CALL FOR PAPERS: “InDigital Latin America II Conference: Indigenous Engagement with Digital and Electronic Media”
Location: Vanderbilt University Campus, Nashville TN. Date: March 16-18, 2017 (co-Sponsored by Vanderbilt University and Middle Tennessee State University)
The study of Indigenous media is a relatively new and rapidly expanding field combining innovative research in anthropology with theoretical perspectives from media studies. Currently the field is evolving at such a “dizzying” rate that it is nearly impossible to keep track of all the innovations, novel applications, and sociocultural impacts transpiring. We invite researchers and media makers to join us to share and discuss these rapid changes in Indigenous media with a focus on Latin America.
(Media as Witness: photograph by Krakrax Kayapó, 2015).
Call for Abstracts
We are interested in a variety of topics and approaches (ranging from viewer/user agency to media effects), including, but not limited to how different groups may engage and be impacted by media as they:
- Watch, interpret, or create television messages
- Fashion, comprehend, and interact with radio texts
- Construct and view their own cultural representations on film and upload them to the Internet
- Build websites to archive culture materials
- Construct social networks in cyberspace among themselves and other groups
- Utilize cell phones to not only communicate but also film in culturally appropriate manners
- Preserve disappearing languages
- Encourage intergenerational dialog and cultural transmission
- Record events for political leverage
- Explore new marketing or consumption opportunities
- Are simply expressive and creative in conceptualization of cultural identity through media
Keynote Speaker: Amalia Córdova (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s Film and Video Center and New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies)
Conference discussants: Elizabeth Weatherford (Smithsonian) and Faye Ginsburg (NYU)
We welcome presentations on:
Institutional analysis of Indigenous media (e.g. the evolution of traditional and new spaces and platforms for expression of Indigenous concerns, the impact of transnational networking with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples);
Textual analysis (e.g. content analysis of themes, genres, representations, as well as current thinking on authenticity of Indigenous media in terms of hybridity and indigeneity); and
Audience/reception studies (e.g. the dynamics of media engagement and consumption in local communities in terms of technological constraints, issues of ownership and access, signification of technology as material object and communication modality, displacement of public activities, creation of new habits of spectatorship, and impact upon worldviews).
Several special sessions are planned to:
Showcase Indigenous films (screenings by Kayapó filmmakers and others)
Explore the emergence of hybrid music forms (including performances of Kaya-pop and Mayan hip-hop)
Commemorate the contributions of the late Terence Turner to Indigenous Media
Explore the emergence of a Pan-American Indigenous media exchange (the Inuit-Latin American connection).
Kiabieti Kayapó (left) and Terence Turner (right) at InDigital Latin America I, 2015
Registration and Transportation/Lodging information may be found on the conference website.
my.vanderbilt.edu/indigitalconference2017
For more information, please contact Richard Pace
