Journeys Across Media (JAM)

Journeys Across Media (or JAM) is an annual interdisciplinary conference, run for and by postgraduates working in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading. It has been running since 2003, and carries on the interdisciplinary focus of the department, by looking at issues concerning film, theatre, television and new media. The running of JAM offers postgraduates in the department a chance to gain invaluable experience of planning and running a conference, and all delegates the opportunity to gain experience of presenting their work, at different stages of development, in the active, friendly and supportive research environment of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. Past events have considered a range of topics, including medium specificity and cross-media relationships, adaptation, perception and engagement, and nu-romanticism. For more information on past JAM events please visit our archive.

 Journeys Across Media

Thursday 19^th April 2012

Time Tells: Temporal Excavations in Film, Theatre and Television

JAM (Journeys Across Media) 2012 is celebrating its 10^th anniversary with the theme of time. The conference seeks to address issues of time in film, theatre, television, and more widely in performance, media and art, and initiate discussions about the temporal across disciplines, practices and fields of research.

Modernity has often been perceived through ever more urgent temporal demands; modern technologies and art forms (film, television, video) have also been examined as time-based media. Film has been discussed as an imprint of time itself. Debates around representations of time, organisation of time in film, the experience of film time, or film as an archival entity have been only a few of the approaches to the rich investigations of cinematic time.

The most prominent link between time and television is that of 'liveness', which highlights the contemporaneous nature of some broadcast television. This is heightened when the broadcast is for a special occasion (i.e. a Royal Wedding or Charity Event) and the notion of sharing a 'television moment'. Although an under-researched area, television and memory rely on understanding the role that time plays within this relationship. Explorations of the impact 'represented time' and 'real time' have on the structure and identity of fiction television programming, have also been central.

As with screen media, in theatre, the physical presence of time on stage, the endurance of performer and spectator, consideration of the aesthetics of duration in discussing time-based and durational modes of performance, and time as a framing device for a performance are only some of the areas of focus when discussing the temporal. In addition, time is vitally important in the construction of gestural narratives. Concepts like instantaneity, rhythm, repetition or duration are very important and crossover into Deaf and disability performance practices.

This is a call for postgraduates engaging in contemporary discourses around time to submit papers for the JAM 2012 conference; topics may include, but are not restricted to:

Perception of time

Time and memory

Spatialisation of time/Time-Space

Cinematic time

Time and technology

Time and New Media

The archive

Revivals, Anniversary Productions, Retrospectives and Re-enactments

Sequels, Series and Recurring Characters

The Evolution of the Spectator in Time

Endurance Art

Debates on Ephemerality within performance

Life-as-art

The experience and performance of Duration

Time-based performance

Timelessness

Journeys Across Media (JAM) 2012 is the 10th annual international conference for postgraduate students, organized by postgraduates working in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. It provides a discussion forum for current and developing research in film, theatre, television and new media. Previous delegates have welcomed this opportunity to gain experience of presenting their work at different stages of development in one of the most established postgraduate conferences in the country, and within the active, friendly and supportive research environment of the Film, Theatre & Television department at the University of Reading. For a second year running, the JAM team will be guest-editing a special issue of Intellect's Journal of Media Practice. They will draw on papers presented at the conference, thus providing further opportunities for new researchers to publish their work and interact with established scholars.

Non-presenting delegates are also very welcome to the conference; their work, should they wish to submit it to the organising committee, will also be considered for the journal.

CALL FOR PAPERS deadline: Friday 3^rd February 2012

Please send a 250-word abstract for a fifteen-minute paper and a 50-word biographical note to Tonia Kazakopoulou, Johnmichael Rossi, Simon Floodgate, Edina Husanovic, Deborah Marman-Ngome and Martin O'Brien at jam2012@reading.ac.uk. Proposals for practice-as-research presentations/performances are warmly invited; these have to conform to the 15-minute format.

A limited number of travel bursaries may be available for the JAM Conference 2012, offered by the Film, Theatre and Television Department at the University of Reading; please fill in the relevant section on the registration form if you wish to apply.

We would appreciate the distribution of this call for papers and wider promotion of this conference through your networks. Journeys Across Media is supported by the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at Reading, the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD) and the Graduate School, University of Reading.

Research Groups

The department is home to three Research Groups, each of which is managed entirely by postgraduates: Practice as Research, Theory Group, Film Analysis. Meetings for each group take place twice a term. They are attended by postgraduates and academic staff from within and outside the department. Discussion is linked to a performance and/or critical/theoretical text, which is chosen by group members prior to the discussion. These meetings provide an informal setting in which issues connected directly with departmental research can be openly expressed, discussed and debated.