A couple of months back I attended the 3rd annual conference of BAFTSS, the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. I’ve been meaning to write up my reflection on the conference ever since I got back but I’ve been busy with other things (more to come on that in future posts!) that I’m only just getting round to it now.
The conference took place between Thursday 16th and Saturday 18th April 2015 at Manchester Metropolitan University. Day 1 kicked off with a pre-conference session aimed at postgraduates and early career researchers entitled ‘The Road to Publication of your PhD: A Q&A Discussion with Publishers Attending the Conference’. The event was hosted by Matthew Frost of Manchester University Press and Laurel Plapp of Peter Lang and was, in my opinion, one of the highlights of the conference. As an ECR myself, this session was extremely useful in terms of learning more about the process of turning doctoral research into a viable book proposal. Matthew opened the discussion by talking about the mechanics of the academic publishing industry before offering advice on how to prepare a book proposal. His key points were as follows:
- When trying to decide on a publisher, look on your bookshelves – who publishes the books you read/work with in your research?
- Contact a reputable publisher; find their guidelines for proposals online and follow these – DO NOT send a general proposal around multiple publishers!
- Source who to send it to – be sure to spell their name correctly!
- DO NOT send your entire thesis saying you can rework it; send a proper proposal.
- DO NOT call your work your ‘PhD thesis’; refer to it as your ‘research’.
- Demonstrate your knowledge of your market and wider readership.
- Think about whether you want to publish your thesis as a monograph or as a series of journal articles.
Matthew handed over to Laurel who gave us some more specific advice about how to prepare your PhD thesis as a book proposal. She began by noting some differences between a thesis and a book, before giving us some questions to think about with regard to the transition between the two. These included:
- What’s your goal?
- Who is your audience?
- Does your thesis require substantive revisions?
She encouraged us to think about the concept of ‘nearby audiences’ when considering possible markets for book projects and gave us a very helpful handout with further tips and advice.
Following this introductory session, we were officially welcomed to the conference by Professor Phil Powrie (Chair of BAFTSS) and Dr Andy Moor before we attended the first of the conference’s parallel sessions. The session I attended was called ‘Genre, Gender and Transforming Concepts’ and featured papers on gender in 1990s detective dramas, heroes and villains in Westerns and the absence of queer visibility and its relationship to sound in Italian cinema. Given my interest in queer theory in the context of Spanish cinema, I was particularly interested in the latter paper, presented by Elena Boschi (Liverpool Hope University), in which she discussed the queer resonances of sound and music channelled through the queer stadom of composer Gianna Nannini in the film Sea Purple. Elena’s paper gave me much food for thought in terms of the relations amongst music, inclusivity and otherness in terms of queer characters in Spanish cinema.
The rest of the day’s schedule suffered from a few unfortunate incidents. The Q&A with Nicola Shindler of Red Production Company, the studio behind Last Tango in Halifax and the recent Cucumber, Banana and Tofu, was unfortunately unable to attend. In her place was Jason Wood of Home, Manchester, whose unapologetic views of what he termed ‘specialist cinema’ coupled with his repeated derogatory (read: misogynistic) remarks about women involved in cinema (from Cher to Jennifer Aniston to Judi Dench) only served to create a disgruntled audience. Furthermore, the planned film screening of Christine Geraghty’s ‘Desert Island Film’ Dance Hall (Charles Crichton, GB, 1950) did not go ahead as the film had not been sourced for the event.
Day 2 began with another series of parallel panels. I attended the panel entitled ‘Representations and Performances of Masculinity in Contemporary Comedies’ and thoroughly enjoyed presentations by Claire Jenkins (University of Leicester) on ‘Parenting, paternity and male anxiety in the contemporary mom-com’ and by Lauren Jade Thompson (University of Warwick) on ‘“Hard” and “soft” masculinity in Crazy, Stupid, Love’ (the latter not just because of all the Ryan Gosling stills!). Lauren’s paper was excellent, highlighting the trend for greater visibility of the soft masculine body in contemporary rom-coms before conducting a close analysis of the distinct ways in which Cal (Steve Carell) and Jacob (Gosling) are coded as soft and hard respectively in the film. Other highlights of Day 2 included Socha Ní Fhlainn’s stimulating presentation on Nolan’s puzzle films and Martin Paul Eve’s plenary session on open access, in which we learned about open access expectations for REF2020. I also presented my paper on Blancanieves on Day 2 – but I’ve written on that elsewhere.
Day 3 of the conference began with a particularly stimulating set of parallel panels and I struggled to choose which to attend. In the end, I went for ‘Questions of Childhood’. The session was excellent. The panel was composed of postgraduate researchers whose presentations were extremely professional and highly engaging. Eve Benhamou (University of Bristol) offered an insight into the generic hybridity of Frozen while Maohui Deng (University of Manchester) discussed the extent to which children perform. The session was brought to a close by Karrie Ann Grobben (University of Exeter) whose paper compared The Wizard of Oz with Tim Burton’s recent adaptation of Alice in Wonderland in terms of their cinematic construction of girlhood. Her arguments were accompanied by detailed close analysis of her key texts and provided intellectual fodder for my own work on the child.
Overall, I enjoyed the BAFTSS conference as it gave me the opportunity to present in a panel alongside three of my colleagues and friends (more on this here) as well as to meet other postgraduates and early career researchers working on cinema in the UK. However, I have a couple of criticisms. In the first instance, I think there were too many parallel panel sessions. Attendance at the conference was modest and with five different panels typically on offer in each session, panels could not possibly be well attended. I know of at least two panels where the presenters outnumbered the audience! Furthermore, with five different panels to choose from, there was so much I missed out on that I would have been interested in seeing had I had the option. A second criticism concerns the length of each parallel panel session. In my panel, each presenter ran short of time. The length of our session had been altered in the final conference programme in comparison with earlier drafts and when we looked at the programme more closely, we realised that the parallel sessions were all different in length, ranging from 1 hour 20 minutes to 1 hour 50 minutes, regardless of how many speakers there were in each panel. While I appreciate that the organisation of conferences is a complex process and that things are bound to slip through the net, I do think BAFTSS would do well to consider such aspects when organising next year’s conference.
spanishcinephilia 