Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2021 Virtual Conference

In mid-March 2020, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) informed its members that its annual conference in Denver, Colorado, was cancelled. As the uncertainties of the global pandemic continued into July, the organizing committee of the conference made the difficult decision to hold the 2021 SCMS Conference fully online. It did so, on the one hand, in response to ongoing concerns about health and safety, as well as international travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, university spending freezes, and other constraints. On the other hand, 2021 marked the first-ever SCMS Virtual Conference, and should be viewed as a significant milestone, especially given that the Society had long resisted requests to add an online component.The following, then, is not a nostalgic lament for the embodied conferences of a pre-COVID era, or a utopian celebration of the possibilities of connectivity afforded by Zoom. Rather, it is a reflection on the ways the SCMS adapted to a virtual conference and how that event operated under the fraught conditions of the global pandemic.SCMS, in operation since 1959, is an international organization of film and media scholars and educators housed at the University of Oklahoma.1 The Society occupies a central place in what has become an increasingly interdisciplinary and multifaceted field, bringing together new scholarly research in both its peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and at its annual conference. Usually, the SCMS Conference, now in its sixty-second year, takes place over five-days in late March at a large hotel in a different host city—most recently Seattle (2019), Toronto (2018), and Chicago (2017). This year’s virtual conference took place on the online event platform Pathable and used Zoom to conduct live meetings over five days, March 17–21, with a two-day pre-conference the preceding weekend. According to the Society’s April/May 2021 news brief, the SCMS 2021 Virtual Conference brought together 2,401 attendees from across more than fourteen different time zones, offering 570 panels, roundtables, seminars, workshops, and special events.2The SCMS Board, Conference Committee, and staff did an excellent job reconceptualizing the conference for the virtual environment. Organizing an international conference online is not an easy task, and their hard work, willingness to innovate, and care for accessibility showed. Since it is an international organization, SCMS needed to ensure that presenters and attendees across many different time zones could engage with the live meetings in real time. Thus, Chicago/Central time was established as the official time zone of the conference, and the schedule was coordinated with London and Shanghai time zones. Moreover, the pre-conference was added to allow the various Caucuses, Scholarly Interest Groups, Institutional Members Meeting, Members Business Meeting, and other factions to meet without conflicting with conference panels and workshops. Further, the virtual conference offered two options for presentations: attendees could either present live in the Zoom meetings, with the option to record for on-demand viewing, or upload a prerecorded presentation to the Pathable platform.SCMS provided regular updates about the logistical details of the virtual conference via email, the virtual event platform and mobile app, and on social media. This type of frequent messaging was particularly important for the success of the virtual conference. Conference attendees benefited from the clarity provided by a comprehensive FAQs page. Pre-conference help sessions were held to orient attendees and presenters to the virtual event platform. Attendees were given detailed instructions on how to chair a panel and how to deliver a conference paper over Zoom. Along similar lines, attendees were provided guidelines on basic Zoom etiquette, presentation tips and best practices, ideas about how to avoid “Zoom fatigue,” and technical support.Pathable launched just prior to the pre-conference, allowing time for conference attendees to familiarize themselves with the interface. The website itself was straightforward and easy to navigate. It was divided into different subpages, including “Attendee Info,” “My Agenda,” “People,” “Social Media,” “Special Events and Sessions,” “Virtual Book Exhibition,” and “Virtual Lounge.” The “Attendee Info” tab allowed conference attendees to create a personal profile where they could upload a photo and add their affiliation, pronouns, and professional interests. The “People” tab led to an alphabetical list of all registered conference attendees. Each linked to a personal profile, which included the attendee’s session information and provided options to send both private messages and schedule one-on-one virtual meetings.The “Special Events and Sessions” tab led to a schedule with the various panels, roundtables, seminars, special events, and workshops, which were organized alphabetically, from A to V, in color-coded blocks according to day and time. Conference attendees could pick and choose which sessions they were interested in and add them to their personal agenda. The “My Agenda” subpage led to the self-curated schedule of all the sessions selected, along with the names of individual presenters and presentation titles. To join a session, attendees needed only to click on “Reserve Spot” on the panel page. A countdown clock changed to a “Join Meeting” button one minute before the panel’s start time, so there was no need to juggle separate Zoom links.In format, the virtual panels were very much like traditional ones in that they ran for roughly ninety minutes, with three to four synchronous twenty-minute papers delivered and time reserved for questions and discussion. Conversation-driven seminars and workshops were particularly well-suited to Zoom. Sessions were generally well attended and generated lively and engaging discussions, often via the chat function. Many of these sessions were recorded and remained available to stream on demand on the conference platform for registered attendees until March 31.The SCMS virtual conference platform was clearly set up not only as a place for attendees to share scholarship and ideas, but to facilitate mentorship, professional networking, and social connections. The “Virtual Lounge” allowed attendees to join a “table” with others for networking and informal meetings. Social events like the “Virtual Mixer: Sparkle and Fizz” also helped attendees build new connections by encouraging casual conversations. Though clearly not a replacement for the in-person social interactions found at a traditional conference, these events reimagined connectivity in new creative ways that embraced the virtual environment.Since it is impossible to summarize much less attend all 570 panels, roundtables, seminars, workshops, and events, let me briefly note two trends. First, many sessions reflected on the various methods and premises of disciplinary knowledge to take stock of the past, present, and future of the field. Emblematic of this trend was the panel “It’s the Theory That Got Small,” which brought together presentations by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Patrice Petro, and Phillip Rosen that traced multiple historical trajectories of film theory, shedding light on the disciplinary configurations, discursive legacies, and generational dynamics at play. Second, the virtual conference highlighted the urgency for scholars to reflect on the role of film and media studies in the COVID-19 pandemic moment. Particular attention was paid to the ways the crisis of the pandemic laid bare the failures of neoliberal capitalism, forcing a global reckoning with systematic racism and inequality. Some scholars sought to respond directly to these pressing concerns, presenting new and innovative research on topics like anti-racist pedagogy, COVID conspiracy media, remote learning, radical media praxis, and moviegoing in the streaming age. For instance, Neta Alexander, Tanya Horeck, Tina Kendall, and Kartik Nair’s panel, “Netflix and Chills: Rethinking Binge-Watching after COVID-19,” introduced new conceptual frameworks and case studies to explore the dominant spectatorial mode of the pandemic—from the “Netflix and heal” phenomenon, to scrolling through TikTok, to binging Friends, to the ways in which Netflix’s interface is strategically designed to promote binging.3 As Alexander pointed out in her talk, “From Spectatorship to ‘Survivorship’: Binge-Watching as a Mode of Survival,” during lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, binge-watching, previously regarded as “excessive, or uncontrollable, consumption,” was suddenly recast as “a form of self-care,” a healing agent to the effects of quarantine.4 Others seemed to use the virtual conference as an opportunity to rethink earlier research in relation to the present moment. For example, Alice Lovejoy opened her talk, “Photo/Chemistry: Film Stock and the Technopolitics of Cinema” by recounting Donald Trump’s announcement in July 2020 that the US government had contracted Eastman Kodak to manufacture chemicals for the COVID vaccine, setting up a historical intervention that repositions film “from the culture industry to the chemical industry.”The quality of scholarship presented this year was exceptionally strong. Papers covered a wide range of fascinating topics, including below-the-line Asian-American labor in twentieth-century Hollywood, Black television studies, copyright law, documentary diplomacy, farm tech as media culture, gendered fan historiographies, global film cultures, Indigenous digital media, Latinx mediascapes, podcasting, and video games set in World War II. Seminars and workshops such as “Rescue Missions: Black Film Feminisms,” “Decolonization and Transnational Solidary in Film/Media Studies: A Workshop Towards Action,” “From Submission to Publication: Journal Editors Answer Your Questions!,” and “Geographies & Genealogies of World Cinema” drew huge turnouts and generated illuminating conversations. Special events celebrated the life and pioneering queer feminist work of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer, brought together attendees for a town hall on precarious labor, and explored the challenges faced by film festivals during the pandemic. Bringing together all these panels, seminars, special events, and workshops, the SCMS 2021 Virtual Conference created a new environment in which its members could connect while physically disconnected, share new and exciting research, engage in important conversations about the field, and reflect on the shape of cinema and media studies in this current moment.We can all agree that we are now in a moment of transition, that the global pandemic has had a profound effect on how we attend conferences, conduct research, work, and operate in our everyday lives. The rapid shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic—via videoconferencing software like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and the ubiquitous Zoom—has made us more accessible, more flexible, and more porous. It has altered our relationship to home and work, blurring the clearly defined boundaries between labor and leisure, public and private spheres. The demand for remote work, coupled with the pressures of everyday life, for instance, forced many conference attendees to fit in sessions between meetings, office hours, teaching, caregiving, and other responsibilities (and often with their cameras turned off). Notably, this unevenly impacted the precariously employed or otherwise vulnerable to the double crisis of the pandemic and systemic inequities. As this suggests, the virtual conference might seem to produce new challenges and inequities, yet they are tethered to ones that already exist.The 2021 SCMS Virtual Conference raises many questions, not only about the challenges and benefits of the online format, but also about the limitations of the traditional in-person conference experience. It seems clear that the online format will endure in some form long after COVID, and may indeed become a fixture of a new hybrid SCMS Conference in post-pandemic times. We can hope to return to an in-person SCMS conference next year in Chicago, but it’s too late to go “back to normal.”

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