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Celebrity Culture and Social Inquiry 
33rd Edition
 
Media Experts

Prof. P. David Marshall
Dr Anita Krajnc
Dr Louis Massey 
Dr Samita Nandy
Dr Jackie Raphael 
Dr Celia Lam

Dr. Basuli Deb
Dr Hilary Wheaton
Dr Mira Moshe
Dr Nandana Bose
Dr Will Visconti
Josh Nathan
Shannon Skinner 

Advisory Board

Dr Anita Krajnc
Dr Louis Massey
Dr Samita Nandy
Dr Jackie Raphael 
Dr Celia Lam
Dr Basuli Deb
Dr Hilary Wheaton
Dr Mira Moshe
Dr Radha Maharaj
Dr Robinder Sehdev
Dr Yaya Mori
Tushar Unadkat
Ravi Kumar

Editorial Board

Dr Robert Caine
Dr Hilary Wheaton
Dr Jarret Ruminski
Dr Nalini Mohabir

Dr Will Visconti 
Nidhi Shrivastava
Christine Bode

Communication Manager

Dr Louis Massey

Founding Director

Dr Samita Nandy

Featured Publications


Celebrity Studies (Routledge)

CrossBridge
(WaterHill Publishing)

Building Bridges in Celebrity Studies (2016)

A Companion to Celebrity (2015)

Bridging Gaps: Higher Education, Media and Society (2015)
 

 
 

 

 
 




Dear CMCS members,
 
Our Advisory Board member Dr Anita Krajnc has been covered in Washington Post, Guardian, CTV, CBC, and Globe and Mail among more international medial channels for her ground-breaking work against speciesism and contesting criminalization of her compassion for animals. See details below. As a well-known activist, she has been key to the growth of CMCS since its launch on August 28, 2013.
 
Today, we are 3 years old.
 
We wanted to take this opportunity to say that we are incredibly grateful to all our supporters and sponsors for their contributions to celebrity studies, social issues, and media outreach.
 
And we have more to do
 
At the moment, please read and share upcoming calls, conferences, media coverage, and professional opportunities below.
 
Highlights of our latest conversations are here:
https://storify.com/celeb_studies/cmcs-2016-august-conversations

On behalf of CMCS, I wish you all a great week and fantastic start to September!

Sincerely,

Dr Samita Nandy
Director, Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS)
 

The Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS) is an international organization and research network that helps coordinating academic research and media commentaries on celebrity culture. CMCS carries a pedagogical philosophy that inspires integration of research and media skills training in academic and public discourses of fame.  The centre believes in intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical values of bridging gaps in higher education and media. With this view, CMCS facilitates research, publications, creative productions, and media commentaries to restore artistic and ethical acts for social change.
 
Photo Credit: Julie O'Neill

 
Call for Papers: Liminal Celebrity and Small Nations – Special Issue of Celebrity Studies
 
Guest Editors:
Professor Barry King, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Dr Damion Sturm, Leeds Beckett University, UK

 
Research into celebrity tends to focus on larger and more powerful media systems and how the logic of mediated fame has been formed and developed in larger and more powerful nations. Considering that 60% of the world’s nations have populations of less than 10 million and 48% of nations have less than 5 million inhabitants, this issue seeks to explore the role, value and function of celebrity in such localities.
Historically the study of celebrity has followed the paths of organizational development and the cultural templates set by the success of Hollywood and the American media. Although significant differences in the formation of global and national celebrity culture are apparent in Europe (e.g., England, France, Italy) and other large and emerging global markets (e.g., China, India) these developments beg the question of the dynamics of celebrity in smaller nations. More explicitly, within such localities the formation of celebrity systems are subject to tensions between the global and the local. Drawing on the work of Victor Turner and Homi Bhabha, there is a need to explore the condition of inbetweenness and the liminal condition of local celebrity, charged with representing nationhood – itself internally conflicted and contested – and participation in the global celebrity order based on American and Western media systems. It could be argued that the national features of global celebrity, especially Hollywood and the American media, is rendered “invisible” as the universal touchstone of fame. Conversely, for the imagined communities of the periphery, celebrities are required to contend with notions of cultural specificity and traditions of representation and identity. So whilst it is true that the tension between the global and the local is a feature of celebrity culture per se, in small nation contexts this tends to be less a phenomenon between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary than between different versions of collective identity.
 
What are the specificities, nuances and complexities that underpin the development of celebrity in smaller nations? How do smaller nations respond to the influence of global Hollywood as it interfaces with local traditions of prestige, performance and cultural identity? Do local “celebrity imaginaries” under pressure to gain the economic advantages of following global formats, essentially mirror and replicate globally powerful forms of celebrity? Alternatively, what are the differences, distinctions and cultural conflicts that emerge in the formation of such “glocal” celebrity systems? Does “liminal” celebrity germinate, operate and mobilise different logics of fame and moral economies of representation? Across a range of celebrity fields – in sport, entertainment and politics – how do localised nationalist discourses come to the fore and how do these play out in the logic of self-commodification and formation of personae? How do the factors of smaller market size and limited economies of scale enact a territorial or geographical compression on systems of value and prestige, geographic distance or isolation from the West structure the discourse of celebrity and the development and maintenance of liminal celebrity cultures?
 
In order to consider the interaction of the local and global (e.g., economic, political and cultural), as well as possible paradoxes and tensions in the formation of small nation celebrity, we welcome submissions that probe celebrity in any small nations located in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Oceania.

Potential themes addressed may include but are not limited to:

  • The politics of celebrity in small nations
  • The local and global dimensions to celebrity in small nations
  • The role, value and/or significance of celebrity in small nations
  • Celebrity identity politics via traditional (e.g., cultural, national, global, gender, race) and alternative articulations (e.g., abject, affect, agency, glocal, grobal, liquid, subversive)
  • Cultural specificity and different versions of collective identity in small nation celebrity
  • Celebrity in specific fields of fame, such as entertainment (film, television, sport, music), politics and public life
  • Typologies of fame in small nations (e.g., notions of stardom, celebrity, persona, personage)
  • Representational regimes and the burden of nationalistic articulations of celebrities as icons, heroes/heroines, and/or representatives of the nation (e.g., sport, media, politics)
  • Everyday occurrences of small nation celebrity, micro-celebrity and ‘ordinary’ celebrity
  • Celebrity culture, commodification and gift economies
  • Celebrity and Transgender performance traditions (e.g., in South East Asia, the Pacific Rim)
  • Local traditions of performance in theatre, film and television, sport and politics in the formation of celebrity systems
  • Historical treatment and/or contemporary case studies of celebrity
  • The mediatisation and/or commodification of celebrities in small nation media
  • The consumption of celebrity in small nations (i.e., fandom, gossip)
  • The role of new media, social media and technology for celebrity in small nations
Interested authors should send a 250 word proposal and 200-word biography to both barry.king@aut.ac.nz and d.c.sturm@leedsbeckett.ac.uk by October 21, 2016. Acceptance notices will be sent out by December 9 2016. For accepted proposals, completed essays of 6000-8000 words will be due no later than April 7, 2017. Final publication of the special issue is expected early 2018. Only previously unpublished essays will be considered.

URL:
http://cmc-centre.com/liminal-celebrity/

CFP: Online, offline and transcultural spaces in Australian Fandom

Australian fans have access to a wide array of popular culture content from around the world, developing relationships with these products that are as rich as fans from other parts of the globe. Until recently access to media products is limited by temporal and spatial distance from countries of origin. Yet, at the same time practices from diaspora communities to preserve cultural identity introduces a multitude of global media content to a wider Australian audience. Australian fans thus engage with a mixture of ‘conventional’ and ‘niche’ media products that places them both within the margins and in the mainstream.  While there may be parallels between Australia and other nations with multicultural communities, the geographical location, history and cultural mix of Australian society give rise to unique contexts shaping the consumption and practices of Australian fans.

We thus ask the question: What makes the Australian fan experience unique? What influence does geo-political location have on the consumption and appropriation of popular culture in the Australian context? What impact does Australian multicultural society have on exposure and access to popular culture? What drives Australian fan interaction with global popular culture, and how does this interaction intersect with narratives of ‘Australian-ness’ in local and globalised contexts?
 
This book seeks to explore the specific and unique experience of being fans living and Australia.

We seek authors to contribute critical chapters for an edited volume to be submitted to University of Iowa Press.
 
Topics include but are not limited to:
  • Online fandom
  • Offline fandom (including convention attendance, fan-celebrity interaction etc)
  • Fan perceptions of celebrity brands/identities/public persona
  • Fan fiction
  • Cosplay culture
  • Anime culture
  • Manga culture
  • Subcultures of fandom
  • Transcultural fan practices (e.g. fan Subbers)
  • World cinema fandom
  • Cult cinema fandom
  • Comic book fandom
  • Distribution practices including Fast tracked television, Streaming services and Netflix
  • Fandom and national identity
Please email 300 word abstracts and your CV to both Celia Lam and Jackie Raphael by August 31 2016. Proposals should be for original chapters that have not been previously published (including conference proceedings), and are not under consideration from other journals or edited collections.

Dr. Celia Lam is Lecturer in Media and Communications, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney (celia.lam@nd.edu.au)

Dr. Jackie Raphael is Lecturer in Design, School of Design and Art, Curtin University, Perth (J.Raphael@curtin.edu.au)

URL:
https://fanstudies.org/2016/07/12/cfp-online-offline-and-transcultural-spaces-in-australian-fandom/

Celebrity Chat – Call for Season 2 Films and Videos

Are you a scholar, journalist, artist or fan interested in conversations on celebrity culture?

Receive a screening opportunity of your conversation on Celebrity Chat Season 2 in Fall 2016!

The screening will offer an international platform for filmmakers, broadcasters, and video artists that critically engage with fame. It will also offer eligibility for $100 CMCS screen award at the next Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS) conference, in which you can be interviewed for a worldwide audience. Entrance will be determined upon evaluation by our review committee.

Entry guidelines:
  • 250-word proposal
  • Original short films, video art works, media installations, audiovisual performances, network based projects, and interviews (max 30 mins)
  • Include a title, your name, e-mail address, and affiliation if applicable
  • Submit proposal to Chairs Dr Jackie Raphael and Dr Samita Nandy at celeb.studies@gmail.com.
  • Entry deadline: August 31, 2016
  • Release dates: September – December 2016

Celebrity Chat is a ground-breaking video series on the CMCS YouTube. The series is based on scholarly discussions on celebrity culture and was launched at the NYC conference “Bridging Gaps: Where is the Persona in Celebrity and Journalism?” in September 2015.

Videos are uploaded as a reliable resource for scholars, students, and journalists seeking academic analysis of celebrity culture. This includes themes of persona, branding, scandal, advertising, sexualisation, activism, authenticity, selfies, social media and much more! References to publications will be included on request.

Videos must provide an intellectual discussion between two scholars, a scholar and a fan or scholar and media expert.

For selection criteria, please contact Dr. Jackie Raphael (Curtin University Lecturer and CMCS Advisory Board Member) and Dr. Samita Nandy (CMCS Director) at celeb.studies@gmail.com

URL:
http://cmc-centre.com/cc/celebritychat/

Media Coverage

As part of the CMCS media outreach, Advisory Board member Dr Louis Massey wrote a critical letter to the editor that has been published in the National Post, August 2016.

Read below:



Scroll down and read “Fiction presented as reality” here:
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/letters-penny-oleksiak-is-a-golden-inspiration

URL:

CMCS Advisory Board Member Dr Anita Krajnc has been featured in The Guardian, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV, Metro News Canada, Huffington Post Canada, Now Magazine and Torontoist, August 2016

Read full news here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/canada-pigs-water-animal-rights-anita-krajnc-trial

Professional Opportunities
 

Would you like to participate in CMCS activities?

Apply for 2017 positions: http://cmc-centre.com/join/positions/




 

 

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