CFP: 13 Ghosts of Multimodality

 

 

 

CFP: AAA 2025

 

13 Ghosts of Multimodality: Critiquing, Rejecting and Learning to Live with Multimodality’s Problems

Panel Organizer: Samuel Collins (scollins@towson.edu)

 

(Still from "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo" (1985))

William Castle was the director and producer of countless horror movies, many of which utilized various “gimmicks”--seats wired to deliver electrical shocks, puppets that appeared from behind the movie screen, props of all kinds. His film “13 Ghosts” (1960) was no exception: the movie recounts the efforts of a family to spend the night in a haunted house and the audience was given special glasses to see the ghosts or make them disappear, an effect (“Illiusion-O”) that critics found a distraction and that did not last into the re-making of the film in 2001. Indeed, many of Castle’s tricks didn’t work as intended: too much voltage to the seats, puppets that people would throw their popcorn at, props that ran far afield of the films they were supposed to support. These were the “ghosts” that bedeviled Castle films. Whatever their success or failure, however, Castle could be considered a multimodal pioneer–constantly trying to reach beyond film to engage other senses. And like Castle, we are also faced with our multimodal “ghosts”--the media that distract, that open alternative narratives, that escape us to create their own, refractory meanings or that produce their own attendant inequalities. Finally, we face some of the same charges of glib insouciance in adopting media that are often seen as outside of anthropology’s usual purview. Here, the gravity of anthropology itself haunts the work.

This panel considers all of these ghosts, and not necessarily to vanquish them. In the spirit of Avery Gordon, ghosts emerge from the past to demand that we act in the future to address an injustice. These multimodal ghosts challenge us to confront digital divides, interrogate what we mean by “collaboration,” and, ultimately, address ethnographic revanchism at the edges of an aesthetic multimodality. Alternately, as Alfred Russel Wallace believed, ghosts are messengers from a utopian future that might stimulate us to lean into the multimodal in order to “burn down” the colonialism of anthropology. Finally, like the hapless Zorba family in “13 Ghosts” who try to last the night the night in the haunted mansion, we might choose to leave–to reject the multimodal–or stay on, learning to live with meanings, platforms and narratives that do not always go as planned. Accordingly, this panel seeks to include papers in a variety of registers: theoretical, confessional, accusatory, communicating through text or through diverse media. Like Castle’s “Illusion-O” glasses, we shift perspectives to see the ghosts or render them invisible; this is both the promise of the multimodal and its inherent weakness. From one perspective, the multimodal helps us to understand and intervene in an increasingly unequal world; from another, power retreats behind a re-deployment of the auteur for a digital age.

Please submit abstracts (250 words) and title by March 14, 2025 to Samuel Collins

(scollins@towson.edu). Decisions will be made by March 21.