CFP: 1st Global Conference: Skins: Exploring Critical Issues

Tuesday 25th September 2012 – Thursday 27th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers

Now in its sixth series on E4 in the UK and first series on MTV in the US, the brainchild of father-son writing team Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain has gained popularity and critical acclaim for the honesty, authenticity and humour of its no-holds-barred depiction of the teenage experience. In a reflexive turn, Skins has become a cultural phenomenon whose influence is registered through its status as essential teen viewing, the Skins party craze and the tendency among fans to perceive their own identities and experiences in relation to characters and situations from the show. The richness of Skins as a televisual text supports wide-ranging explorations of the show’s aesthetic, thematic, ideological, social and technological implications.
We therefore invite papers and preconstituted panels that address any aspect of Skins, such as:

■Representations of teenage life and teen culture
■Identities: gender, class, race, sexualities (hetero-, homo-, bi-, fluid, queer, etc.)
■Death and the concept of mortality
■Mental illness/psychology/psychoanalysis
■Fandom
■Transnational reception
■Analysis of fanvids, fanfics, fanart
■Assessments of the meaning/cultural significance of specific storylines (c.f. the Naomily phenomenon)
■Plotline controversies and moral panics
■Adapting Skins for the American market
■Narrative and storytelling
■Creator/showrunner as author
■Genre analysis
■Modes of comedy
■Defining the ‘Skins aesthetic’
■Uses of inter-textuality/pop culture allusions
■Fashion
■Music
■Space and place: Bristol on screen
■Skins novels
■Acting and performance
■Cameos and guest stars
■Fame and celebrity
■Production process studies
■Technologies of production, distribution and reception in the post-broadcast era
■Skins and Channel 4/E4/MTV
■Comparative analyses of Skins and other television shows

For 2012, the Skins and Contemporary Culture project will meet alongside our project on Gender and Love It is our intention to create cross-over sessions between the two groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between gender and love and Skins and contemporary culture. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: SKINS Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Ann-Marie Cook
Visiting Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation,
Queensland University of Technology,
Australia

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For more information, please click here.