*Alphaville: Home as a Site of Resistance* SCMS U/G/A SIG 24-25 Virtual Events
The Urbanism, Geography, and Architecture Scholarly Interest Group at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) invites you to its third online event of 2024-25, focusing on the theme of 'Home on Screen.'
Join us for a conversation with editors and contributors of Home as a Site of Resistance.
Join Zoom Meeting: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83398771491
Meeting ID: 833 9877 1491
Time: Friday, 24 January 2025, 1pm EST/6pm GMT
We are delighted to have Professor Laura Rascaroli, University College Cork and Editor-in-Chief of Alphaville, as a respondent. Editors will briefly introduce the special issue, followed by a response and Q&A.
Panelists include: editors Liz Patton and Anna Viola Sborgi and contributors Mariana Liz, Julie Le Hegarat, Jenny Gunn, Conn Holohan, Lauren S. Berliner, Francianne dos Santos Velho, Sabine Haenni.
About the Special Issue
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we view the concept of home. This shift has highlighted various societal disparities, including those based on race, gender, sexuality, and economic status. While the idea of the mediated home has been a growing topic of study (Schleier; Wojcik; Rhodes; Barnwell; Baschiera and De Rosa; Palmer; Patton; Price), this issue of Alphaville narrows its focus on the home as a space of resistance across different geographies and periods, from the 1960s to today. Considering debates from fields such as home movie studies, virtual reality, media activism, and the relationship between film and urbanism, the articles in this issue demonstrate how film and media can address resistance centred around the concept of home. They also challenge and offer alternative views to white, heteronormative, middle-class representations of domestic life. These articles provide insights into the challenges and importance of home for marginalised groups, suggest new ways for film and media studies to approach representation, and centre the portrayal of often-overlooked communities. Central to these articles is the idea of home and the use of media as a form of resistance and agency that can be used to contest mainstream perspectives. Each article looks at what home means, whether it is a place of safety, precarity, identity, or memory, and at how media shape or challenge our views of home and social identity.
The Issue was published in February 2024 and is available open access at: https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue26.html
Laura Rascaroli is Professor in Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, where she lectures on film theory, on documentary, and on European and World Cinema. Her research interests span European and World cinemas; experimental nonfiction, the essay film, and first-person cinemas; artist film; the post-cinematic medium; space & film (the filmic city, film & architecture, travel & cinema); and the politics of form. She is the author of several publications including two monographic studies on essayistic and first-person nonfiction: The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Wallflower Press, 2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks.
Elizabeth Patton is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research interests centre on media history, identity, and space, and how media practices have informed popular understandings of work and leisure. She is the author of Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and the recipient of the 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She currently serves as comanaging editor of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.
Anna Viola Sborgi is Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK, working on the team project What’s On? Rethinking Class in the Television Industry. In 2023 she completed a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellowship: MEDIAHOMES: Housing Precarity on Screen in Ireland, Portugal and the UK from the 2008 crisis to COVID-19 at the Department of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, Ireland. Recent essays include “Precarious Homes in Britain and France: Dance, Girlhood, and Escape in Fish Tank and Divines” in Home Screens (Bloomsbury, 2023), “Millennium Mills: London’s Last Post-Industrial Ruin as a Site of Production.” In London as Cinema and Media Gateway (2023). She is editorial board member at Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, and co-chairs the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Urbanism/ Geography/Architecture SIG.