Fwd: SCMS 2014 CFP: The Mind in Midcentury Media

From: dleopard <[email protected]>

Call for Proposals

Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)

March 19-23, 2014 in Seattle

The Mind in Midcentury Media: Mentalities on the Cusp of the Digital Age

It can be argued, using a Foucauldian formulation, that the postwar period
was the beginning of the current digital episteme as changes to media and
culture were shaped by the ramping up of American capitalism, cold war
diplomacy, and the globalization of youth and technology. This panel will
feature papers that focus on the ways in which theories of mind (while
keeping conscious of the political and cultural ramifications of this
theme) serve as reciprocating structures within media from the 1950s to the
1980s. These ideas shaped the ways that the mind and mentalities were
imagined onscreen, and in turn these media served to shape popular
conceptions of how minds worked and how character was formed (extending
upwards toward the larger totality that is society).

Theories of the mind have been crucial to both the production and critique
of film and media throughout the twentieth century. While psychoanalysis
gained prominence within film studies during the 1970s, with the rise of
cultural studies and the increasing dispersion of pop-neuroscience,
psychoanalysis became, once again, the bad object of public – and sometimes
scholarly – discourse. But in the postwar period, other models of the mind
– behaviorism, phenomenology, and cybernetics (and that sweet, popular
child of psychoanalysis – ego psychology) – also served up explanatory
concepts for understanding and producing film, television, and
electronic/digital media in an American culture dominated by movies,
advertising, glossy magazines, paperbacks and screens of many shapes and
sizes.

Consequently, this panel seeks papers that examine films, television shows,
computer programs, and print and visual cultural objects from the 1950s to
the early 1980s that served to shape, or were shaped by, popular
conceptions of the mind (or more colloquially, the self). Papers could
address the ways in which ideas about the mind were represented in a given
media production or the ways in which these same mentalities can serve to
explain the context in which these programs were developed and produced.
Although the films of Alfred Hitchcock fall within the above definition,
this panel seeks papers that look at media in a broader context that
includes feature films but also documentaries, avant-garde media, teaching
machines, industrial and educational films, television programs and
commercials and such.

I am particularly interest in papers that focus on documentary and
para-documentary texts (such as industrials, educational media, and the
avant-garde).

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words, 3-5 bibliographic sources and a
short bio to Dan Leopard ([email protected]) by August 5, 2013. Submissions
will be responded to by August 15, 2013.

Dan Leopard
Associate Professor
Media Studies and Communication
Saint Mary's College of California
310-779-4908
[email protected]
[email protected]

Teaching with the Screen: Pedagogy, Agency, and Media Culture
www.routledge.com/9780415640626
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