Cinema Studies Student Conference

Cinema Studies Student Conference
Abundance/Scarcity CFP, February 27th-March 1st, 2026

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia University)

In our era defined by proliferating images, platformed memory, and the instantaneous circulation of audiovisual forms, the notion of abundance pressurizes every level of film culture, including material, aesthetic, institutional, and epistemic. We live amid a relentless stream of mediated memory and algorithmic visibility. However, abundance always gestures toward its latent scarcity: infrastructures strain under digital excess and financial precarity; archives remain precarious; a totality of histories, voices, and bodies linger in absence. The overflow of information generates a lack of certainty; the proliferation of new technologies coincides with the obsolescence of so-called “old media;” the persistence of preservation compels renewed attention to loss. Abundance does not erase scarcity; instead, it continually redefines it.

Between too much and not enough, cinema and media studies move within the paradoxes of care and neglect, curation and erasure, framing and forgetting. It is within this unstable space that ethical, aesthetic, and material questions emerge about how we preserve, circulate, and engage with images across uneven global infrastructures. This graduate conference invites scholars, artists, archivists, and practitioners to think dialectically about abundance and scarcity as material reflections, fiscal realities, epistemic conditions, and aesthetic strategies across cinema and media. Rather than lamenting scarcity or celebrating abundance, this conference asks what kind of zone of potentiality scarcity delineates, and how it enables us to encounter the abundant possibilities of methodologies:

How might scarcity inform new historiographies, community archives, speculative preservation, counter-algorithmic practices, or embodied forms of remembering? How could we engage the archive not as a formed repository of abundance or lack, but as a living site shaped by economic precarity, institutional neglect, and uneven access? How can we explore new modes of collaboration, circulation, and minor practices emerging from conditions of scarcity within an uneven global cultural system? How do we trace and imagine the absent spaces, histories, and lived experiences of marginalized, diasporic, and queer communities? How might scarcity, manifesting as obsolescence, decay, or infrastructure neglect, be reinterpreted as a productive condition that reshapes our encounters with technological remains? Ultimately, how could we turn insufficiency itself into a critical and creative abundance for studying cinema and media?

We welcome traditional papers, seminar-style discussions, screenings, performance lectures, archival demonstrations, small workshops, and practice-based research from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to Cultural and Communication Studies, Indigenous Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Postcolonial Studies, History and Archival Studies, Political Science and Sociology, Anthropology, Art History, Sound Studies, as well as Regional Studies. We encourage papers, artistic interventions, and experimental presentations addressing (but not limited to):

•    Alternative and community-based archives
•    The political economy of arts funding, scholarly labor, and institutional scarcity
•    Indigeneity within Moving Image infrastructures and networks
•    Platform capitalism, algorithmic disappearance, and digital decay
•    Methodologies of speculation and critical fabulation
•    Infrastructures of exhibition, circulation, and access
•    Memory, absence, and trauma 
•    Ecologies of media production and material waste
•    Found footage, remix, reuse, and appropriation ethics
•    Obsolescence, soft hardware, and technological remains
•    Digital vs analog media
•    Institutional archives and state power
•    Diasporic memory, embodied record, and sensory historiography
•    Access and preservation in the Global North/South
•    Aesthetic strategies of withholding, silence, opacity, refusal, or visual maximal

To submit, please complete the following form before December 14th, 2025. The form will ask you to submit a 250-300 word abstract. Please include your name and contact details. You will also have to submit a 50-100 word biography. The conference also welcomes submissions from undergraduate students. If you have any questions, please email nyucinemastudent@gmail.com.