CfP: The Audiovisual in Question: State of Research and Perspectives

Call for paper for the international conference "The Audiovisual in Question: State of Research and Perspectives", which will take place at the University of Lausanne, on the 24-25 November 2022.

Argument (extracts)
Download the complete call for paper in PDF

In 2025, the public broadcasting service Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) will move into new studios located on the Lausanne university campus. The media organization will thus reside in immediate vicinity of academic institutions. If this move offers multiple opportunities, the contours of which will be defined through renewed collaborations between academics and media makers, it invites us today to update our knowledge on Swiss media history and to draft new approaches to the topic.

As a first step, we would like to question a notion that is omnipresent in scientific and journalistic discourse but rarely discussed in a critical and historical perspective, namely that of the “audiovisual”. Audiovisual, audio-visual, audio-vision, audiovision: analogue to the spelling vagueness, a definitional vagueness indeed accompanies the term. Designating technical equipment, teaching methods, "new media", or simply TV and radio: the audiovisual as a term seems as malleable as the multiple realities it covers.

Thus, we invite proposals that problematize the history and notion of the audiovisual by addressing, among others, the following strands:

• Methods: To what extent does the notion help us to discover new corpora and new objects and, more broadly, to question historiographical categories or periodization? Is it possible to develop new approaches based on its use?
• Historiography: What place does this term occupy in the scholarship on media? Is it autonomous or is it entangled with other notions such as the digital, multimedia, transmedia, etc. and why?
• Archives: As audiovisual sources have now acquired the status of cultural heritage, their archiving is a central issue for the institutions concerned. What definitions of audiovisual are operative in this context? How is the relationship between sound and image defined?

submission of proposals
We invite submissions from scholars in the humanities and social sciences who can enrich the reflection on these questions and on the history of the audiovisual more broadly. In particular, doctoral students are invited to discuss these theoretical and methodological issues from their specific field of research.

Deadline for submission of abstracts : July 15, 2022

Response to authors: end of July 2022

Conference: 24-25 November at the University of Lausanne. Travel and accommodation will be provided by the organizers.

Please send abstracts in English or French of 600 words maximum, together with a short bibliography and a biographical note, to annekatrin.weber@unibas.ch