International Conference: Call for Papers
Detecting Europe in contemporary crime
narratives: print fiction, film, and television
21-23 June 2021
Link Campus University
Via del Casale di San Pio V 44 – Rome
Conference Website: https://www.detect-project.eu/detect2021/
Among the different expressions of popular
culture, no other genre more than crime – meant as a composite made up of many
different variants or subgenres -- has proved able to travel and expand its
reach into international markets and with audiences. Nor has any other genre
been more adept at laying bare the conflicts and contradictions – social,
political and historical – that characterise contemporary European societies.
The Detecting Europe conference offers an open forum to explore and discuss how
narratives of crime and investigation, as well as their production and
reception, have helped define the major industrial, commercial, thematic and
stylistic trends of European popular culture since 1989, fostering both the
transnational circulation of its products and the appearance of new
transcultural representations in line with the emergence
of new social identities. We welcome
proposals that interrogate the notion of Europeanness as a critical category,
and its viability for the study of contemporary popular culture, both in print
and screen media. We wish to explore both the scope and limits of the
interrelated notions of transnational identity and cosmopolitanism when applied
to the works of European crime fiction, including print fiction, film, and
TV.
A few general — but not exclusive —
questions may be asked. Are we to conceive of cosmopolitanism and the
process of European transculturation merely as unifying factors, fostering the
generation of a shared and uniform transnational identity? Or should we better
acknowledge the existence of a variety of European transcultural identities,
expressed in different writing and audio-visual styles, characteristic
narrative models, place-specific production cultures and distribution and
consumption patterns? What is the impact of national media ecologies in shaping
the idea of the European, and how the national translate the European when
foreign products appear in its mediascape? Should hybridization and
transculturation be assumed as markers and powerful drivers of cultural
homologation? Or rather the opposite is true, namely that cultural
hybridization entails a growing differentiation of narrative forms and styles,
contents and formats, production and reception practices, thus contributing to
the emergence of a post-national assemblage of multiple and possibly diverging
cosmopolitan identities? We deem it important, at this particular time, that
the notion of Europeanness and its eventual instantiations in contemporary
crime narratives is approached having in mind the multiple crises that are
currently affecting the continent and its population.
We invite proposals from multiple fields
of cultural studies, including representation studies, industry and production
studies, and reception and audience studies. Possible topics may include, but
are not limited to, the following:
• Main stylistic trends of the crime-genre
works produced in Europe in the last 30 years.
Debating/reframing Euronoir as a critical
category for cultural studies.
• Hybridization and transculturation:
toward homologation or increased cultural differentiation?
• Crime fiction and the European crisis:
immigration, migrant labour, Brexit, and the rise of right-wing popularism.
• The restaging and critical analysis of
Europe’s recent past in the work of crime writers, screenwriters and directors.
• Images of Europe and Europeans:
investigating social change through the study of popular crime narratives.
• Restating vs challenging class, gender
and ethnic stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination in the representation of
crime.
• The multiple facets of European
diversity: how have social, spatial and historical identities been expressed in
the works of the European crime genre?
• Ecocriticism and environmental
humanities in the era of widescale ecological crisis: eco-noir and the
challenges to European environment policies.
• The profiled position of crime in
fostering transnational cooperation in the European cultural and creative
sectors.
• Relationships and discrepancies between
national/local creative industries and transnational cultural policies in the
production milieu of the European crime genre.
• Transnational production and
distribution and the emergence of transcultural formats.
• The hopes and limits of European
cohesiveness, as revealed in practices of co-production and
distribution of crime novels, films and TV
dramas across the continent.
• Crime narratives and the media discourse
on organized trans-European crime.
• Fictional representations of legal and
forensic practices in comparative perspective.
• Translation, dubbing, subtitling as
strategies for cultural adaptation and appropriation.
• The imbrication of local, national and
transnational identities in the reception of foreign crime stories, between old
and fresh perspectives on proximate or distant neighbors.
• Transnational distribution and the role
of audiences in shaping the circulation patterns of European crime narratives
across the continent.
• Detecting transcultural identity and
social change through the study of the audiences’ response to crime stories and
trans/cross-media universes.
• Engagement and design of crime audiences
in the age of digital markets and online distribution.
• Making sense of social change through
the audience’s response to the representation of female, gay, lesbian and queer
characters.
• Theorising
transnational/transdisciplinary research for the study of European crime
narratives in print and screen media.
Conference Chairs
Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna),
Federico Pagello (University of Chieti-Pescara), Valentina Re (Link Campus
University)
Organizing Committee
Luca Antoniazzi (University of Bologna),
Sara Casoli (University of Bologna), Massimiliano Coviello (Link Campus
University), Paola De Rosa (Link Campus University), Lorenzo Orlando (Link
Campus University)
Advisory
Board
Stefano Arduini (Link Campus University),
Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna), Jan Baetens (KU Leuven), Luca Barra
(University of Bologna), Stefano Baschiera (Queen’s University Belfast), Giulia
Carluccio (University of Turin), Silvana Colella (University of Macerata),
Caius Dobrescu (University of Bucharest), Andrea Esser (University of
Roehampton), Nicola Ferrigni (Link Campus University), Katarina Gregersdotter
(Umeå University), Kim Toft Hansen (Aalborg University), Annette Hill
(University of Lund), Dominique Jeannerod (Queen’s University Belfast), Sandor
Kalai (University of Debrecen), Matthieu Letourneux (University Paris
Nanterre), Natacha Levet (University of Limoges), Giacomo Manzoli (University
of Bologna), Janet McCabe (Birkbeck University), Jacques Migozzi (University of
Limoges), Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast), Marica Spalletta (Link
Campus University)
Deadlines and practicalities
Abstracts deadline: 15 November 2020
Feedback: 15 December 2020
Registration deadline: 31 January 2020
Regular conference fee: €120
Reduced conference fee (PhD students,
Postdoctoral researchers): €90
Further information: info@detect-project.eu
Submissions guidelines
Submissions are welcome as individual papers
(max. 20 minutes) and pre-constituted panels (3/4 papers).
Individual presenters are required to
provide their name, email address, the title of the paper, an abstract (max.
300 words), references (max. 200 words), and a short bio (max. 150 words).
Submit your paper proposal here
Submit your panel proposal here (panel
organizers are also asked to submit a panel title and a short description of
the panel (max. 300 words).
The conference is supported by CUC – Consulta
Universitaria del Cinema, Italy.
Luca Antoniazzi
Post-doctoral Researcher
Università di Bologna
Dipartimento delle Arti
Via Barberia, 4, 40123 Bologna (IT)
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