Three-D Issue 29: MeCCSA 2018: Creativity and Agency
Philip Hammond
We are in the final stages of preparations for MeCCSA 2018, at London South Bank University on 10–12 January.
We have been delighted with the response to our call for papers. Following review of 261 submissions, we have selected 26 ready-made panels and 128 individual proposals – altogether we are programming 57 parallel panel sessions.
We have also been very pleased to receive many practice-based research proposals. We will be showing four full-length films during the conference, and are putting together a rolling programme of shorter screenings.
In addition to this, we are looking forward to a number of roundtables, including a session on ‘Immaterial and “Wasteful” Artistic Labour’, which aims to explore the potential for agency in the context of devalued ‘(artistic) labour’ and overvalued ‘(creative) work’. The panel will particularly reflect on feminist theories of (re)production and how they inform the work of feminist activists and media artists.
Another roundtable is on ‘Politics and Comedy’, discussing the disconnect between ‘orthodox’ left-leaning comedy rhetoric and the voting behaviour of the country. The three professional comedians speaking on the panel will also be performing at the inaugural MeCCSA Comedy Night on the evening of 10 January.
Our final line-up of keynote speakers now includes Anita Biressi on ‘Career selfies’, examining prevailing messages about the manufacture of the successful neoliberal self. Andy Miah will be talking about ‘Sport 2.0’, exploring innovations such as artificial intelligence, wearables, and ingestibles as new, disruptive artefacts within our media culture. David Gauntlett will be giving the closing conference keynote, discussing creativity and agency in relation to the purposes of media studies and reflecting on how the discipline has changed.
More details are available on the conference website,
https://meccsa2018.org. We hope you’ll agree this is a rich and interesting programme!
For those of you who cannot be with us, we will filming the keynote addresses and making them available later on the MeCCSA YouTube channel. We’ll also be tweeting updates from @MeCCSA2018 and using the #MeCCSA2018 hashtag.
If you have any questions about the conference, please get in touch via meccsa2018@gmail.com or visit https://www.meccsa2018.org