Call for Projects & Papers: The Video Essay
a special issue of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies
Edited by David P. Terry & Michael LeVan
» download call
This special issue of Liminalities seeks submissions of 1) video essays as works of performance scholarship and/or praxis (i.e., works that address performance, the performative, or performativity as a social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic practice; as a methodology; or as a mode of critique); 2) scholarly essays in more traditional forms that investigate limitations and possibilities of video essays as sites/mediums of knowledge production; and 3) scholarly essays that critique and respond to specific video essays.
We take Paul Edwards’ Selected Video Essays, 2004-2016, published collectively in Liminalities 13.1 (2017), as the springboard for this call.
Performance Studies already enjoys a vibrant life of liminality among texts and bodies, as well as a soaring interdisciplinarity among its objects, methods, and products. As the ease and ability to produce video has become as ubiquitous as the videos that flood the feeds of our daily digital lives, we recognize its potential as a vehicle for scholarship, research, teaching, and critique. Accordingly, we seek innovative essays on a wide variety of subjects using diverse performance techniques and methods. These projects should take their form as video essays seriously and be grounded in performance theories and discourses.
Liminalities maintains an account on Vimeo from which the journal’s video content is streamed. All submissions will initially be uploaded to a password-protected area of this account for juried review and feedback. To facilitate the spirit of blind peer review as much as it is possible, video files for review should not include information on authors, directors, producers, and performers (we do not expect you, however, to mask the voices or images of people). The optimal codec for video compression is H.264, though Vimeo accepts most of the major codecs. The optimal audio codec is AAC-LC with a data rate of 320 kbits/sec and a sample rate of 48 kHz. For more on Vimeo’s compression guidelines, see: https://vimeo.com/help/compression.
Video files should be sent to Michael LeVan at michael(dot)levan(at)gmail(dot)com by either a large-file transfer service or by directing me to your password protected video on your own video streaming service. Documents and inquiries can be emailed directly to Michael LeVan.
Submission deadline is 31 July, 2017. Anticipated publication date is 1 December, 2017.
