The NECS 2023 Conference - Call for Papers

Conference Topic: Care

Oslo, The University of Oslo, Blindern Campus

Deadline for submission: January 31, 2023

Conference dates: 13-17 June, 2023

The recently published Care Manifesto (2020) defines care as „…our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive – along with the planet itself.” Casting a wide net of universal ambitions, care is used here to refer to not only the care given and received within families, or in professional child, elderly and medical care, or the care administered in schools and education. Rather, care is meaningfully extended to privacy, culture, the economy, and, not least, the environment. While screen media does not figure prominently in this definition, it nevertheless plays an important role, not so much by it being in the picture but by providing the frame. From ecomedia to telephilia and from cinematic ethics to surveillance, notions of care underpin many key debates in cinema and media studies. Whether it be caring for people, animals, or the environment—or caring for objects and legacies, we ask: what does “care” allow us to protect and/or preserve? And, conversely, what can be committed, permitted, or excused in the name of care? Media is crucial in shaping the ways in which care is experienced, practised and understood in today’s societies. When the authors of the manifesto locate the urgency in redressing care in what they call the current “reign of carelessness”, few of us will be hard-pressed for examples in which this reign is articulated in a heavily mediated form. To offer one such instance, when private health insurances now offer ‘customised’ care, which promise ‘tailormade’ policies fitting ‘individual needs’ this supposed responsiveness to personal needs also suggests the abolishment of the principle of the provision of care for all. And yet, examples to the contrary also abound. As the increased focus on sustainability, inclusivity, empathy, and ethics in cinema and media studies indicates, we also live in an age of widespread politico-cultural pushes for care in the face of adversity.

In the spirit of care-ful scholarship and politics, thinking and acting, NECS and the Screen Cultures initiative at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, invite cinema and media scholars to come together to think about care and its implications across film and media history and into the digitally mediatised cultures of the 21st century.

For more details see the CFP online: https:necs.org/conference/cfp-2023/