Call for Papers
Affective Encounters: Tools of Interruption for Activist Media Practices

Special Issue of Feminist Media Studies
Guest-edited by Marta Zarzycka and Domitilla Olivieri, Utrecht University

Although there is no scholarly consensus on their meaning (their definitions ranging from Sigmund Freud to Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi to Teresa Brennan), affects, emotions and feelings have become tangible commodities in neoliberalism and late capitalism. Profoundly shaping the experience of community and collectivity, they are frequently employed by political bodies to maintain global and local market consumerism, social divisions, and notions of national belonging.
This special issue explores how affects, feeling and emotions can serve as strategies of activism, resistance, and disturbance that facilitate socially and politically transformative actions. It considers how media practices – such as fiction films, experimental documentary films, online digital archives, social media platforms, queer, feminist and lesbian pornography, or news broadcasts – reveal a potential to engender affective encounters and critical engagement beyond the rhetorical and the narrative. A turn to affective engagements enables the maker, the spectator, and the critic to engage with the non-linear and non-narrative elements of media - noise, rhythm, photographic blankness, spatial negotiations of proximity and distance, "contagiousness" of online debates, digital enhancement and editing. Such turn thereby escapes dominant codifications of meanings, and thus generating the possibility for counter-narratives to be performed, alternative stories to be enacted, and practices of resistance to be ignited.

We seek manuscripts that pay special attention to the interruption and suspension of meaning rather than its (re)instatement. We are particularly interested in processes and tools that counter the rule of narrative – as "the organization of a perceptual field according to the imperative of rendering things readable" (Panagia, 2009) – within dominant discourses. Contributions highlighting the strategies beyond the governance of narrative (as deployed by imperialism, patriarchy, and social homogeneity) will be of particular interest.

The following questions suggest some directions for inquiry that will be of interest for this issue:

- How can the distribution of affects and feelings facilitate political action, recognition, and dialogue, and bring about social change?
- How can we develop a critical engagement with the politics of viewing, sensing, archiving and witnessing as enacted by and towards marginalized subjects such as women, queers, and racialized groups?
- How can media and artistic practices reveal a potential to engender affective encounters facilitating socially and politically transformative action?

These questions should be considered through the matrix of interdisciplinary and intersectional methodologies, in which various categories of difference such as gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and geopolitical location come into focus. Drawing upon most recent scholarship in the field of media studies, critical race theory, gender and queer studies, postcolonial theory, and political activism, the essays should pay particular attention to what media practices can do as tools for political intervention when they work alongside the cognitive in the fertile field of affect.

Please submit a 450-word abstract and an abridged CV to Dr. Marta Zarzycka at m.j.zarzyckauu.nl<mailto:m.j.zarzyckauu.nl> and Dr. Domitilla Olivieri at <mailto:d.olivieriuu.nl> d.olivieriuu.nl<mailto:d.olivieriuu.nl> no later than December 15, 2015. In your abstract, please indicate how your paper will relate to one or more of the issue’s framing questions, listed above.


Important Dates

- Abstract submissions due: December 15, 2015
- Decisions on abstracts to authors: January 15, 2016
- First drafts of selected papers due: May 30, 2016


Aims and Scope
Feminist Media Studies provides a transdisciplinary, transnational forum for researchers pursuing feminist approaches to the field of media and communication studies, with attention to the historical, philosophical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions and analysis of sites including print and electronic media, film and the arts, and new media technologies. The journal invites contributions from feminist researchers working across a range of disciplines and conceptual perspectives.

Feminist Media Studies offers a unique intellectual space bringing together scholars, professionals and activists from around the world to engage with feminist issues and debates in media and communication. Its editorial board and contributors reflect a commitment to the facilitation of international dialogue among researchers, through attention to local, national and global contexts for critical and empirical feminist media inquiry.

For guidelines on how to format your paper, please visit the "Instructions for Authors" section on the Feminist Media Studies website: www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rfms. When submitting your paper, please do not follow the link ‘Submit Online’ as special issue papers are handled directly via email with the special issue Editors.