*Gender and labour in the Italian screen industries: Critical research approaches and methods*

CALL FOR PAPERS - deadline approaching (May 15)

Special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali - Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies (Scopus indexed; A-class rated ANVUR) edited by Rosa Barotsi, Gloria Dagnino and Carla Mereu Keating

In the last twenty years, increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to the screen industries as a workplace and as a site of institutional and individual cultural and creative practice (e.g., Deuze 2007; Mayer, Banks and Caldwell 2009; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010). Studies in this field have often centred on film, television and audiovisual media production (e.g., Caldwell 2008; Barra, Bonini and Splendore 2016; Comand and Venturini 2021), although forms of labour in circulation, promotion and reception of media texts have also attracted interest (e.g. Loist 2011; Grainge and Johnson 2015; Fanchi and Garofalo 2018; Treveri Gennari et al. 2020). Within these studies, a number of scholars have interrogated and utilised gender as an analytic category in order to expose and criticise unequal and divisive labour dynamics (e.g., Foster 1997; Gaines, Vatsal and Dall’Asta 2013-; Bell 2021). The gendered division of labour and the systematic exclusion of female-identifying professionals in the screen industries persistently emerge as global, transnational issues (e.g., Gledhill and Knight 2015; Hole, Jelača, Kaplan and Petro 2016; Liddy 2020). In Italy, pioneering studies on women’s labour in the audiovisual sector can be traced back to the 1970s (Bellumori 1972; Carrano 1977), but it is only in recent years that a gender perspective has been taken on more systematically, focusing on directors (e.g., Scarparo and Luciano 2010, 2013, 2020; Cantini 2013) as well as other above- and below-the-line professions (e.g., Dall’Asta 2008; Cardone and Fanchi 2011; Cardone, Jandelli and Tognolotti 2015; Buffoni 2018; Missero 2022).

This concerted academic attention continues to raise a number of critical, theoretical and methodological, questions: how instrumental is the category of gender in exposing power dynamics and labour relations in the Italian past and present screen industries? How can we uphold intersectional feminist, queer and decolonial perspectives of gender and labour in meaningful ways? How do we redress long-established heteronormative and binary approaches? Finally, how do we tackle historical bias in archival practice and engage with the promises and limitations of digital technologies?

This special journal issue aims to foreground a range of research approaches and methods to document the intersection between gender and labour from a diachronic or synchronic perspective. It welcomes a variety of theoretical frameworks and applied case studies that identify and engage (self-)critically with past and present understandings of gendered specialisation and discrimination in the Italian screen industries, also from comparative and/or transnational perspectives. This issue concurrently serves as a platform for screen industry scholars and practitioners to reflect critically on historical relations of gender bias and power in the research process, calling them to examine consciously and explicitly the assumptions that underpin their approaches and methods and the nature and availability of their archives and data resources. We are also interested in contributions from educators and practitioners whose work integrates ethical principles in the formulation of innovative research-led teaching and creative practice.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following areas of investigation:
*Methodological challenges in gender-based studies of Italian screen industries.
*Gendered labour and working conditions in the Italian screen industries.
*Screen labour historiography and historical revisionism.
*Screen labour and intersectional, transfeminist, decolonial and disability studies.
*Critical inclusion studies and Italian screen industries.
*Questioning normative frameworks of employment in the Italian screen industries (political, economic, legal, policy-based).
*Histories of hidden, forgotten and/or marginalised figures in Italian screen labour.
*Gendered labour in Italian promotional screen industries.
*Ethics and aesthetics of representation, casting and performance.
*Archival research methods, experiences, challenges (politics of archiving).
*Datafication of screen research (materiality, typology, bias, interpretation and politics of data).
*Digital Humanities and research on screen labour (mapping, immersive, digitisation, online sources).

Submission details:
Please send your abstract and a 150 words biographical note by May 15, 2022 to:
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Abstracts should be between 300 to 400 words of length (in English). All submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, contact details and a short bio for each author. Authors will be notified of proposal acceptance by May 30, 2022. 

If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article, in English, by September 18, 2022. Please note that NO article processing fee will be required. 
Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
Articles must not exceed 5’000/6’000-words (including references)

For more information: http://comunicazionisociali.vitaepensiero.com/news-call-for-papers-cfp-gender-and-labour-in-the-italian-screen-industries-critical-research-approaches-and-methods-5801.html    

Contributions will be submitted to a double-blind peer review process.
The issue number 1.2023 of Comunicazioni Sociali will be published in April, 2023.

“Comunicazioni Sociali” is indexed in Scopus and it is an A-class rated journal by ANVUR in: Cinema, photography and television (L-ART/06), Performing arts (L-ART/05), and Sociology of culture and communication (SPS/08).

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