Film-Philosophy Conference 2025 – Call for Papers
Call For Papers
FILM-PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE 2025
University of Malta, Valletta Campus
June 23-25, 2025
https://journals.ed.ac.uk/f-p-submissions/film-philosophyconference2025
Sponsored by York University in Toronto and the University of Malta, the 2025 Film-Philosophy Conference will be held June 23-25 at the Valletta Campus of the University of Malta. For more about Film-Philosophy and Malta, see below.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Sandra Laugier (Philosophy, Sorbonne)
May Adadol Ingawanij (School of Arts, University of Westminster)
Walid El Khachab (Arabic Studies, York University)
GENERAL TRACKS AND TOPICS:
We invite proposals for 20 min presentations (submission details below). All presentations should focus on film, philosophy, and their intersections. Within those parameters, we invite proposals on the following tracks, themes, and topics, but not restricted to these:
- Algorithms/Digital Technology/New Media
- Animality/Nonhuman/Environment/Climate
- Arabic Thought and Cinema
- Black Thought and Cinema
- Body/Affect/Emotion
- Classical Film-Philosophy
- Cognitivism and Post-Analytic Philosophy
- Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Film-Philosophy
- Documentary, Nonfiction, Science Film
- Ethics
- Existentialism and/or Phenomenology
- Expanded Cinema, Artist Film and Installation, Video Art
- Feminist, Gender, Queer, and/or Trans Theory
- Indigeneity and Fourth Cinema
- Islands, Water, and/or Piracy
- Love, Care, Relationality
- Malta and Moving Images
- Mediterranean Thought and Cinema
- Migrants/Migration
- Neurodiversity
- New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Plasticity, and/or Network Theory
- Open topics
- Political Film-Philosophy
- Psychoanalysis
- Religion, Spirituality, Dis/Enchantment, Secularism, Postsecularism
- Workshops
SUBMISSIONS:
Please submit only one 300-word proposal for a 20-minute English presentation by February 21, 2025. Submissions should be prepared for blind review. We are not accepting any unsolicited proposals for pre-constituted panels; if you have an idea for a panel, please contact Mark Cauchi (mcauchi@yorku.ca) before you submit. Submissions will be evaluated by a review panel. Decisions about acceptance will be announced by March 7, 2025.
To submit a proposal, go to https://journals.ed.ac.uk/f-p-submissions/index, which is the submission page for the Film-Philosophy Journal. Click “Make a Submission” on the right. You will have to register or login. On the “Submissions” page, click “New Submission” on the right. On the “Make a Submission” page, be sure to select “Film-Philosophy Conference 2025” in the menu.
ENQUIRIES:
If you have any questions, please get in contact with Mark Cauchi (York University, Toronto) and include “FP Question” in your subject line: mcauchi@yorku.ca
The conference is being organized by:
Mark Cauchi (Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto)
Gloria Lauri Lucente (Film Studies, University of Malta)
Claude Mangion (Department of Philosophy, University of Malta)
ABOUT FILM-PHILOSOPHY:
The Film-Philosophy conference has been taking place since 2008. The conference and its related journal, Film-Philosophy (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/film), are dedicated to the engagement between film studies and philosophy, exploring the ways in which films develop and contribute to philosophical discussion. The journal and conference provide a forum for the thoughtful re-evaluation of key aspects of both film studies and philosophy as academic disciplines. The language of both the conference and the journal are English.
ABOUT MALTA:
The archipelago of Malta is located 80 km south of Sicily and 280 km east of Tunisia. That geographic location gives an indication of the Italian-Arabic fusion that characterizes its culture. As is noted in the contemporary Maltese literary journal, Aphroconfuso, the first printed publication about Malta, from 1536, observes that “The people have a Sicilian character, with a mixture of African [Aphro confuso].” Ruled and colonized by outsiders for almost all of its 5000-year history, Malta’s culture is very visibly tessellated by that of its settlers and rulers. A former British colony, English is the second official language of Malta, and today almost everybody speaks it very well; its first, native language being Maltese, a distinctive language that fuzes Arabic and Sicilian, written in Roman script, with much adapted English vocabulary. With a total land area of 312 km2, and a population of 500k, it is the eighth-most dense place on Earth, and it packs in many things to appreciate: sunny hot weather, numerous beaches, neolithic ruins and goddess temples, medieval and renaissance towns, Baroque and neo-Classical architecture, two Caravaggio paintings, 400 historical churches, quiet rural escapes and natural wonders, stunning views, and a distinctive local cuisine, as well as more common Mediterranean and international fare. While this dense geography and history may not be exactly what Humphrey Bogart meant in The Maltese Falcon when he referred to the “stuff dreams are made of,” Malta has nevertheless also been something of a dream factory, serving as a filming location for numerous films: Midnight Express, Popeye, Clash of the Titans, Swept Away, Troy, Munich, World War Z, Gladiator I and II, and Napoleon, among many others.