This conference takes as its theme “Collaboration and Cross-pollination.” As we re-imagine how we work together and gather as a community post-COVID, the conference foregrounds processes of exchange, circulation, and recombination across the fields of Film, Television and Screen Studies. We encourage participants to shift their thinking from the individual to the community, and to engage with conceptual play around the ecological metaphor of cross-pollination (or the sharing and interchange of ideas), in order to reflect on how this process can shape our work as researchers, collaborators, and mentors.

The conference invites submissions for papers, panels, or practice-based research on any aspect of collaboration or cross-pollination in Film, Television and Screen Studies. 

Topics might include:

• – Collaboration/cross-pollination in the academy: as methodology, as practice, as scholarship, as engagement
• – Collaboration/cross-pollination through creative practice research
• – The politics of collaboration in film, television, and screen media: questions of power, labour, visibility, inclusivity, equality, and value
• – Examining film, television, and screen media through cross-pollination: mutation, reproduction, recombination, hybridity, integration, sharing, gifting, contagion, virality, contingency 
• – Textual cross-pollination in film, television, and screen media: remixes, intertextuality, experimental media, remakes and reboots, adaptations
• – Film, television, and screen geographies of collaboration/cross-pollination: global production practices, co-productions, distribution circuits, festivals, exhibition
• – Film, television, and screen networks of collaboration/cross-pollination: practitioners, audiences and fandom, collectives, activist groups, societies
• – Histories of collaboration/cross-pollination in film, television, and screen media: archives and institutions
• – Ecologies of collaboration/cross-pollination in film, television, and screen media
• – Collaboration/cross-pollination between film, television and screen studies and other disciplines
• – Collaboration/cross-pollination across and between media forms

In the spirit of the conference theme, this conference places emphasis on discussion and debate rather than a traditional paper/questions format. Each panellist will present for 10 minutes on the day of the panel, with the other panellists acting as respondents, generating questions and comments. Rough papers, notes, and/or slides will be circulated to the other panellists a week in advance to facilitate this discussion. This is to encourage more constructive discussion and engagement, and to preserve the conference as a space for works in progress. 

Rather than individual keynote speakers, the conference will include plenary roundtable discussions featuring collaborative research projects.