We received this email from Martin Barker, a friend of the conference, and are delighted to be able to extend a helping hand to his and his team's audience research. Read it, then complete the survey.

Dear Friends and Colleagues

This week four of us (Kate Egan (Aberystwyth), Sarah Ralph and Tom Phillips (UEA) and myself) launch a research project.  We are trying to capture people’s memories of watching the film Alien, from anyone and anywhere in the world.  It is a project that I personally have wanted to mount for over a decade.  It may seem an odd thing to emphasise, but this project is entirely self-funded.  Ten years ago, Kate Egan and I applied to the AHRC for funding for a much bigger version, but it got turned down.  That happens.  But what really got us was one referee’s comment, that Alien simply wasn’t worth spending time studying.  That dismissal made me even more determined to do it.  What we’re doing now is a version stripped down to what could be managed without funding support.

What do we hope to learn?  A great many things, actually, but among them these:  (1) what labels would different people attach to the film, and how do their choices connect to what they see as its most salient features?  (2) how do men and women compare in their responses to the film – a question made particularly interesting by the ways in which Alien has featured as an exemplar within feminist film theory?  (3) how does age – and also age in relation to when the film was first seen – affect people’s responses?  (4) what changes about people’s perceptions of the film when they watch it repeatedly?  (5) How do people’s responses to Alien relate to their general sense of connection with film and cinema?  This is a small sample of what we believe we will be able to learn, providing we get a sufficient number and range of responses to fill all the various categories.  And that’s the key.

The favour, then, is simply to ask you to tell other people you know about this, by copying this message out to friends, etc, to any email lists to which you belong, or by posting the survey address to web fora, Facebook pages, or whatever.  And, of course, fill in the survey yourself, if you’ve seen the film – whatever your response to it.  We are promising to make all our results publicly available.

The survey’s web address is: www.remembering-alien.org.

Of course, if you have any queries about the project, I will do my best to answer them.  Thanks, hopefully, in advance.

Martin Barker

We're pleased to announce that the special edition of Participations dedicated to papers from EIFAC 2011 will be published this November. Conference director Ailsa Hollinshead has already been in touch with paper presenters.

We also have two conference announcements that members of the EIFAC community have asked us to pass on - read the full newsletter.

02 - 03 September 2011

Daniela Treveri Gennari is organising Catholics and cinema: productions, policies, power in Oxford in collaboration with Daniel Bilteryest (Ghent). From the website:

"There has been a renewed interest in how film and religion interconnect and how religious characters and rituals have been popular subject matters of movies. Books such as S. Brent Plate’s Representing religion in world cinema: filmmaking, mythmaking, culture making (2003), Colleen McDannell’s Catholics in the movies (2008) and Pamela Grace’s The religious film: Christianity and the hagiopic (2009) have provided an insight into the representation of religious people, places and symbols in world cinema.

"However, over the last hundred years, Catholic organizations around the world have tried to assess, manipulate, control and intervene in the development of cinema. This inter-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues of power in the relationship between the film industry and an external institution such as the Roman Catholic Church. In particular the conference is interested in investigating the various contexts of production, distribution, exhibition, reception, classification, censorship, which have been influenced by an organization that has nothing to do with the commercial enterprise called cinema."

A full list of speakers and a programme are available online.

16 - 18 September 2011

Miruna Runcan is organising The Digital Generation: Self-representations, Urban Mythology and Cultural Practices International Conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. From the Call for Papers:

"The Digital Generation: Self-representations, Urban Mythology and Cultural Practices International conference aims to develop an interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of the mutations in representation and socio-cultural insertion which have occurred in the last decades in the cognitive systems and everyday life practices of the digital generation.

"Participation is open to all specialists, researchers, and postgraduate students with research interests in the fields of sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, literature and communication studies, as well as to specialists and researchers in the fields of performing arts, music, visual arts or multimedia.

"Submitted papers can be both theoretical approaches and presentations of empirical research (finalized or work in progress)."

Short proposals (maximum 1500 characters) are invited, by email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . The deadline for proposal submissions is 25 June 2011. The full call for papers and submission guidelines can be found on the conference website.