SSMF 2022: “Pause”

About the Screening Scholarship Media Festival

The Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) provides a creative, collaborative space to engage with diverse multimedia projects. We explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal representational strategies in research, and we interrogate their social implications. SSMF is a hybrid between a traditional academic conference and a film/media festival. We strive to bridge the gap between art and science by bringing together scholars, artists, educators, and activists.

This year’s SSMF is organized around the theme Pause. We understand pause as mobility and immobility, as waiting, as rest and recuperation, but also as a refusal and political strategy and action.For whom is pause a privilege? For whom is it a need for existence? And how do our practices respond to the notions of pause? What do pauses encompass? The festival features projects that explore pause as an intentional engagement with suspension, as well as a way of being.

About CAMRA

CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) fosters interdisciplinary collaborations amongst scholars, sensory ethnographers, artists and educators within and beyond the University of Pennsylvania to explore, practice, evaluate and teach about multimedia research and representation. 

We ask questions about the affordances, challenges, and possibilities of multimodal scholarship in teaching, learning, mediamaking, and knowledge production. Our aim is to support media-based research and pedagogies, with an explicit focus on: (1) providing practical guidelines for evaluation of multimodal research; (2) utilizing participatory, digital, and ethnographic methodologies; (3) creating digital and physical spaces for multimodal work to be showcased; (4) critically examining how technology is changing the processes of teaching and learning.

CAMRA Directors, 2021-2022

Atenea Rosado Viurques, CAMRA Director
Farrah Rahaman, Partnerships Director
Chrislyn Laurore, Finance Director
Rabani Garg, SSMF Director
Larissa Johnson, Programming Director
Roopa Vasudevan, Branding & Design Director

SSMF Planning Committee, 2020-2021

Rabani Garg, SSMF Director
Florence Madenga, Submissions & Program Coordinator
Atenea Rosado-Viurques, CAMRA Director
Indivar Jonnalagadda, SSMF Streaming & Tech Team
Juan Castrillón, SSMF Streaming & Tech Team
Larissa Johnson, SSMF Streaming & Tech Team
Monique Perry, SSMF Streaming & Tech Team
Astrid Pickenpack, Communications Coordinator
angel gutierrez, CAMRA Fellows Showcase Coordinator
Bethany Monea, CAMRA Fellows Showcase Coordinator

SSMF 2022 Reviewers

Indivar Jonnalagadda, Florence Madenga, Kim Fernandes, Alex Rafi, Bina Nehama Brody, Gokcen Erkilik, Jake Nussbaum, Melissa Essman, Monique Perry, NaOme Rich, Olivia R. Haynie, Perry B. Johnson, Rabani Garg

SSMF 2022 Selection Committee

Indivar Jonnalagadda, Florence Madenga, Perry B. Johnson, NaOme Rich, Kim Fernandes, Alex Rafi, Rabani Garg

Finance: Chrislyn Laurie Laurore
Website Design: Roopa Vasudevan

SSMF 2021 has been generously supported by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation; the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn; the Penn Graduate School of Education; and the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

We would like to thank Grace Ndicu, Amit Das, and Dean John Jackson for their support to the CAMRA fellows.

We would also like to thank the Morris Arboretum for letting us film our opening performance, ‘Stabdha: Interlude’, there.