national pastime with academics becoming a core group using blogs for personal and professional reasons. Yet even though many people embrace blogging, many others have no idea what it is or why anyone would do it. In this issue of Lore, we want to explore the roll that blogging plays for compositionists and the composition classroom.

Lore invites two types of writers to participate in this discussion. First, there are those who recognize a place for blogging in the profession. Do you keep a blog as part of your professional identity? Do you have your students keep blogs or read them for class assignments? What roles do you think blogs can play in a range of professional contexts? Second, there are those who keep blogs for personal reasons. What attracts you to the “blogosphere”? Do you keep an anonymous or pseudononymous blog and how did you come to that decision?

We recognize that many writers may see themselves in both groups, and no one needs to choose one over the other. We simply want to explore how blogs influence both the teaching of writing and those who teach it. Furthermore, you do not have to be a composition instructor to join the conversation; we hope to hear from a range of academics who keep their own blogs about how and why they do it. If you do keep a blog that withholds personal details like name or location, we will certainly respect your choice and will publish essays under whatever name you choose.

In Digressions, writers compose a response of approximately 1000 words. Please place URLs in brackets after the underlined text that you would like to use as a link. While we recognize that writing on the web is in the public domain, we also recommend that writers get permission from any bloggers you quote, or at least let them know that you are possibly exposing them to a wider audience.

Please submit your responses as an attachment in Word or RTF to Staff Editor, Nels P. Highberg by Wednesday, September 22, 2004. He will respond to everyone within the following week. While those who have previously written for Lore are again welcome to contribute, we are always seeking a wide-range of perspectives and new voices, especially those of graduate students and adjuncts.

Feel free to view the current issue for ideas about structure and style:

http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/lore/

Lore needs to hear what you have to say!

Cinema and Technology Conference

Call for papers
Cinema & Technology Conference
6-9 April 2005
Institute for Cultural Research
Lancaster University
Lancaster
United Kingdom

The Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, will host a major international conference around the broad theme of “Cinema and Technology.” The conference will take place at Lancaster University and venues in the city of Lancaster from 6 to 9 April 2005.

Our aim is to address the digitisation of the film image and the consequences of this process for theories of history, subjectivity, agency and perception. Within this general framework, participants will be encouraged to engage with the dematerialisation of the film image, the uses of digital cameras, the forms of contemporary cinematic experience, and revisionist debates about the meanings of technology. The conference will feature a public keynote address, two major plenary sessions, and a range of parallel sessions focusing on issues such as:

The digital imagination
Changing forms of cinematic consumption
Histories of film technologies
The apparatus and technologies of vision
Cinema/technology/ideology
Sound and light in cinema
The politics of cinema technologies
Technologies of new media
Other related topics

There will also be a series of related events in and around Lancaster that highlight the conference themes in a more informal setting.

Scholars in any discipline are invited to submit proposals for papers that address the implications of technology for cinematic practice and theory.

Proposal should include: provisional title, an abstract of up to 250 words, your name and contact details (including an email address), and should be sent to June Rye (icr@lancaster.ac.uk) by 1 September 2004.

Collage as Cultural Practice (conference):

Collage as Cultural Practice seeks to examine interventionist collage practices in all media, with an emphasis on the social, political, and legal implications of this method of appropriation. The conference, taking place March 24?26, 2005, at the University of Iowa, will interrogate the political and social dimensions of collage as a practice that enables oppositional commentary across the cultural spectrum: from the leftist collages of the Dadaists and the Situationists to the unauthorized use of corporate trademarks, interventions by queer activists, and the more recent flurry of Internet-distributed antiwar video collage pieces that appropriate from the mainstream media in satirical ways. We seek to bring together scholars of, and practitioners in, the media of film and video, music, literature, visual arts and beyond?putting together a series of panels, performances and screenings, and an exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art on Interventionist Collage: From Dada to Negativland. Confirmed speakers include: Patricia R. Zimmermann, Rosemary Coombe, Carrie McLaren, Mark Hosler, Lloyd Dunn, Philo Farnsworth, Douglas Kahn, and Xmena Cuevas. Possible session topics are: Collage and the Beat Movement; Collage and Copyright; Found Footage Film and Video; Dada and Surrealist Collage; Situationist and Fluxus Collages; Feminist Strategies of Appropriation; Collage in the Digital Age; Collage: Remixing Cultures; Collage:
The Cultural Politics of Appropriation; Collage: From musique concr?te to Hip Hop; and Collage: Queer Interventions. Send 250-word proposals for papers to Rudolf Kuenzli at rudolf-kuenzli@uiowa.edu or Kembrew McLeod at kembrew-mcleod@uiowa.edu. Conference registration is free. Deadline: October 15, 2004.