The Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) is pleased to announce the theme of the annual 2027 Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF): MODES.
This year, we return to the central question that animates the festival:
What does it mean to produce knowledge multimodally?
MODES invites participants to consider multimodality as not just a stylistic choice, but as an epistemological intervention that has long informed the multiplicity of ways knowledge comes into being. Rather than treating image, sound, performance, or creative practice as supplements to written research, MODES asks us to explore how different modes shape what is known, felt, exchanged, created, and transformed.
Originally a semiotic intervention within Communication Studies (Barthes, Kress, van Leeuwen), multimodal research has become increasingly visible in contemporary intellectual and creative life encompassing the many ways knowledge comes into being beyond traditional, written academic formats. Across disciplines, communities, and traditions, however, people have long turned to story, performance, visual art, movement, sound, ritual, embodiment, technology, and collective practice to make meaning, preserve memory, contest power, and re-make the world around them.
Contemporary multimodal research arts draw from a rich repertoire traversing anthropology, sensory ethnography, arts-based research, performance, filmmaking, activism, performance art, storytelling, critical making, experimental methods, and media-based knowledge production. We take inspiration from thinkers and practitioners whose work travel between modes and across disciplinary boundaries, including Zora Neal Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dwight Conquergood, Sarah Pink, E. Partick Johnson, and the countless others who challenge conventional distinctions between research, art, education, and social engagement.
This year’s festival further asks:
Submission Formats
We invite proposals from scholars, artists, filmmakers, activists, educators, students, and community practitioners in formats including: AUDIO PROJECTS / VISUAL ART / RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS / POETRY / FILM & VIDEO / WORKSHOPS / PERFORMANCE / INTERACTIVE MEDIA / OTHER MULTIMODAL WORK. Proposals must briefly reflect on the relationship between form and content, considering how their chosen mode(s) contribute to the creation, expression, and reception of the ideas explored within the work.
Submit your proposal here.
Proposal Deadline
Friday, December 20th at 11:59PM EST.
About SSMF
The Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) is a hybrid media and art festival/academic conference featuring screenings, exhibitions, workshops, and performances alongside peer-reviewed academic panels hosted by the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) and the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE). The festival provides a creative, collaborative space to explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal strategies in research, and to interrogate their social implications. We center multimodal scholarship, working to uplift media and art as valid modes of knowledge production by bringing together scholars, filmmakers, artists, educators, activists, and more.
Important Information
Most accepted submissions will be presented in conference-style format alongside other selected works. A small number of projects may be featured as plenary events, screenings, workshops, or performances.
*Please note that funding for travel, production, or elaborate staging is not available. Proposals requiring substantial technical or financial support may not be feasible.
