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Reminder: European TV Memories – Call for papers

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Reminder: deadline is September 6th, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

Journal of European Television History and Culture

Vol. 2, Issue 3: ‘European TV Memories’

The Journal of European Television History and Culture (http://journal.euscreen.eu) welcomes paper proposals for its third issue dedicated to ‘European TV Memories’ and guest-edited by Jérôme Bourdon (Tel Aviv University) and Berber Hagedoorn (Utrecht University).

The journal is the first peer-reviewed multi-media e-journal in the field of television studies. Offering an international platform for outstanding academic research on television, the journal has an interdisciplinary profile and acts both as a platform for critical reflection on the cultural, social and political role of television in Europe’s past and present as well as a multi-media platform for the circulation and use of digitized audiovisual material.

The journal’s main aim is to function as a showcase for a creative and innovative use of digitized television material in scholarly work, and to inspire a fruitful discussion between audiovisual heritage institutions (especially television archives) and a broader community of television experts and amateurs. In offering a unique technical infrastructure for a multi-media presentation of critical reflections on European television, the journal aims at stimulating innovative narrative forms of online storytelling, making use of the digitized audiovisual collections of television archives around Europe.

The theme of third issue of the journal, due for publication in April 2013, is European TV Memories. The editors welcome two kinds of contributions:

  • scholarly articles (historical, sociological or anthropological with a European focus) of 4,000 words
  • discoveries: journalistic essays (2,500 words) which include audiovisual sources as a central component andreflect on the practical challenges of doing television research in an archival or academic environment (e.g. case studies, new collections, news from archives, audio/video interviews).

European TV Memories

The phrase “European TV Memories” can be understood in many ways, of which we can suggest three:

  • Memories as remembering: memory as content actually remembered and shared (especially in contexts and events triggered by the researcher (focus groups, life stories).
  • Memories as policy: as the way the institutions of European television have tried to engineer, generate, support, and disseminate specific memories (at least, potentially, collective memories, considering the reach of the medium).
  • Memories as text: as they can be inferred from the close analysis of text as vectors of memory.

Although there is no strict correlation, different disciplines have generally focused on different understandings of memory. “Memory as text” is frequent among historians and philosophers, “memory as remembering” is analyzed by social psychologists and sociologists, while “memory as institution” is connected to a more political perspective (political sciences, but history as well).

We invite contributions across disciplines and across different conceptions of memories. Similarly, we would appreciate contributions, which study television memories beyond the genres usually emphasized in the study of memory (news and current affairs and historical programmes). TV series, advertisements, entertainment, can be considered as well.

Finally, three aspects cannot always be limited strictly to the medium of television, which interact with other medium, either “old” or “new”. The memories of news events, for a given viewer/citizen, cannot be isolated from a news culture, which includes the press, once the newsreels, today online news. The memory of cinema is built, to a large extent, through television. This is why we will invite contributors to include other media, especially new and digital media, in their analysis, although the focus should be on television.

Proposals are invited on (but not limited to) the following suggested topics:

Television as an institution of memory

  • the policies of memory in and on television
  • event memories: public/private memories of televised media events
  • commemorations and anniversaries
  • reruns and repetition
  • nostalgia programming and TV memorabilia

Preservation and erasure

  • the impact and challenges of accessing TV history and memory in the digital age, considering a.o.: online access and storage, copyright issues, open source archiving, digital contextualization, user generated data
  • the TV user as archivist
  • the future of TV memory

New cultures of remembering and forgetting (via) television

  • the impact and challenges of new and digital technologies
  • new cultures of viewing and user participation, inside the household (wallpaper memories) and outside
  • the gendering of television technologies and experiences
  • transnational TV memories

Researching television memories

  • the methodological debate: archives, life-stories, political statements

Paper proposals (500 words) are due on September 6th, 2012. Submissions should be sent to the managing editor of the journal, dr. Dana Mustata (journal@euscreen.eu). Articles (2-4,000 words) will be due on December 15th, 2012. Please consult the journal’s Author Guidelines. For further information or questions about this issue, please contact Jérôme Bourdon and Berber Hagedoorn.

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