NEW CREATIVE PRAXIS IN FILM AND TELEVISION: Hybrid Futures of Gender Equality

Conference Program

Organizing Committee

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• Dr. Feride Çiçekoğlu | Istanbul Bilgi University
• Dr. Beth Tsai | University of California, Santa Barbara
• Dr. Colleen Kennedy-Karpat | Bilkent University
• Dr. Diğdem Sezen | Teesside University
• Dr. Ebru Thwaites Diken | Istanbul Bilgi University
• Dr. Estrella Sendra Fernandez | SOAS University of London
• Dr. Katie Bird | The University of Texas at El Paso
• Dr. Şirin Erensoy | Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF
• Res. Assist. Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan | Istanbul Bilgi University

Dear participants,

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Although the pandemic has been a challenge for creatives and researchers on a global scale, at the same time, these conditions have pushed the limits of artistic creativity and generated thought provoking experiments in form and distribution. This has led to burgeoning production and performance of video essays online, a trend that has also been reflected in the applications submitted to our conference. While we have received a number of exceptional proposals suitable for our conference, we are framing new categories and expanding the format to be more inclusive. We hope to be in dialogue with scholars, film practitioners and students, and early career artists interested in rethinking the hybrid futures of audio-visual production by sharing their academic work in traditional paper or audio-visual presentations. The following are the new formats to which we welcome you to submit a proposal under the newly extended deadline. 

ROUNDTABLE: Behind the Scenes of Creative Praxis

This roundtable discussion aims to explore behind the scenes of artistic and creative production. Investigating the futures of hybrid forms requires a critical and a reflexive understanding of the process of creative production and the labor involved in the process. This round table aims to better understand behind the scenes to rethink the hybrid futures of audio-visual production as well as the possibilities of the video essay medium in commentary, criticism, teaching and academic publishing. We invite all who wish to reflect on their experiments and experiences of video essay production behind the scenes.

WORKSHOP: Collaborative Video Essays Online / Unfinished Works

The digital turn has increasingly opened up space for the video essay in online platforms. This workshop invites early career and established scholars and videographic practitioners to present their video essays and other visual forms as works in progress. In alignment with the theme of our conference series -- that is, collaboration in production and performance as a means of fostering gender equality -- we invite participants who wish to experiment with online, collaborative video essay production and open their work to peer feedback.    

Undergraduate Video Essay Workshop

This workshop – a spinoff group from the main workshop described above – aims to bring together student artists, enabling them to present their work and receive feedback on their projects and foster international collaborations. The students will not only develop their video essay projects, but also rethink the status of the image and cinematographic representation in emerging hybrid forms. Interested students (who are currently enrolled in any undergraduate program) may submit works already evaluated in their previous courses, or new work-in-progress. 

ROUNDTABLE: The Video Essay as Creative Pedagogy 

One aim of the conference is to explore the potential of the video essay as a creative methodology that can be applied in academic teaching. This seminar/roundtable will focus on how instructors have integrated digital video assignments into course assessments in higher education. Teachers with this experience are invited to join the roundtable to share their insights. Points of discussion will include best practices, pitfalls, and integration of video assignments to broader department curricula. 

PANEL: Video Forms and Academic Publication

Video forms can figure prominently in our academic research agendas, although many questions remain about how such work will be reviewed, published, and accredited for promotion and other avenues of professional recognition. This panel invites scholars, past or current editorial board members, and publishers to discuss the evolving academic status of the video essay and other audiovisual outputs. The editorial criteria used to evaluate video essays is an integral part of this discussion, which will also reflect on where the video essay form stands in relation to other emerging audio-visual forms that navigate the boundaries between visual art, cultural criticism and streaming media. We invite practitioners and academics who wish to participate to reflect on their own experiences, and media professionals who wish to reflect on the video essay form as a new form of publishable critique.

MOBILE EVERYDAY: Making at Hand

Inspired by the feminist filmmaking practices of making-do with the materials on hand and celebrating the creativity of making for oneself with only the subjects of day to day life, we invite short video submissions no longer than two minutes capturing a single everyday routine task or moment in everyday life. This emphasis on what filmmaker Courtney Stephens has called the "minor spaces" of gendered lives also opens up room to creatively play with other routine and mundane corners often overlooked because they are merely nearby. Adapting our prompt from Irene Lusztig's "Feminist Filmmaking Syllabus for Anyone," we encourage participants to "celebrate the mundane, everyday, routine;" "critique every day labor conditions;" document maintenance work: care for others, care for you, the upkeep space and self; look at the overlooked actions and cumulative time of tasks, "to make art from the boring, repetitive, domestic, quotidian." We encourage participants to resist the impulse to create something polished which would require time, labor, and care in short reserves due to the ongoing disruptions of Pandemic life. Instead we hope this short pause for a low-stakes, one-off self-making experiment offers an alternative model of creative praxis less dependent on productivity and guilt and more welcoming for creativity wherever and whenever we can find it. We suggest the following parameters not to restrict, but make possible this practice.

How to:

Let it be Small: 2 minutes or less
Keep it to be Accessible: Use only DIY, low cost/cheap, accessible production tools (think mobile camera and on board mics)
Allow it to be Simple: Employ home movie techniques - one take, hand-held or propped up, minimal or in-camera editing, little or no additional text or voiceover
Imagine an Audience of One:  The video is only for you, a documentation or diary of the vent
Compose with the Near at Hand: Show what takes up your days now.

Call For Submissions

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New Creative Praxis in Film and Television planned for May 6-7, 2022 marks Istanbul Bilgi University’s fourth annual event dedicated to women and media.

Inspired by the principles of gender equality and sustainability – two of the core principles of İstanbul Bilgi University – the first in this conference series was Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television in April 2019, with a book from Palgrave Macmillan published in November 2020. Then came the March 2020 virtual conference Gender Equality and Sustainability: Agnès Varda’s Sustaining Legacy, with proceedings volume The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda Feminist Practice and Pedagogy (2022) forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Finally, the Teaching Women’s Filmmaking in April 2021 featured Catherine Grant’s keynote and video essay as anchoring pieces for a prospective Open Screens special issue under peer review currently.

For 2022 we seek contributions from scholars and practitioners around the world that explore strategies, best practices, and past experiences when new forms with hybrid ways of storytelling on a variety of digital platforms transform the hierarchical relations of production.

We invite submissions focusing on the intersectionality expressed in subversive media practices that engage new digital technologies. We are particularly interested in how marginalized groups (i.e. LGBTQIA, Black diaspora, religious minorities, indigenous peoples, etc.) experiment with new forms of expression in contemporary digital and transnational media. We also welcome and encourage practitioners to submit their creative media work that may have been “abandoned” or “unfinished” to play up the complex, emotional, and often invisible labor in the making process. Such practices call for re-thinking creative subversion in praxis and the subjectivity that emerges from it.

The two-day conference will be held online, and aims to include practice-based work as well as traditional academic papers and roundtables. Regardless of format, each presentation will be limited to 15 minutes. Contributions will be considered for published proceedings, whose format will be finalized after the conference.

The presentation format for creative film and media practices will consist of up to 10 minutes for screening the work (an excerpt may be selected if the full work exceeds this limit), followed by 5 minutes of commentary from the creator(s). The submitted work must not have been curated by any academic publications.

The committee is pleased to welcome award-winning filmmakers, scholars, and educators Dr. C.A. Griffith and Dr. Karen Pearlman as the featured keynote speakers for the two-day conference.

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Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Web series and streaming television
• Smartphone filmmaking
• Intersectional gaze
• Intersectionality in filmmaking
• Auto-ethnography and film forms
• The meanings of subversive praxis
• Hybrid forms and the future of gender equality
• Transnational production of global feminist subjects
• Gender and sexuality in new media forms
• Digital distribution of analog media from the predigital era
• Archiving praxis
• Digitalization, restoration and preservation
• Gender and sexuality in abandoned, unfinished, works-in-progress
• Collective and collaborative authorship
• Practice based research
• Gender in film and television production
• Pedagogies of gender and creative praxis

Alternative Formats might include, but are not limited to:

• Audiovisual Essays/Videographic Criticism
• Desktop Documentary
• Practice-based Research: Experiments, Tests, Tinkering
• Experimental Film
• Virtual Installation
• Interactive Games
• Audio Documentary/Soundscape
• Multimodal/Crossmedia study
• Platform/Social Media manipulation
• Documentary
• Abandoned, unused, found footage
• Making Ephemera/Documents, "Notes Towards a project in progress," Outlines, Production Notebooks, Locations photos

Submission Requirements

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• A traditional paper proposal must include a 300-500 word abstract, a bibliography with up to 5 entries, and a brief author bio.
• Roundtable, preconstituted panels, and collective authorship panel proposals must include a ~500 word abstract describing the goal of the panel, a bibliography/filmography with at least 5 entries, and bios and contact information for each of the 3-5 participants. Please indicate clearly in the proposal which panelist is the primary correspondent.
• Alternative submissions must include a link to the complete work/advanced work-in-progress (with password if access is restricted), an abstract, a bibliography/videography for prior scholarship cited in the work and related scholarship, as well as a brief creator bio.

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Please direct all inquiries and submissions to Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan no later than March 1, 2022 / 12.00 AM GMT. | nilufer.arslan@bilgi.edu.tr