This virtual conference marks Istanbul Bilgi University’s third annual event dedicated to women and media, following the conference Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television in April 2019, with proceedings forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan (November 2020) https://ftvconference.bilgi.edu.tr/ and the March 2020 virtual conference Gender Equality and Sustainability: Agnès Varda’s Sustaining Legacy https://ftvvarda.bilgi.edu.tr/  

This year’s focus blends scholarship with pedagogy. We seek contributions from scholars and teachers around the world that explore strategies, best practices, and past experiences when using films made by women in the classroom and when navigating women’s careers in cinema through teaching and research.

The two-day event will be split between two forms of scholarship: one day will be dedicated to traditional academic papers and roundtables; the other to audiovisual criticism. Individual paper presentations will be limited to 10 minutes. We will also consider pre-constituted, 30-minute roundtable discussions with 3-5 designated participants. Written contributions based on papers and roundtables will be considered for inclusion in published proceedings, whose format will be finalized after the conference.

For the video essay component, our goal is to challenge both established and emerging video essayists to devote their critical energies to audiovisual scholarship on women’s filmmaking. These video essays can focus on any aspect of women’s filmmaking, past or present. The conference presentation will consist of up to 10 minutes for screening the work (an excerpt may be selected if the full video essay exceeds this limit), followed by 10 minutes of commentary from the creator. We will consider audiovisual material that has already circulated online (e.g., posted to video sharing sites), but which was posted no more than two years prior to submission. The submitted work must not have been curated by any academic publications. Formal curation/publication for video essays may be offered after the conference to selected contributions.

Call for Papers