TVSERIES 2020: Discourses of Fictional (Digital) TV Series ADEIT - FUNDACIÓ UNIVERSITAT-EMPRESA DE VALÈNCIA Valencia, Spain, November 3-6, 2020 |
Conference website | https://congresos.adeituv.es/series20/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tvseries2020 |
Submission deadline | July 15, 2020 |
DISCOURSES of FICTIONAL (DIGITAL) TV SERIES
Universitat de València
Forthcoming Conference
4-6 November 2020
Conference Convenors: Carmen Gregori-Signes, Claudia Alonso-Recarte,
Miguel Fuster-Márquez, Sergio Maruenda-Bataller
Secretaries: Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras & Joaquín Primo-Pacheco
We are delighted to announce that the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de València and the Institut Interuniversitari de Llengües Modernes Aplicades de la Comunitat Valenciana (IULMA) will be hosting, on the 4th-6th November 2020 in Valencia, Spain, the International Conference on Discourses of Fictional (Digital) TV Series. The conference will address series originally produced in English.
Popular culture has undoubtedly been influenced by TV series, shows and sitcoms ever since television became a commodity in the middle-class household. Such series epitomise the rich, diversified heritage of twentieth and twenty-first-century consumer culture, reflecting in one way or another the social and political scenario of their time. The ideas and concepts beneath successful series are the product of the times; and it is also the politics, financial demands and established ethos of such times that determine and often limit the direction of the show and the type of discourse it assimilates.
Although hit series have always drawn enthused groups of followers, fandom itself seems to have become an empowered phenomenon in the last decades and particularly in the last few years. Indeed, with the advent of personalized service that streaming media, downloading, and video-on-demand offer, our emotional and social connections to series have shifted. The fact that companies such as Netflix or Amazon have, following the footsteps of long-established public or cable channels such as HBO, ventured into producing their own original series or miniseries goes to show the extent to which (digital) TV series (DTVS) have gained momentum and are currently one of the most profitable initiatives in the entertainment industry. Substantial investments into quality script writing, casting, special effects, directing, editing, and marketing, among other procedures, have ultimately delivered to the public all sorts of audio-visual fictional narratives that address the concerns and interests of a highly diversified viewership that is constantly under the scrutiny of production companies. This cultural phenomenon has caught the attention of scholars who, from a range of disciplines, have approached the multi-signifying discursive significance that fictional DTVS, as stories and products, have in current society.
In line with such scholarship, this conference aims to create a space in which to analyze, discuss and debate the discursive and narrative aspects of fictional DTVS. We seek to explore how competing discourses enable or confront identity politics, how narrative structures implode viewer expectations, how genre conventions are reinvented through discourse and audio-visual rhetoric, and to ultimately delve into what such strategies say about English-speaking cultures and communities.
Conference topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Multimodal discourses in DTVS.
- The function of dialogue in DTVS.
- Characterisation: innovations and stereotyping through characters’ unique discourse.
- Identity politics based on race, ethnicity, religion, age, class, or species in DTVS.
- Gender equality and sexuality in DTVS.
- Feminist, postcolonial, posthumanist and ecocritical aspects in DTVS.
- Conventional vs. experimental structures and narrative plots.
- Screen adaptations.
- Fandom-related discourses and industries.
Submission Guidelines
All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:
- Individual papers. Please submit a 400-500-word abstract (excluding references), along with 5 keywords and a short bio-note. Each speaker will be given a maximum of 20 minutes for his or her presentation. More interactive types of presentations are encouraged (as opposed to reading the paper). Abstracts should include theoretical framework, methodological approach, findings and references.
- Round tables. Round tables should not be conceived as a panel. They are to be designed according to a particular topic of debate that is discussed amongst 3-4 participants (and potentially attendees), all of which bring in different perspectives. The proposal should include both the individual abstracts (400-500 words each) and an abstract by the chair (400-500 words) on the development of the round table (summarising previous research, setting the scope of the presentations and including open questions to engage with the audience). 5 keywords and a short bio-note of the participants must also be included.
- Workshops. These should be practical and conducted by professionals and specialists, within the entertainment industry, with experience in DTVS. Please submit a 1000-word description of the topic and the design of the workshop itself.
List of Topics
- Multimodal discourses in DTVS.
- The function of dialogue and other forms of narrative in DTVS.
- Characterisation. Innovations and stereotyping through characters’ unique discourse.
- Identity politics based on race, ethnicity, religion, age, class, or species in DTVS.
- Gender and sexuality in DTVS. The use of DTVS as an innovative space for raising awareness about social inequality.
- Sexual and gender-based politics. Denunciation of patriarchal discourses, feminist utopias and dystopias.
- Posthuman, transhuman, biotechnological and ecocritical discourses in DTVS: the overcoming of humanism and the blurring of the boundaries between the human, the technological and the animal.
- From Ageing to Disability Studies in DTVS: portrayals of old age, illness, disease, and the handicapped subject.
- Screen adaptations. Conventional vs. experimental structures and narrative plots in DTVS.
- Fandom-related discourses and industries.
Invited Speakers
Monika Bednarek is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a corpus-based discourse analyst who works on language use in the mass media (media linguistics) and on the connection between language and emotion/attitude. She is the author of six books, including Language and Television Series: A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue (2018 http://www.syd-tv.com>) and The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity (2010). Most recently, she has published a collection of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters, Creating Dialogue for TV: Screenwriters Talk Television (2019). She tweets @corpusling, and maintains a website at www.monikabednarek.com.
Brett Mills is a Professor of Media and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Television Sitcom (BFI, 2005), The Sitcom (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human (Palgrave, 2017), and co-author of Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor of two editions of Reading Media Theory: Thinkers, Approaches, Contexts (with David M Barlow, Pearson, 2009/2012). Brett was the Principal Investigator of the three-year Research Council-funded project, ‘Make Me Laugh: Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry’, working with members of that industry to explore creative processes and creative labour. He is also a regular reviewer, having a weekly television discussion slot on BBC Radio Norfolk, and writing comedy reviews during the Edinburgh Festival for the magazine Fest. Website
Sarah Kozloff is Professor of Film at Vassar College, New York, USA. After working in film production in New York City, she earned a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and joined the Film Department of Vassar College in 1988. She was awarded the prestigious William R. Kenan Jr. Endowed Chair in 2009. She pioneered the analysis of voice-over narration and dialogue in film studies and refuted the traditional assumption that the visual is superior to the verbal with groundbreaking publications such as Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000) and Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (1988). She has also prefaced the book Film Dialogue (2013) and authored more than ten chapters on television, film, genre and narrative theory in books such as The Films of Preston Sturges (2015) and Directing (2017). Most recently, upon realizing that neither the books nor films of The Lord of the Rings could pass the Bechdel Test measuring the representation of women in fiction, she has applied her academic expertise to creative fiction writing. Her epic fantasy quartet, The Nine Realms, will be published by TOR in 2020. Website
Guillermo López García (Zaragoza, 1976) holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication (2002) from the University of Valencia, where he has served as Associate Professor of Journalism since 2008. Most of his research focuses on political and online communication. He coordinates the R&D Group Mediaflows (www.mediaflows.es/en). This project, fruit of the convergence of the two aforementioned research areas, focused on the analysis of communication flows among political parties, the media and citizens in processes of political mobilization. He has authored/edited 12 books and numerous articles and book chapters in various scientific publications, such as Election Campaigns & Political Communication (2019); Comunicación política. Teorías y enfoques (2018); Pantallas electorales. El discurso de partidos, medios y ciudadanos en la campaña de 2015 (2017); Periodismo digital: redes, audiencias y modelos de negocio (2015).
Kay Richardson works in the UK, University of Liverpool, in the Department of Communication and Media Studies, School of the Arts. She has published widely in media and language studies. Broadcast TV drama dialogue was the subject of the 2010 monograph with Oxford University Press (Television Dramatic Dialogue: a Sociolinguistic Study), whilst nonfiction radio comes in for attention in her recent article "The Listening Project as caring public talk" (Discourse, Context and Media (2018); “Newspaper reportage features in "Spelling-gate: politics, propriety and power", Journal of Language and Power, (2018), whilst previously she has also written about social media interaction (Internet Discourse and Health Debates, Palgrave 2005. A review article about the study of mediated fiction is published in the 2020 edition of the Routledge Handbook of Media and Communication Research. Website
Manuel de la Fuente is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and the Coordinator of the Media Studies Degree at the University of Valencia (Spain). His most recent research interest is on the political effects of popular culture, while his teaching focuses mainly on the documentary film, Spanish film and popular music. He also served as a research fellow in Europe, United States and South America, Geneva, Paris 12, Virginia, Newcastle, Valdivia, Valparaíso and Temuco. He has published articles on music and cinema in various international journals and the books Frank Zappa en el infierno. El rock como movilización para la disidencia política (2006) and Madrid. Visiones cinematográficas de los años 1950 a los años 2000 (2014).
Organising Committee
Convenors
- Carmen Gregori-Signes
- Claudia Alonso-Recarte
- Miguel Fuster-Márquez
- Sergio Maruenda-Bataller
Secretaries
- Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras
- Joaquín Primo-Pacheco
Scientific Committee
- Alcantud Díaz, María (Universitat de València)
- Álvarez Benito, Gloria (Universidad de Sevilla)
- Armengol Carrera, José María (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha)
- Bednarek, Monika (University of Sydney)
- Brígido Corachán, Anna (Universitat de València)
- Byers, Tom (University of Louisville)
- Chávez, Daniel (University of New Hampshire)
- Chierichetti, Luisa (Università degli Studi di Bergamo)
- De la Fuente Soler, Manuel (Universitat de València)
- Fernández-Caparrós Turina, Ana (Universitat de València)
- García Martínez, Alberto Nahum (Universidad de Navarra)
- Gualberto Valverde, Rebeca (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
- Kozloff, Sarah (Vassar College)
- Ledford-Miller, Linda (University of Scranton)
- Leggott, James (University of Northumbria)
- Locher, Miriam A. (Universität Basel)
- López García, Guillermo (Universitat de València)
- Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria (Swansea University)
- Méndez García, Carmen (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
- Messerli, Thomas (Universität Basel)
- Mills, Brett (University of East Anglia)
- Monrós Gaspar, Laura (Universitat de València)
- Nelson, Robin (University of Manchester)
- Pérez, Héctor J. (Universitat Politècnica de València)
- Piazza, Roberta (University of Sussex)
- Planells Bolant, Laura (Universidad Católica de Valencia)
- Queen, Robin (University of Michigan)
- Ramos Gay, Ignacio (Universitat de València)
- Richardson, Kay (University of Liverpool)
- Romero Barranco, Jesús (Universitat de València)
- Santaemilia Ruiz, José (Universitat de València)
- Valls Oyarzun, Eduardo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
- Zago, Raffaele (Università degli Studi di Catania)
Venue
Fundación Universidad-Empresa de la Universitat de València - ADEIT
Plaza Virgen de la Paz, 3 (located behind Santa Catalina Church)
46001 Valencia, Spain
Tel: + 34 963 262 600
http://www.adeituv.es/
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to tvseries@uv.es
Sponsors
Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya (Universitat de València)
IULMA (Institut Interuniversitari de Llengües Modernes Aplicades de la Comunitat Valenciana)