Extended Deadline: CFP: The Labour of Media (Studies): Activism, Education, and Industry

Greetings!

Would you mind circulating the below notice about an extended deadline for
this CFP? Thanks in advance!

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*With apologies for cross-posting*

*The Labour of Media (Studies): Activism, Education, and Industry*

Call for Participation
Concordia University, Montréal, November 16-17, 2018
*EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: JULY 15, 2018*

Confirmed keynotes: Alexandra Juhasz (Brooklyn College), Vicki Mayer
(Tulane University), Charles Acland (Concordia University)

We are a group of knowledge workers creating a forum for discussion and
analysis of contemporary academic labour in media studies inside and
outside of the academy.  The university is characterized, in a neoliberal
environment, by precarity and exploitation, especially in humanities
disciplines such as media studies. As media proliferates and is organized
by capital in a variety of emergent contexts, the position of media labour,
and the place of those studying media industries and representations, grows
more precarious, contract-based and instrumentalized. Precarity is the new
tenure.

The emergence of the “corporate university” in North America has created a
vacuum in, and an exodus from, the field of knowledge work in media and
industry, resulting in a migration of activists away from the university.
Some of us leave the system entirely, entering para-academia, devoting our
collective energies to causes impossible to reconcile with the
neoliberalized university. In this context we continually find ourselves
struggling within the constraints of profit and utility.

But how do we, as media scholars engage with those working in the
industries and practices we so closely study? Within the university, where
media scholars share departments with the new trainees of the post-Fordist
knowledge economy, these dynamics of professionalization take hold at
earlier and earlier stages of education, as obligatory co-ops, unpaid
internships, promised futures, and student debt drain the potential for
meaningful revolt. Buckle down, work hard, and you’ll do just fine. Never
mind the debt, there are jobs aplenty as long as you’re prepared to sell
your future labour time, with compounded interest. While this means that
many media trainees enter industries increasingly designed to slash their
protections as workers, others use their training for activist potential.
But this ultimately means another avenue of traditionally un- or under-paid
work. The university is designed to train the new indebted precariat for a
lifetime of free labour.

We want to create a venue for discourse, and to encourage activist
engagements with topics such as casualization, competition, colonization,
and limitations to academic freedom in the context of media industry and
labour research. As knowledge workers we must confront and articulate the
normative bounds placed on our activities in order to mobilize outside of
the institution. We must also engage with our comrades in the industries
and networks we study in order to generate more robust bonds between
contexts of knowledge production, cognitive labour, and so-called creative
economies.

We invite graduate students, LTAs, artists, filmmakers, part-time
lecturers, professors, para-academics, public scholars, community
activists, union representatives, interns, writers, and all knowledge and
media workers engaged with the exploitation of cognitive labour and
committed to exploring these issues through their work, to join our forum.
We welcome proposals for papers, panels, workshops, roundtables,
performances, and non-normative modes of knowledge exchange in order to
create an environment of dialogue and a platform for collective action that
will build connections between disconnected sectors of cognitive labour.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

-para-academia, activism, street universities, and autonomous communities
of knowledge workers
-challenging university/industry connections
-alternative/hybrid research and research-creation methodologies
-alternative/radical pedagogy and new pedagogical technologies
-unions, labour institutions, and political action
-training modules and the instrumentalization of media education
-immaterial, affective, and feminized labour
-research clusters, labs, incubators, and other neoliberal creatures
-internships and free labour
-the myth of the creative class and the city
-debt
-resistance, non-participation, and imagination of future politics

Abstracts or proposals of 250-300 words, in English or in French, should be
submitted by email to [email protected] by July 15. In addition, please
include a ~100 word bio. Submissions will be reviewed by committee members,
and authors will be informed whether their paper is accepted by July 30.
Conference proceedings will be published in a special issue of *Synoptique:
An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies*, and information on
submission will be provided after the conference.

For updates and more information, please see the conference website and
Facebook: https://medialabourconference.wordpress.com/ and h
ttps://www.facebook.com/medialabour/

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