SIG Newsletters

• Read the latest SIG Newsletter (Issue 8, June 2023) here.​
• Access past issues here.

Reports on SIG Activities

• January 2019.

Adaptations

This special interest group represents scholars from a range of career points who are focused on adaptation, including those who are adopting a practice-based approach. It seeks to build a stronger network within the broader BAFTSS community and offer another avenue of connections for those interested in adaptation.

​Find out more.

Amateur Cinema

The SIG will introduce scholars, researchers, and students of amateur cinema studies to wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary evaluations of key histories and theories of amateur media production, distribution and reception.

​Find out more.

Animation

There is now a growing community of researchers investigating animation in diverse ways. This special interest group represents and supports all researchers working on related topics, including those undertaking practice-based research.

​Find out more.

Archives and Archival Methods

This SIG aims to bring together researchers, archivists, and practitioners to discuss archival methods, collections, preservation, cataloguing, education, and insights. The SIG encompasses a range of theoretical approaches to the use of archives, with the aim of furthering, promoting, and discussing film, television and media archives and archival research (of all forms) across disciplines.

​Find out more.

British Cinema and Television

This SIG aims to provide a collegial forum for scholarly interests in British cinema and television cultures, both domestically as well as in their broader transnational and global contexts. The SIG operates within an expansive range of critical, theoretical, methodological and pedagogic parameters and aims to foster work that significantly advances the field of study.

​Find out more.

Colour and Film

The BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG is an international forum of scholars, filmmakers, archivists and film conservation specialists.​ The SIG offers a space in which to discuss questions that arise through the study of colour, its technologies, theories, philosophies and their historical contexts in cinema. Utilising the opportunities offered by seminars, screenings, conferences, research projects and publications the group aims to facilitate discussion and collaboration on Colour and Film.

Find out more.

Documentary

The Documentary SIG aims to bring together scholars, practitioners, and researchers to exchange ideas, generate debates, and form collaborations on various aspects of the documentary. Documentary—as a theoretical and epistemological frame—cuts across many different types of film and media. The SIG aims to define it as broadly as possible, engaging with a wide range of emerging ideas and research in this burgeoning field. 

​
Find out more.

East Asian Screen Cultures

This SIG provides scholars and research students with an active platform to exchange ideas, generate debates, and form collaborations on various aspects of East Asian Screen related studies. We encourage and facilitate research conversations on diverse paradigms and approaches, to enhance our understanding of histories, aesthetics, theories, philosophies, practices and industries of cinema, television and other screen-based media, within East Asian countries and regions, and through trans-regional comparative perspectives.

​Find out more.

Essay Film

The practice and formal analysis of the Essay Film form within the field of film, television and screen studies is an established academic area that is developing quickly with impactful contribution in the way the moving image is studied today. This group focuses on building on these foundations and exploring how the study of the essay film practice can develop within BAFTSS. The group aims to disseminate research and evaluate how the essay film can contribute new knowledge to the field of film studies in terms of its novelty, significance and narrative impact. The group also explores innovative methods of academic dissemination, public engagement and impact.

​Find out more.

Euro-Bollywood

This SIG aims to bring together for the first time pan-European and internationally based scholars and cultural partners to explore the histories, networks and filmic representations pertaining to Euro-Bollywood (i.e. ideas of Europe in Bollywood and Bollywood in Europe), to explore and create new knowledge and understanding, including conceptual frameworks through the interaction of different areas across film, media, cultural studies and related disciplines.

​Find out more.

Film and Philosophy

The Film and Philosophy SIG has members who are PhD students, professors and practitioners from universities in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and America. This reflects the burgeoning community of scholars who are bringing film and philosophy together in productive and radical ways. The SIG is not affiliated to any journal or institution, but rather is a forum for scholars and practitioners who are interested in exploring the philosophical potential of individual films, filmmakers, and the medium of film itself.


​Find out more.​

Film/Making Education

The Film/making Education Special Interest Group is designed to foster dialogue and collaboration across all levels of film education, including schools, colleges and higher education institutions. The SIG aims to facilitate, produce and disseminate research into film education which can highlight good pedagogic practices and in turn, help to foster a more coherent film/making education strategy for the development of emerging UK talent. 

Find out more.

French and Francophone Screen Studies

French and Francophone audio-visual media continue to hold an important place on university syllabuses as well as in screen studies research – whether dedicated to their own history and personnel or within transversal historical and theoretical concerns: national, transnational and post-national studies, authorship, ‘extreme’ cinema, stardom, animation, film and philosophy, etc. The French and Francophone Screen Studies SIG brings together an international group of scholars and graduate students working in a wide range of areas within the field. 

Find out more.

German Screen Studies

The German Screen Studies SIG emerges out of the German Screen Studies Network, an independent international network founded in 2011 as a platform for research and public engagement activities relating to German-language screen media. The BAFTSS group acts as the GSSN’s principal UK research forum, providing a focus at the BAFTSS conference and related events for national and international scholarship on German-language screen media.

​Find out more.

Horror Studies

Since the pioneering historical research of scholars such as Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich in the 1990s, horror film, television and screen studies in the UK and Ireland has grown and developed rapidly. The BAFTSS Horror Studies SIG aims to bring together UK and Irish researchers studying horror across this wide range of disciplines and approaches to exchange diverse ideas, to facilitate collaboration and to form a supportive and creative network.

Find out more.

LGBTQIA+ Screen Studies

This SIG brings together scholars and practitioners with an interest in research, whether practice-based or otherwise, that relates to LGBTQIA+ issues. The SIG seeks to create a professional network where peers and colleagues can exchange ideas and collaborate on future projects, building a safe and inclusive support system. In building such a safe and inclusive support system, the SIG acknowledges the diverse experiences that the LGBTQIA+ acronym bands together and will give due regard to each and every group encompassed, further committing to platform those who are more often marginalised.

​Find out more.

Media and the Environment

This SIG brings together people interested in how Film, Television and Screen Studies relate to the environment. In doing so, it pays attention to the ‘environmental turn’ that has manifested in our discipline over the past decade. Comprising research, pedagogy and practice, the environmental turn focuses on the screen’s myriad material and conceptual connections to the planet. In the ever-intensifying global climate emergency, its relevance extends beyond the academy to activist groups, local communities, the creative industries, policymakers, and governments.

​Find out more.

Performance and Stardom

While stardom has become a significant and well-established part of Film Studies, the field has expanded to consider areas beyond the initial focus on Hollywood stardom to examine new areas including performance, ageing, and European stardom, and into new media, including television. There is a diversity within the study of stardom and performance that this network of individuals represents through their already published works and future projects that this SIG would support through communication and exchanges for scholarship and teaching.

​Find out more.

Practice Research

This group focuses on Media Practice Research within the field of film, television and screen studies & practice which has demonstrated an impactful contribution to the field. This SIG aims to disseminate and evaluate how media practice research can contribute new knowledge to the field and explore innovative methods of process, academic dissemination and peer review, as well as public engagement, impact and knowledge exchange with creative industries. The SIG is linked to Screenworks, Open Screens and Media Practice and Education.
​
Find out more.

Psychoanalysis and Film

This group focuses on developing discussions regarding relevant and adjacent concepts such as psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, affect, trauma, subjectivities, and (post)memory in relation to a variety of screen media. The group aims to share networks and resources in further multidisciplinary research as well as practice-based knowledge.

​Find out more.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Historically, the study of Science Fiction and Fantasy has been dominated by prose fiction, although that is changing, and the SFF scholarship that appears in screen studies often demonstrates very different concerns. The principal aim of this SIG is to further connect these communities, fostering communication and collaboration in order to establish and maintain SFF studies as a prominent sub-field of screen studies, and vice versa.

​Find out more.

Screening Sex

The Screening Sex Special Interest Group aims to continue and extend the work emergent from the academic blog and associated book series, Screening Sex. Commissioning and publishing short research articles, opinion pieces, interviews and book reviews on a range of topics related to sex on screen and sexual cultures, screeningsex.com has quickly become a popular and valuable public-facing academic forum exploring the politics of sex on screen. This SIG builds on the valuable work of existing contributors, extend the research network, supports the development of original work and invests in its contributors and members in order to produce and support activities that continue to highlight the value of sex on screen, in culture and in society.

​Find out more.

Screen Industries

The Screen Industries SIG works to reflect, promote and advance historical and contemporary industry-focused research within film, television and screen studies by providing a forum for interdisciplinary communication and exchange, and a platform for the dissemination of cutting edge scholarship. ‘Industry-focused research’ is understood in broad terms.

Find out more.

Transnational Screens

There is growing interest in the transnational in the many areas that constitute film and television studies, and academics have found it increasingly fruitful to conceptualise their work using a transnational framework. We have seen a proliferation of courses, publications, and conferences that engage with the transnational, and this Special Interest Group aims to contribute to this research landscape. We aim to bring together researchers and offer a platform for discussion, debate, networking, collaborations, dissemination of resources, and promotion of events and publications.

Find out more.