The Biennial Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) Conference will be held at The University of Melbourne from 1st to 4th December 2026.
The theme for the 2026 SSAAANZ Conference is Making Do. This year’s conference will be held in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia at the University of Melbourne, with a pre-fix day for ECR and HDR members on 1 December 2026. This year’s SSAAANZ Conference will be held in person.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Making do is a generative act. To “make do” means to seize agency, create, act and enact. In common parlance, to make do is typically understood as a response to a condition of deficit, at best a stoic act and, at worst, subservient to fixed conditions. The awkwardness of the phrase itself, make do, mirrors analogous phrases like “get by”, “eke out” or “scape by”, verbally enacting the constraints they signify.
The 2026 SSAAANZ Conference considers the creative, subversive and abundant possibilities of making do in screen studies and screen cultures. Making do involves leveraging existing assets, foraging, and crafting: films, multihyphenate careers, classroom or on-set resources. It is to bricolage what is at hand, to give new life to old materials. Making do is to mend what is broken, repair what can be fixed, and find new uses for the obsolete or redundant, including technologies, critical theories, genres. Making do can be a tactic: it gives agency to the disenfranchised, enables resistance when resources are scarce.
Making do also invokes the limitations of time. We make do with what we have when time is scarce, or when the passage of time has left us with resources that are partial or non-extent. To make do is to offer a working theory, to speculate, and to embrace unusual forms of evidence. In this way, it is an engagement with time: time is leveraged; hypotheses are posed for future re-makings and re-doings.
This conference focalises making, doing, and creative problem solving in screen practice, theories, histories, and policies. We invite papers that consider how screen studies is a process of making do:
What “making do” means in screen theory and practice
Critical or creative theories of incompletion, speculation, prediction, or imagination
Cross cultural interpretations of making do
Indigenous screen histories of making do within dominant systems
Making ado: celebrating, making a fuss
The incomplete archive; archives subject to environmental, financial, political, or social pressures
Amateur, experimental, and activist filmmaking
Making do without enough money, time, resources
Screen praxes and pedagogies in the context of neoliberalism
Making do in an age of technological disruption and generative artificial intelligence
Piecing together and making do as methodology
An ethics of making do in practice and research
We invite papers from across the disciplinary spectrum of screen studies, including (but not limited to):
Cinema and television studies
Game studies and interactive media
Animation
Documentary and nonfiction screen media
Video art, multimedia, and immersive media (VR/AR)
Screenwriting and production studies
Video essay and videographic criticism
Creative practice research
Screen and creative labour
Screen environments and policy
Screen history, theory, and criticism
Screen industries, production, and distribution
National, transnational, and postcolonial screen industries
Reception, audiences, and screen cultures
Proposals for individual presentations, pre-constituted panels or workshops should include a 200-word abstract per paper, a 50-word bio per presenter, up to 5 external references and 3-5 keywords. Proposals are due 1 June 2026 via the portal:
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the conference organisers at ssaaanz-2026@unimelb.edu.au.
SSAAANZ 2026 Conference Organising Committee: Dr Janice Loreck, Dr Kirsten Stevens, Dr Nonie May, Dr Duncan Caillard, Dr Alicia Byrnes, Dr Fann Goh, Dr Cristóbal Escobar Duenas, Dr Mark Nicholls, Izzy Kane, Alex Williams, Jon Dale.