Conference
MeCCSA 2025 Conference, 4-6 September 2025, Edinburgh Napier University
Theme: Identity and Belonging
Media and culture play a crucial role in shaping identity, especially in contemporary contexts marked by economic struggles, conflict, and migration. The significance of identity is heightened as individuals navigate their sense of self in new and evolving cultural and social environments. This raises questions about how identities can be preserved or adapted, and the responsibilities of academics and researchers in addressing identities at risk.
Questions of identity have been at the heart of MeCCSA disciplines and debates for a long time. How identities are mediated and how they mediate themselves is often at the core of our work. sections and networks in many ways reflect this across gender, race and ethnicity, disability, social movements, etc. Our 2025 conference seeks to further this questioning, whilst also considering the issue of belonging. Whether we belong to research communities that embody media, communications or cultural studies, and whether we belong to groups that prioritise areas such as climate change, policy or conflict, this conference provides an opportunity to reflect on the character of our diverse disciplines and where we find spaces of belonging.
We envisage the conference to be a mix of scholarly papers, themed panels, posters, film screenings, performance, installations, and other practice-based or artistic research contributions.
For any queries, please contact the organising committee: meccsa2025@napier.ac.uk
For news and updates, please see the event website: https://screenacademyscotland.ac.uk/meccsa/homepage/
Programme
Our final programme for this event can be found here.
Our final abstracts for this event can be found here.
Registration
Registration for this conference is now open, please follow this link and fill in the appropriate registration option, you are encouraged to submit your registration as soon as possible. Early Bird submissions are 11th July and Standard Submissions are the 4th of August 2025.
Keynotes
Our keynotes have now been announced and are as follows.
Mallika Sarabhai – Says Who?
In Hindu philosophy the first being is half male and half female. One, with static energy, the other with kinetic. From this springs life.
In India we worship Goddesses and women rulers – both historic and current.
In India we also abort female foetuses and video gang rape as sport.
What is the jaundiced perspective that makes all these facts sit together comfortably? Why do women become the foot soldiers of patriarchy and misogyny?
Over the years I have worked at unearthing variations of our myths, to track down in which periods women and goddesses got reduced or became subservient. What was the ethos? Who ruled? Why was she inconvenient? Who didn’t become a goddess?
Another prism of examination has been looking at who authored these text – male or female? Upper caste or marginalised? North Indian or South Indian?
This performed talk looks at these perspectives and tries to navigate the many pitfalls in standing tall in a gendered and hierarchical world. Using India’s most codified and ancient classical Dance style, with theatre and often masks or objects, I try and unravel where ‘being’ gets refracted and then becomes an accepted reflection or truth. What happens to a woman’s identity as she navigates these patriarchies of ‘being’ and ‘belonging’?
Gholam Kiabany – State of Citizenship and Identity
The recent rise of the far right and the spectre of fascism, rather than appearing from nowhere, builds upon and expands Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis which dominated imperialist state policy after 9/11. Disastrous military interventions which ensued in Afghanistan and the Middle East were followed by the redrafting of citizenship laws across Europe and identifying racialised minorities as a threat to Europe’s Enlightenment values, in what was repeatedly described (with no hint of irony or shame) as Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage. The clash of civilisations, therefore, was not only taking place ‘out there’, but also, very much ‘at home’.
A few decades earlier Stuart Hall suggested that Thatcherism had succeeded in ‘neutralising the contradiction between the people and the state/power bloc and winning popular interpellations so decisively for the Right’. Authoritarian populism, he argued, could therefore be understood as ‘the project, central to the politics of Thatcherism to ground neoliberal politics directly in an appeal to “the people”; to root them in the essentialist categories of commonsense experience and practical moralism – and thus to construct, not simply awaken, classes, groups and interests into a particular definition of “the people”’. This construction of people was, and continues to be, racialised.
This paper argues that the nation (and national identity) as a particular ideological construct arises out of the conjunction of i) a long history of imperial civilisation in which the reification of citizenship, nation-state and culture, has projected racial identities to those who don’t belong and are from ‘over there’ and an those who belong as being ‘from here’; ii) the contemporary failure of the state to implement any radical change in the lives of the popular classes; wrought by neoliberal economic policies and iii) a specific dissociation of the intellectual strata from those classes. The paper also examines whether the new great moving right show is neutralising or exacerbating the contradiction between the people and the state and explores what forms of resistance can challenge and overcome the nostalgic cultural chauvinism which has become the substitute for a progressive project.
Gholam Khiabany teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London and is a member of the Council of Management of the Institute of Race Relations.