Hosted  by the University of Southampton Centre for International Film Research (CIFR)

The 9th Annual BAFTSS conference will take place entirely online from 7th -9th April 2021. It will be hosted by the University of Southampton Centre for International Film Research (CIFR), and takes as its theme ‘Time and the Body in Film, Television and Screen Studies’. In focusing on time and the body, the conference seeks to bring attention to two elemental components of the physical world, whose manifestation in moving image media is however always dependent upon technological, cultural and artistic determinants.

The conference invites submissions for papers or practice-based research on any aspect of time and/or the body, whether human, social or otherwise, in Film, Television and Screen Studies. These might include:

• how different treatments of time and the body vary according to historical, national or regional context, technology or exhibition space;
• how special visions of time and the body distinguish art and entertainment, helping define different varieties of genre;
• how categories of pleasure and punishment, love and labour, work, class, care, production and reproduction are each experienced; and
• how stardom and performance, action and pace, haptics, spectacle and contemplation, each involve particular understandings of temporal or corporeal properties.
• how time and the body help us rethink the relationship between nature and culture, or contain a political potential in areas as diverse as futurism and nostalgia, biopolitics or ecology, or with regards to how time and the body are gendered, sexed and raced.

The conditions of the 2021 conference bring home with particular pertinence the fundamental, yet malleable, natures of time and the body. The conference will be held entirely online, and will adopt a different format to increase participation and accessibility. Panels will be conceived as opportunities for discussion, with participants offering summaries of their research and devoting the rest of the time to debate with their fellow panel members and audience. Participants will be asked to provide a 10-minute presentation, script or any other form of audiovisual criticism prior to the conference to allow their research to be available to attendees in advance. In keeping with such a format, the conference will not feature keynote speakers, but rather a series of round table discussions about the challenges and opportunities the discipline currently faces.

We thus invite proposals for papers, practice, audiovisual essays, workshops or panels of three or four papers. BAFTSS is committed to issues of equality, diversity and inclusivity and we particularly encourage those proposing pre-convened panels to be mindful of this.

Submission guidelines: Proposals for individual papers should be no longer than 300 words, plus presenter’s name, affiliation, email address and a short biography (150 words max). Proposals for workshops and pre-convened panels should include details of individual papers (where relevant), plus a short summary (300 words max) of the session and information about the chair.

We encourage BAFTSS Special Interest Groups [SIGs] to submit proposals for panels consisting of three or four presentations, a workshop, online screenings, and discussion panels. SIG Annual Meetings can form part of the session or be organised separately.

Papers submitted and accepted for the cancelled BAFTSS conference 2020 at the University of St. Andrews are welcome to resubmit them with an address to the new theme. Please include a note with your abstract stating whether it was accepted for the BAFTSS 2020 conference.

The deadline for proposals is 01 December 2020.

Email proposals to: baftssconference2021@gmail.com

Registration: As part of the commitment to an innovative, inclusive and discursive experience, conference attendance will be free to PGRs and those not in full time employment, and £10 for all other attendees to cover the costs of administrative and technical support. Further details about registration will be announced in late-January 2021.

BAFTSS Membership: All attendees must be BAFTSS members at the time of the conference.  You can join here. 

Conference website:  https://sites.google.com/view/baftss2021/