2nd to 4th of September 2026
Ekphrasis Center for Transdisciplinary, Liberal Arts and Creative Technologies Research
Film and Media Department, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Visit the official conference website for the full programme, registration, venue information, and updates: rethinkingtrauma.conference.ubbcluj.ro
Contemporary media environments—cinema, digital platforms, online performance, and algorithmic systems—are reshaping how trauma is represented, circulated, and experienced. While trauma theory has traditionally focused on testimony, narrative rupture, and belatedness, these frameworks now encounter new conditions of mediation, visibility, and reception.
This conference invites scholars and practitioners to rethink trauma in relation to these transformations. We are particularly interested in how established concepts operate today: where they remain productive, where they reach their limits, and how they might be extended or reconfigured.
We welcome contributions addressing:
Format
Selected papers will be considered for a peer-reviewed special issue of Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media.
Organizers
Doru Pop
Teodora Crișan-Matcăbojă
Adrian Tătăran
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, August 29-31, 2019
Anthropocene is a much-debated, yet a highly influential catch-all term for a planetary condition, which casts humankind as a geological force. Subsuming phenomena like dramatically diminishing biodiversity, detrimental pollution, destruction of marine and telluric ecosystems, and anthropogenic climate change, Anthropocene succeeds in capturing the contemporary moment of crisis, anxiety, and even “pre-trauma” depression (Anne Kaplan). At the time the term was coined in the early 2000s, environmental alarms have been sounding for more than three decades, and environmental issues have already transcended the domain of natural sciences. Indispensable in diagnosing damage and construing simulated scenarios, when it comes to engaging the public at large, the natural sciences are no match for the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts. For them, Anthropocene is a tool for making cultural, political, and ideological sense of irreversible environmental phenomena, for rendering them graspable, and even resolvable.
The conference organizers would, therefore, like to convene scholars of the Anthropocene condition from a wide variety of disciplines – communication studies, literary ecocriticism, new materialism and post-humanism, media studies and animal studies as well as engaged colleagues from the social sciences and the natural sciences. Artists and writers confronting the Anthropocene condition in aesthetic media are encouraged to apply for the conference.
We would also wish to consolidate innovative discussions within the methodological frame of intermedial ecocriticism since we consider intermediality and multimodality to be crucial in communicating interaction, and believe that:
Intermedial ecocriticism understands all medial expressions as medially and modally mixed, meaning that Intermedial ecocriticism considers art, mass media, journalism and science on a gliding scale instead of as absolute entities;
Intermedial ecocriticism aims at comparing different medial expressions of societal and scientific facts related to environmental questions, therefore
Intermedial ecocriticism aims to reinvestigate the basic ecocritical questions from a media comparative point of view.
Possible topics of interest include but are not limited to
Anthropocene dystopias (and utopias?); Anthropocene media;
Comparative Climate Change communication; Dark media ecologies;
Ecofeminisms; Ecopoetics;
“Hyperobjects” across media;
Intersections between environmental philosophies, science and the arts; Media-oriented discussions of Science and Technology Studies; Parascientific histories and methodologies; Posthumanities versions of scientific reasoning; Science representation as a medial question; Queer ecologies; Speculative and “weird” Anthropocene fictions.
Conference Organizers
The conference is a collaboration between Linnæus Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies and The Center for Transdisciplinary Research - Ekphrasis, Universitatea Babeş- Bolyai, Cluj-NapocaDoru Pop (Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca), Liviu Lutas and Jørgen Bruhn (Linnæus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Sweden)
Confirmed Key Note Speakers
Lars Elleström, professor of Comparative Literature, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Simon Estok, professor and Senior Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University (Department of English Literature and Critical Theory
Alexa Weik von Mossner, associate professor of American Studies, Klagenfurt University, Germany
Christina Stojanova, associate professor, University of Regina, Canada
Guide for authors
The official language of the conference is English.
We welcome proposals for papers and pre-constituted panels (2-3 papers).Art-based researchers and artists are strongly encouraged to submit suggestions for presentations in various formats. Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.
Important Dates
Deadline for proposal submission: July 1st, 2019.
Notification of acceptance: July 15th, 2019
Conference registration deadline: July 30th, 2019
Other Important InformationThe conference fee is € 100, payable online. It includes conference dinner and access to all conference activities and materials. The organizers will provide a meal plan and housing at the Babeș-Bolyai University hotel for an extra fee of € 50. Reduced fees for graduate students and independent artists/writers are to be discussed with the organizers. The venue of the conference is the main building of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, Mihail Kogălniceanu St. 1, 400084.
Publication of Conference ProceedingsWe are planning to publish a selection of the articles presented in the peer-reviewed journal Ekphrasis (ESCI, ERIH/ EBSCO http://ekphrasisjournal.ro/index.php?p=call)
- a separate volume edited by the organizers, to be published at an international publisher, pending on the range and quality of papers.
For further details, please contact Professor Doru Pop Email: doru.pop@ubbcluj.ro.
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