CAMRA is pleased to announce the theme of the annual 2026 Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF): Portals.
In this year's call, we invite proposals that explore and experiment with the idea of Portals: spiritual, virtual, historical, (meta)physical, and technological. Embodying the act of crossing boundaries, shifting perceptions, and navigating between worlds, portals act as gateways between what is and what might be.
We understand Portals not just as literal doorways or entry points, but as intersections where multiple realities, experiences, and dimensions converge. As such, this theme encompasses a range of projects and perspectives that explore the notion of portals across diverse mediums, disciplines, and traditions. We encourage submissions that reveal how portals serve as passages between the known and unknown, the familiar and foreign, the tangible and intangible.
We offer the following provocations with those ideas in mind:
- What portals have been opened in order to create the world we live in today? How do we open portals to more liberatory alternatives? What boundaries, thresholds, and borders must we transcend and/or collapse in order to open them?
- How do catastrophe and collapse act as portals? What does it look like to move though catastrophe to arrive at a world unknown?
- How does multimodal scholarship create portals for pluriversality, allowing us to acknowledge and affirm the legitimacy of many different epistemologies and forms of existence?
- How have technologies been used to transport us into the world we inhabit? How might they be alternatively utilized?
- What does it mean to work within, around, outside of, and across time? How does multimodality afford new ways of working through time?
Inspired by the works of artists and scholars such as Arundhati Roy, Cynthia B. Dillard, Omise'eke Natahsa Tinsley, Walter Mignolo, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Wangechi Mutu, and Alisha B. Wormsley, among the many whose works have acted as portals for liberation and worlds otherwise, we offer this theme as a way to think together about the portals we seek to open in our own work. We hope to collectively reframe the boundaries of what is possible and to engage with the profound, transformative possibilities of multimodal scholarship.
As we step through this year’s theme, we encourage works that engage artistic, mediated, and scholarly modalities in new and metamorphic ways. We are open to proposals in a variety of formats, including AUDIO / VISUAL ART / RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS / POETRY / VIDEO & FILMS / WORKSHOPS. We invite submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators of all backgrounds that creatively explore these ideas. DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO Friday, December 12 at 11:59PM EST.
SSMF 2026 will take place in-person at the University of Pennsylvania on March 27-28, 2026. The festival will involve commissioned musical and poetry performance as well as talks and workshops. It is produced in collaboration with the support of the Annenberg School for Communication and the Center for Experimental Ethnography. The festival will remain free and open to the public.
Join us as we collectively unlock new dimensions of knowledge, connection, and possibility.
