NEWS
The 12th Biennial Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference will take place at Chiang Mai University, on 14 – 16 August 2025.
The focus of the conference is Sustainable Futures: ecologies, kinships and communities in Southeast Asian Cinemas. This theme will be addressed from a broad range of perspectives in order to encourage critical engagement with current debates in film theory and the environmental humanities, inviting papers that theorize the diverse film and media practices across Southeast Asia including new developments in artists’ moving image, video art, VR, and activist media.
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in ecological approaches to film and media studies including publications devoted to Southeast Asia (e.g. Chua, Davis and Taylor, 2021; Chulphongsathorn and Lovatt, 2022; Ryan and Telles, 2022). Seeking to build on this work, the conference invites papers that develop new approaches to questions of ecology and sustainability from a variety of perspectives including film production, exhibition, discussion and circulation.
We are interested in papers that respond to questions such as: What can a specific focus on Southeast Asian film bring to existing debates within the fields of energy ethics, the blue humanities, posthumanism and human-nonhuman relations (including human-spirit) and/or animal studies? And what kinds of practices build and sustain communities, kinships and solidarities in the face of ongoing ecological and humanitarian crises brought about by extractivist capitalism, war and authoritarianism? We welcome a range of methodological and theoretical approaches.
Topics could include (but are not limited to):
● Sustainable practices in film production and archiving
● Materialism, extractivism, electronic waste
● Feminist, indigenous and decolonial theories of environmental histories
● Queer ecologies
● Animism and more-than-human relations in film aesthetics, genres and narratives
● Sustaining practices of kinship and communities through film production, exhibition, criticism and pedagogy
● Cinema and moving images in the context of ritual, religious and other supra-human engagements
● Migration, war, and human rights on screen
● Animal studies and film
● Energy ethics on screen
● Blue humanities, oceanic humanities
● Elemental media
● Useful cinema, non-theatrical cinema, industrial films, infrastructural cinema
● Activist film and video, social movements
● Film and the plantationocene
Abstract Submission Deadline: December 1, 2024
