Mediascape Features Section Call for Papers
Fall 2015: Time

For the Features section of its Fall 2015 issue, Mediascape, UCLA’s journal of cinema and media studies, invites scholarly articles that address the theme of time.

Time is a basic dimension of human experience, but it is also one of the fundamental aspects of moving image media. Unlike other visual art forms, moving image media are especially suited to the creation, deconstruction, and manipulation of temporal constructs. Film, television, and new media makers have long engaged the concept of time from within, while the scientific, philosophical, historical, and experiential implications of these media have been the subject of external scholarly observation and discourse. The aim of this issue is to further these discussions and to explore the various methods by which time has informed and continues to inform our mediascape. We welcome papers that examine any interpretation of time in the context of film, television, and digital media.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:
- Representation — How has time been represented in film, television, and new media? What techniques have been used to depict time and have these changed over time?
- Timelines — How have narrative structures changed over the course of film, television, and media history? How has nonlinear storytelling functioned?
- Time periods and period pieces — How do depictions of certain time periods serve to shape our understandings of history? To what degree are these artificial cognitive constructions and how do these temporal imaginaries influence conceptions of the world? (i.e. depictions of “The Sixties” or the mythologies of “The Old West”)
- Past, present, and future time — How is history presented or constructed by media? What are the implications of temporal nostalgia? How is media used to change the present? How have moving image media presented visions and predictions of the future?
- Remakes and sequels — How are narratives told and retold throughout time?
- Perception — What are the multiple temporalities of human experience and how have these been expressed in film, television, and new media? How do these media express the experience of time?
- Reception — How are media texts received differently over time?
- Cultural time — How is time a cultural construct?
- Modernity — What is the impact of ideas of “modernity” (and “postmodernity”)?

Interested participants are invited to submit drafts of papers of between 4,500 and 7,000 words (approximately 15-25 pages) in length OR an abstract along with a CV to features.mediascape@gmail.com by January 31st, 2015.

If you have any questions, please contact Heather Birdsall at features.mediascape@gmail.com