The conference Media Inside Out brings together scholars and mediamakers to reflect and speculate on the field of film and media studies, its origins, and its futures. As a provocation, “media inside out” invites immediate reflection on the hermeneutic, structuralist, and discursive approaches that have been foundational to our discipline; in what ways have these frameworks been generative or limiting? It encourages us to examine the boundary logics of film and media studies, how we define and understand its epistemological edges. It prompts us to consider the role of intellectual curiosity and promiscuity in shaping a discipline that continually upends itself. What are the key moments at which our discipline has mobilized its interdisciplinarity and its global orientation to reinvigorate, reinvent itself? How do the stakes shift when the discipline pivots with emerging paradigms, making a “turn” to the popular, the archival, or the pluriversal? In what ways has our discipline been able to transform historical understanding and spatial apprehension: not only of evolving, proliferating media fields, but also of broader experiential registers such as modernity, agency, and planetarity?

“Inside out” invokes a supple film and media studies that reaches beyond its anchoring concerns to pose pressing, expansive questions about power, depredation, and futurity. In our media epistemologies, what is placed inside or out, and how does this location determine what we view as valuable or trivial, legitimate or illicit, normative or at the margins? What is legible at the surface, in the here and now, and what remains recessed as interiority, in memories, archives, or deep time? What are the disciplinary stakes when we speak of confoundingly diverse forms, dimensions, and processes of media/tion: celluloid and electronic, generic and experimental, evidentiary and pornographic, infrastructural and recuperative? When analytical interests of recent vintage, such as platform, blockchain, or elemental media have to contend with other upstart categories like epidemic media, metabolic rift, or s-risk? What modes of rethinking, retooling, reformulating–perhaps even unthinking, unlearning, overhauling–keep emerging as necessities, both from within the realm of media and in response to the broader ecologies of knowledge production?

As a focal point for the conversations, participants will engage, think, and play with the significant intellectual work of Professor Constance Penley, Professor Janet Walker, and Professor Chuck Wolfe on such themes as: film history, film theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, popular culture, comedy, documentary, environmental media, sex media, institutions and spaces of scholarship, publishing and editorial work, and much more. The conference honors the careers of these three esteemed UC Santa Barbara faculty members who have deeply shaped our understanding of what film and media studies has been and might yet be. Invited participants will gather and think together with us over these two days, stitching connections across intellectual generations.