CFP: Asian Visual Cultures Workshop (UC Irvine; 16 Mar; 13 Apr)

University of California, Irvine
April 13, 2008

Graduate students of the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine invite submissions from graduate students, independent scholars, and visual artists/filmmakers for a one-day workshop on Asian
Visual Cultures. This workshop aims to create a space for dialogue among those interested in Asia and visual cultures (including but not limited to art, cinema, games, theater, architecture, animation) beyond disciplinary frameworks in order to explore methodologies, theories, and objects of analysis.

We hope that this workshop will become an ongoing forum for sharing ideas, difficulties, and criticism around dialoguing research interests and dissertation projects.

This workshop will be experimental in nature. Instead of a conventional conference format, we imagine spending more time providing feedback to each presenter in a round-table discussion after each paper is presented. Also, presentations need not follow the standard of 'reading' papers. Let's talk about the work in progress, methodological difficulties, and theoretical impasses.

While there is no limitation to possible topics, we would be very interested in the following questions and problematics:

Cinema and Erotics
Affect and spectatorship
Genre Practice and its historicity
Transnational Asian Films: Production and reception
Feminist visual theory and criticism
Film festivals
Memory and history
Familiar/familial space
Queer visual culture
Vernacular modernity and urban space
Medium specificity
Re-imagining field/discipline
Film studies/area studies
Methodology, epistemology, objects of analysis
"Death" of cinema/ "rise" of "digital"

The deadline for submissions is Sunday, March 16, 2008. Please email a brief abstract (200-350) to Yun-Jong Lee

Please feel free to contact us for more information at: Yuka Kanno or Erin Huang