The interest in materiality within television studies has been reflected through various scholarly perspectives, from work on spaces and set designs, to heritage and costume, to product-placement and the role of material objects, popular culture, and merchandise, to the role of the television set itself as a material object.
However, these discourses on materiality within the context of television as object and medium have rarely been directly connected to the field of materiality studies and object-orientated philosophies. This conference aims to spark debate and explore the interplay between television, materiality, design, and identity, as well as the intertextual and intermedial dimensions of television and the relationships that are formed, through its material cultures, with audiences and environments.
Scope
This conference hopes to bring together papers on material culture and television and seeks to explore ways in which a focus on materiality can enhance our understanding of and connection with the medium. The intention is to provide an insight into how materiality impacts on the understanding of television today (its meanings and practices), and also in reverse, the ways in which television materiality contributes to the production and transformation of material cultures beyond the screen.
The conference invites interdisciplinary perspectives and welcomes proposals from all disciplines and approaches, including (but not limited to) television studies, media studies, digital media, drama and performance, cultural studies, history, sociology, literary studies, critical theory, philosophy, art, etc.
Possible topics might include:
- Contemporary material discourses of television
- Television as a material object
- Nostalgia and television’s object reality
- Television design and material cultures
- Television history and television’s situatedness between the material and the immaterial
- Television and the digital realm
- Intermediality and object reality on and of television
- Cultural history
- Television as display
- The (television) museum
The conference will take place at the University of Hull on Monday and Tuesday, 21st – 22nd March 2016.
Submission and Details:
Please address abstracts or proposals of panels (of no more than 300 words) along with information about institutional affiliation and a short bio to Dr Iris Kleinecke-Bates at i.kleinecke-bates@hull.ac.uk
The deadline for submission of proposals is: Friday 6th November 2015
*Website:* CFP: Material cultures of television – University of Hull
<http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/drama,-music-and-screen/news-and-events/cfp-material-cultures-of-tele.aspx>