The SCMS 2024 Election is underway. SCMS leadership is determined by its members, so please take the time to participate in this very important activity, one of the key privileges and responsibilities of your SCMS membership.

Read more about the candidates for Secretary below, and cast your ballot here. Remember, voting closes at 11:59 PM (EST) on February 29, 2024.

More about candidates for Member-at-Large Executive Board Positions next week!

Candidates for Secretary

Kay Dickinson

University of Glasgow

Kay Dickinson works in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to moving there, she held positions at Concordia University, Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Goldsmiths and King’s College (both in the University of London) plus, earlier, at four other institutions as an adjunct. She has also taken up visiting fellowships at Cornell, USA, MICA in Ahmedabad, India and in Amman, Jordan. Throughout her career, she has convened programmes and departments, as well as welcomed roles ranging from EDI officer to community inclusion representative to Deputy Dean of Internationalization. For decades now, her teaching has prioritized decolonial theoretical paradigms, Global Majority cultural production, and issues of precarity, including how it devastates higher education.

She was fortunate to serve on the editorial board of Cinema Journal as it then transitioned into JCMS and as it launched a number of vital initiatives to diversify its board composition, authors and readership. In this capacity, she built on earlier contributions to SCMS that include: compiling an In Focus section dedicated to the Arab Uprisings in 2012; co-editing the “Teaching Film and Media Against the Global Right” dossier with Priya Jaikumar; evaluating submissions for the Middle East Caucus Student Writing Award; and participating in the three-person committee to determine the winners of the SCMS Student Writing Award.

Kay’s publications centre labour, expression and thought that has been violently marginalized. Her monographs include Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (2016) (soon to be published in Arabic), Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (2018) (which translates and contextualizes primary documents from this region) and Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers (2024) (with a core concern for labour conditions in the academy).

Read Kay Dickinson's vision statement here.

Kate Fortmueller

Georgia State University

Kate Fortmueller is Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media and Theater at Georgia State University. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and her B.A. in Government and Italian Studies at Smith College. She was appointed as the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California (2014-15) and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Film Studies and Communication at Fairfield University. Prior to her position at GSU she was faculty at the University of Georgia in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Fortmueller’s research and teaching has focused on the histories and present of the media industries with an emphasis on labor. She is the author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production and Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (both University of Texas Press, 2021) and co-editor (with Luci Marzola) of the forthcoming anthology Hollywood Unions (Rutgers University Press). Her writing about film and television labor has appeared in journals including Film History, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and Media Industries, as well as in popular venues such as Los Angeles Review of Books and The Washington Post (with Miranda Banks). She is currently working on a book about risk management and insurance and co-authoring a book with Miranda Banks on contemporary labor and the 2023 strike. Her faculty bio can be found here. 

Read Kate Fortmueller's vision statement here.

Members, click here to cast your ballot.

Voting closes at 11:59PM (EST) on February 29, 2024.

Stay connected - follow SCMS on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram

for news and updates!