Call for Responses is now closed. The deadline was June 15, 2008

Flow Conference 2008 will resemble traditional academic meetings in name only: There will be no panels, no papers, and no plenary sessions. Instead, the event will feature a series of roundtables, each organized around a compelling question. Respondents are asked to submit a brief abstract addressing one of the roundtable questions listed below. We especially encourage responses that address issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and ability, as well as international perspectives.

To submit a response send a 150-word abstract to flowconference2008@gmail.com by June 15, 2008. In the subject line of the email please put the title of the roundtable to which you are responding. Be sure to also include your full name, e-mail address, and affiliation in the body of the email.

Please submit a response to only one roundtable topic. However, we imagine that some individuals will have interest in several roundtable discussions and thus difficulty choosing between them. We want to accommodate as many people and their preferences as possible. Therefore, it would be helpful for us to know about those individuals who are willing to participate in another roundtable if too many responses are submitted for their original question.

If this applies to you, please submit one response to one roundtable question AND let us know two other roundtable questions in which you’re interested. If the original question to which you respond produces too many responses, we will invite you to submit a response to one of the other questions.

Note concerning UT RTF students: While we welcome your participation with the conference, we ask that you do not submit a response to a roundtable. If you want to be a part of the 2008 conference you can either join the conference committee by sending us an email or look for upcoming volunteer opportunities (such as panel moderators) this fall. This only applies to RTF graduate students, UT students from other departments are welcome to submit an abstract.

We will inform participants of acceptance via e-mail by July 15, 2008. Upon acceptance, respondents will be asked to expand their abstract to a 600-800 word position paper, due by September 15, 2008.

2008 Roundtable Questions:

Failure
Failure defines television. Most programs, TV workers, and policy goals fail. Yet, we don’t study failure, we study success. Because we look at stars, successful programming, powerful executives, or the ruling ideas in broadcasting, success has become concomitant to cultural importance. Failure seems culturally irrelevant. What can we learn from failure? How is failure naturalized in programming, employment, and policy initiatives? What of reality TV’s losers, celebrity meltdown, and beloved shows that get canceled? Is failure part of “successful” programming?

TV and the Question of “The Mainstream”
How are changes in television’s perceived and/or real role as “the” mass medium destabilizing assumptions and theories foundational to TV studies? For example, does the cultural marginalization of the medium or the fragmentation of viewing require us to revisit how TV functions ideologically? How is TV’s changing social role encouraging scholars to pursue different research agendas? How might the current changes help us re-consider previous work on TV’s relationship to a notion of “the American mainstream”?

New Formations of Stardom in Contemporary Media Culture
Celebrity gossip blogs, voyeuristic glimpses into stars’ lives, and stardom associated with reality programs such as American Idol and The Hills have become commonplace. How are notions of stardom, celebrity publicity, and the utility of stardom shifting in contemporary media culture and in the popular imagination?

Music Fans and Copy Protection
More and more music fans, artists, and labels are rejecting DRMed file formats in favor of more lenient digital music sharing policies than what are available through most commercial music service providers. Under what conditions do music fans resist copy protections? When have music labels dropped copy protections? What is the disposition of digital music distributors towards DRMed formats?

Producing Audiences Through Television Metrics
One major consequence of television’s move into the post-network era and onto digital viewing devices is that the convenient fiction of Nielsen ratings has been challenged. What are the possibilities, perils, and politics of refining the Nielsen system? What new metrics are being introduced? How can subscription, packaged, and on-demand television be accounted for? How do emergent technologies build information capture into their design, and how is this inherent data being used? As more refined metrics become available, how can we account for individual viewing habits, networked viewing groups, and marketable viewer categories?

Televised Sports and Its Contexts
Given the popularity of televised sports from the Super Bowl to pay-per-view events such as ultimate fighting, it is curious that media scholars overwhelmingly neglect the influence of sports coverage. Sports offers interesting lines of inquiry for media scholars with regard to technology and new media, race and class and industrial practices. How can sports on television best be examined: As a genre? A site of racial/political struggle? A testing ground for new technologies and media convergence?

Mobile Television
Given the significant take up of cell phones around the world — one of the most adopted technologies to date — how or can this technology shift television viewing practices, gaps, and divides? What challenge does this represent for television? What of other mobile viewing devices?

Televised Religion
Religion remains decidedly under-represented in secular television even while religious-based networks are proliferating. Considering that the majority of Americans claim to believe in a higher power, how is religion represented—or not represented—on television and how does television shape our understanding of religion in the 21st century?

Television, Technology and Everyday Life
The industry vision of new/digital media foregrounds personalization and control in rather limited ways, typically reinforcing traditional forms of economic production and framing empowerment as adaptive consumption. What spaces, if any, remain for more meaningful autobiographical practices? What is the future of user-generated content in convergence culture?

Television’s Post-Network Promotional Strategies
What is happening to television’s promotional forms in a post-network era? As the medium adapts to a multi-platform future, how are alternative distribution and online delivery impacting the way programs are presented as part of a station or network’s offerings? What are the implications of these changes for television audiences?

“Bit@$%s Get Things Done!”
Television has historically fostered many famous female comics, yet several factors currently push women out of TV comedy. This roundtable asks how women such as Allison Silverman, Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have nonetheless managed to succeed in the television industry. Where are female comics today? How does female labor behind the scenes influence what we see on-screen? How do genre and format contribute to these questions?

Media Policy, Media Reform, and Media Criticism
This roundtable aims to bring together various conversations about media policy, convergence and reform/activism as they relate to scholars and critics of the media. What are the most productive ways to discuss regulation and policy in the current landscape of converging media, telecommunications and information services/technologies? How can we as scholars and educators continue to connect policy issues to the humanities-based study of media texts/institutions/audiences/etc.? What role can media scholars and educators play in formulating policy? Finally, in what ways can academics best advocate for media reform?

Talking Through The Wire
How does The Wire generate or expand conversations about issues traditionally engaged in television studies—notions of narrative and psychological complexity, quality television, representations of race/class/sexuality, serial television, place/geographic specificity, and “authorship?” Does the series say something new in these regards? More broadly, does the show facilitate conversations about politics and society in ways rarely addressed by politicians and the mass media? That is, can this series enliven and/or re-engage the governmental infrastructure in discussions of entrenched social problems?

Global Television Flow
Global TV flows have an important and controversial history. Drawing on the works of Raymond Williams, cultural studies scholars have theorized flow as a defining characteristic of television as a technology and a cultural form. Although there are significant theoretical and methodological distinctions between flow research in cultural studies and international communication, in recent years, the concept of “global flows” has been used in both contexts – albeit in different ways — to examine the growing transnational connections of television institutions, texts and audiences. In this context, how can we use the concept of “global flows” in television studies to create a more productive dialogue between scholarship in cultural studies and international communications?

Electronic Waste and Media Studies
As technology production and consumption increase dramatically on a global scale, are there potential environmental impacts? The electronic waste of this consumption – particularly in terms of discarded televisions and computers – disproportionately impacts the developing world. However, these wider environmental effects tend to be overlooked by media scholars. Similarly, as scholars we seem reluctant to consider our own roles as consumers who contribute to this problem. How do we address the wider socio-cultural impact of electronic waste as citizens, consumers, and media scholars?

Feminisms & Feminists in the Public Sphere
There has never been a greater need for informed feminist commentary than in the current cultural climate. While feminism is glancingly and regularly invoked as a straw (wo)man in popular culture, this is most often simply to rebut a feminist view before moving on to something else. When popular culture does engage with feminism directly, it frequently does so by sidelining it into “women’s issues” that are seen as peripheral to general questions of politics, economy and culture. This roundtable seeks to expand the range and depth of ways in which feminism and feminists are represented in our public discourse. How can feminist scholars, activists, and intellectuals exploit both old and new media to enter public debates? What can feminists in different national and cultural contexts learn from one another about their public work? How might we better connect questions of representation to gender politics more broadly?

The Media Industries and Media Studies
How might our histories of the media industries shift in light of contemporary changes? Can we speak of film, television, and music as distinct industries in this age of convergence? What theoretical frameworks and methods can be employed in conducting analyses of these industry/ies? What challenges do researchers encounter in studying the media industries and how might these challenges be overcome?

Narrative Franchises
What is television’s role in wider narrative franchises? How does syndicated storytelling function within larger narrative franchises supported by film, video games, fiction, and merchandise as well as fan-fiction?

Game Studies in The Academy
Computer games–teaching with them, building them, studying them—are all the rage in the academy. Indeed, interest in these sorts of theoretical, practical, and historical pursuits has been steadily growing for nearly forty years. Why then are most educational institutions still so reluctant to invest in game studies in any but the most cursory way? How do we shape game studies into a more respected and institutionalized discipline? Should we?

Digital Aura and Web 2.0 Canceled
How does Benjamin’s notion of “aura” change in the age of digital, user-generated content? At issue is the ability to replicate a digital original without any discernible difference in the copy. This digital duplication could upstage or upend the hegemony of the original performance, thereby devaluing the intellectual property’s value in the wider multinational media marketplace. This is of particular relevance as user-generated content, available on MySpace, YouTube, and other social networking sites, becomes the “property” of such websites’ owners. What are the ramifications of copyright, copyright infringement, and originality in an era of digital duplication?

Flow 2.0
Raymond Williams’ concept of flow in the context of television provided a new prism through which to think about content, industrial priorities, and audience reactions. Now that the stream of content for many people depends on an Internet interface, how can we reconceptualize flow? With its mix of content sources (radio, broadcasting, mashups, music, blogs, web sites, etc.), Internet-based media challenge us to come up with a more meaningful way to talk about what people are doing with media. What would that be?

The DTV Conversion
In February 2009, analog television broadcasting will cease and be replaced entirely by a digital signal. This issue has received little mainstream coverage, particularly in terms of what citizens will need to do to adapt to this change. What opportunities could result from the conversion to help the public and further their awareness of critical media issues? Is this a way to promote wider media literacy? What should concerned citizens and scholars do to position themselves to take advantage of these opportunities?

Editing to Make a Point
One of the most powerful (and often invisible) visual codes is that of editing. Usually editing is employed to create the illusion of movement and action. But sometimes, in subtle or not so subtle ways, editing is used “to make a point.” How do professional editors and teachers of film and television studies use editing to make a point–for entertainment, for enlightenment, for instruction, to create a visual simile or metaphor? How does this kind of editing fit into the longer work that is being created? And how does this kind of editing fit into a larger “history of editing”?

Viral Videos and Political Participation
While many critics have embraced online video as inherently democratizing, few people have addressed how the videos circulate online and on television, and how political videos often attach themselves to unexpected, and sometimes reactionary, meanings. In this context, how have the various forms of political video shaped our definitions of democracy and how has our ongoing attempt to define democracy shaped political video? How is online video influencing network and cable news programming, and what is the impact on the electorate?

The Series Text Canceled
LOST received tremendous media attention in Spring 2007 due to the creators’ decision to end the show after three more seasons of 16 episodes each. How has this impacted texts and affected storylines across the televisual landscape? Is this a function or factor in fan discourse surrounding this and other shows? What are the industrial contexts surrounding a stated end date? At the same time, this notion of finality is common to international television programming. Why has this change received so much attention here?

Online and Offline Fan Communities
What is the contemporary status of fan culture, both online and offline? With all of the attention paid to online fan communities, what and where are the meaningful offline fan activities? As media conglomerates increasingly acquire, monitor, and censor online fan forums, how has corporate control of fan culture impacted participation and free speech? How is this impacting fan culture?

Talent-Based Reality Shows and The American Dream
How do we account for the sudden proliferation of talent-based reality shows in which contestants demonstrate a unique skill that corresponds to marketable, commercially viable products and industries? (Examples include Top Chef, Project Runway, and America’s Next Top Model.) Victory traditionally consists of professional security, with a contract or job offer within the field. What are the politics of these shows in terms of consumerism and notions of success?

Teen Shows and Pop Music Canceled
Teen melodramas have long been used to introduce new pop music artists to their traditional audience. How do we understand this historical relationship? Is it one of cultural cache? Is it about grooming teens to be better consumers? Is this merely a marketing ploy? What of cross-fertilization and convergence? Are there class and gender considerations at work here?

Television Format Evolution? Canceled
In an increasingly complex and convergent television landscape, traditional TV formats are evolving. Consider Ugly Betty, a hybrid dramedy-telenovela; The Office and other NBC sitcoms airing “super-sized” 44-minute episodes; or The Disney Channel and Cartoon Network’s 15-minute-long serials. On the Internet and mobile devices, mobisodes and webisodes are becoming increasingly popular. Is it possible to clearly define and distinguish contemporary television formats?

“Who Killed the Video Star?” Canceled
Currently, there is no mainstream television network devoted solely to airing music videos. Videos are migrating off of TV and on to the Internet, into mainstream websites such as MTV.com and e-zines such as Stereogum and Pitchfork. At the same time, networks such as The N and Logo show videos between programs and music-based networks program videos during late-night hours. Is the music video still relevant in the televisual landscape, and how?