Call for Papers – Special Issue
 
Students on Screen

Abstract Deadline: Monday 20th September 2021
 
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
 
You are invited to submit 200-word abstracts for a forthcoming journal special issue provisionally entitled Students on Screen. This special issue seeks to examine a range of representations and constructions of students on screen, in film, television and other screen media. We welcome contributions from all disciplines and approaches and from those working within and beyond academia. 

Context
Students are increasingly prominent on screen, in film and television and on social media platforms including TikTok and YouTube. Williams (2010, p.170) has emphasised that ‘media representations of students are worthy of analysis as they reflect back to society some of the dominant ways in which what it means to be a student is understood’. Screen representations can frame, inform and offer complex and competing messages about what it might mean to be a student both now and in the past. The presence of students on screen often intersects with ideas about schooling, education and academic ‘success’ and ‘failure’, peer friendships and youth subcultures. Representations of students are commonly entwined with notions of risk. For example, how students can pose ‘a risk’ to society through anti-social behaviour, poor academic attainment, drug and alcohol use and sexual activity or be presented as ‘at risk’, highlighting their vulnerability, fragility and need for protection in screen representation that feature suicide, self-harm, gun violence, bullying and sexual exploitation (Calver and Michael-Fox, 2021 and forthcoming). This ‘at risk’/’a risk’ dichotomy is often played out on screen and tends to reflect and sometimes challenge stereotypes regarding students in relation to gender, age, ethnicity and sexuality. 

Livingstone (1998) argues film, television and social media can all be understood to form spaces in which audiences engage with complex social understandings. Depictions of students on screen therefore inevitably become informed by and inform a range of prominent cultural, social and political concerns about, for example, consumerism, protest, activism and racism (see, for example, Harris et al., 2020), sexism, social class, and – very broadly – what it means to ‘be a student’ in any given context. 

Contributions might focus on:

•	On screen representations of students in schools, post-compulsory education, universities, colleges, secure environments or any other setting
•	Students on screen in drama, documentary, horror, comedy or any other genre
•	Students on screen via social media eg TikTok, YouTube or other streaming, platform or social media networks
•	How the construction of students on screen informs ideas about schooling, further or higher education or other educational contexts
•	Students on screen in different countries and in different contexts
•	Historical or recent representations of students on the screen 
•	Shifting constructions of the student on screen over time
•	Representations of the student on screen that intersect with gender, class, ethnicity, racism, protest, sexuality, violence or other contexts
•	Audio-visual practice submissions, which might be drama, documentary, video essays or autoethnographic pieces, or other screen media practice research – for more information and guidelines on Film Practice Submissions see the following link https://openscreensjournal.com/about/submissions/
or get in touch with us at [log in to unmask]
•	Reviews of relevant texts (reviews of individual texts should be no longer than 1000 words. Review articles covering more than one text should be no longer than 3,000 words in length – please note only 200 words abstracts are needed initially)


At this stage, we have initial interest from the Open Access journal Open Screens and will be submitting a full proposal for the consideration of the editorial board once article abstracts have been collated. Authors will be contacted by 11 October 2021 to confirm whether their abstract has been selected for the full proposal and will be kept informed throughout the process. Full papers will likely be due in Spring 2022 and should be no more than 8000 words in length for written submissions. For the length of submissions for reviews or more information on audio-visual practice submissions please see here: https://openscreensjournal.com/about/submissions/

Please email 200-word abstracts along with a brief biography of no more than 150 words to [log in to unmask] by Monday 20 September 2021

Please send any queries to [log in to unmask]

Key dates

Abstract deadline: 20 September 2021
You will hear if your paper has been chosen for the proposed issue by: 11 October 2021

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