Panel proposal: The “Host City”: Media Festivals and Urban Spaces

Deadline has passed but the outcome of this call might be worth keeping an eye open for.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, MA, March 21-25, 2012.

This panel invites papers on relationships between film and media industry festivals and the urban, sub-urban or rural communities that claim them.

As film and media festivals of all stripe proliferate around the world, a variety of stakeholders jockey for position and advantage in the geographical and cultural contexts chosen to host them. Many of these events are well-established and have assumed a defensive position aimed at maintaining brand identity and prestige. Others are ascendant, still others nascent at best. Each of these communities, however, have a unique relationship to their event(s), and each of these relationships provides fertile ground for investigating the role of media festivals in promoting discourses of community identity, establishing infrastructural networks, reifying the importance of being mediated, utilizing the ”local” to speak “globally”, and a variety of other processes. Case studies on particular events/locations, comparative analyses, and attempts to theorize the event-location relationship are welcome, among other approaches.

Questions addressed might include:

• how do local communities create and grow a successful media festival?
• how do established festivals deal politically, economically, structurally with host communities?
• what benefits or challenges accrue for host communities?
• what is the role of the festival in supporting both the community and the industry of which it is a part, and are these imperatives always in a state of cooperation?
• what does it mean to be a “host city”?
• what is the nature of the mediation occurring around festivals (as opposed to that deriving from other events)?
• how do we approach theoretically and epistemologically the festival/community relationship?
• how do historical/archival approaches to yesterday’s festivals help us understand today’s?

Submissions are welcome on these and related questions, and international foci are encouraged. Please send abstracts of 250 words plus a short bio to robert.peaslee(at)ttu.edu by August 15, 2011.