SECOND ANNUAL
SCREEN INDUSTRIES IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE CONFERENCE:
CULTURAL POLICIES AND POLITICAL CULTURE 23–25 November 2012, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Sponsored by the Czech Society of Film Studies and Masaryk University in collaboration with MINE – Media Industries Network Europe
The Second Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference (SIECE) will focus on the broadly defined issues of policies and politics. To date, historians have, by focusing on propaganda, censorship, and purges, examined in some measure the nature of top-down political control of media in the region; a region characterized somewhat notoriously by changes in political regimes and by the redrawing of national borders. Nevertheless, there remains a distinct lack of empirical and theoretical studies considering the ways in which policy and political agenda have shaped the structure and everyday practices of actual media institutions, and how, in turn, policy and political agenda have shaped media texts and cultural experiences of those texts. Accordingly, this conference provides a forum in which to interrogate the multifaceted relationships in East-Central Europe between, on the one hand, policy and politics, and on the other hand, screen media. Potential topics for papers and panels include but are not limited to: - Authoritarian state policies: direct, top-down state and Party control through ideological prescription, financing, quotas, censorship, planning, labor policies, etc … - Creative industries and today’s policy frameworks and institutions: “culture as heritage” and “cultural diversity” policies; adoption of neoliberal discourses around “creativity”, “creative economy” and “creative clusters”; regional and local economic development policies; European and national support programmes, including incentives for overseas producers, coproduction initiatives and “cultural tests”; festivals and film markets, etc … - Industry politics: political strategies and agendas as implemented and re-articulated through concrete practices of production, distribution, exhibition, and preservation - Micropolitics of production communities: struggles over authority, creative control, authorship, credit, reputation, trust, social status, etc … - Politics of the text: politicized and subversive genres, narratives, styles, and readings, understood through their interaction with top-down cultural policies - Public-service broadcasting: to what extent has television replaced the socialist state as the main commissioner of, producer of, and delivery system for film, and what are the cultural-political consequences of such a shift? - Governance of participatory media: piracy (including its long political history in the region), sharing, mashups, intellectual property rights enforcement, surveillance and new forms of censorship in terms of their impact on online audiovisual production and dissemination - Media corruption: non-transparent media ownership, clientelism and the ways in which media manipulate politics and public opinion have been discussed widely in communication studies, but consideration of these issues is conspicuous by its absence from culturally-based research on film and television in EastCentral European countries; however, last year’s conference showed that the question of who is “corrupting” audiovisual industries and how “corruption” takes form are topics of direct relevance to the region.
The Second Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference investigates historical and contemporary dimensions of the region’s audiovisual media industries from all angles – local, transnational, economic, cultural, social, and political – and through a broad range of original scholarship delivered in the form of conceptual papers and empirical case-studies. A selection of the conference proceedings will be published in a special Englishlanguage issue of the Czech film studies journal Iluminace (www.iluminace.cz). The 2012 SIECE Program Committee (consisting of the Steering Committee members of the Czech Society of Film Studies – see www. cefs.cz) invites proposals for twenty-minute conference papers and for panels of three or four speakers focusing on any topic related to East-Central European audiovisual industries. Panels of three to four papers will include a brief summarizing reflection of between five and ten minutes in length which will be delivered by an assigned respondent and which is designed to facilitate discussion. Proposals for conference papers should include a title, an abstract of up to 150 words, and between three and five key bibliographical references, along with the presenter’s name, the presenter’s institutional affiliation, and a concise academic bio. Panel proposals should include a panel title, a short description of up to 100 words on the panel’s focus, and proposals of all of the papers to be delivered (including the information described above). Please submit all proposals no later than 30 June 2012 to szczepan@phil.muni.cz. Conference attendance is free of charge, and the conference will be conducted in the English language.
Conference Organizer: Petr Szczepanik (szczepan@phil.muni.cz) in association with the Czech Society of Film Studies (www.cefs.cz), the Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture, Masaryk University (www.phil.muni.cz/wufv), and MINE – Media Industries Network Europe (www.mine-europe.com). Conference Management: Adéla Kokešová (adelakokesova@gmail.com; [+ 42] 737956645).