[Closed to public] HoMER 2025 Pre-Conference Graduate Workshop: Microhistories from Beyond the Screen: Other Stories, Other Sites

In English
Closed to the public

Homer_Graduate-Workshop_program

Graduate Workshop Organizers:
Elif Kaymaz (Middle East Technical University), Özde Çeliktemel-Thomen (Boğaziçi University)

HoMER 2025 Pre-Conference Graduate Workshop:
Microhistories from Beyond the Screen: Other Stories, Other Sites

Across the history of cinema, what’s on the screen has often taken center stage, but the stories that surround it, circulate behind it, and spill out beyond the auditorium often remain
untold. This graduate workshop explores the overlooked spatial and material dimensions of cinema culture, by approaching cinema not only as a medium, but as a catalyst; a generative
core around which infrastructures are built, spaces are activated, and new practices emerge. Whether as the reason for constructing a theater, or the force behind archives, rental stores,
or storage rooms, film generates infrastructures that live on, to be reused, reinhabited, or reconfigured across time.

Taking inspiration from the New Cinema History literature, this workshop foregrounds microhistory as both a method and a critical stance. A growing body of research has demonstrated how close attention to local exhibition practices, subaltern audiences, and noncanonical venues can reconfigure dominant narratives in cinema history (Thissen, 2019; Biltereyst & Meers, 2020; Gennari & Culhane, 2019; Şavk, Çam & Şanlier, 2025). Microhistory’s commitment to the fragmentary and the situated invites us to ask: What happens when we
shift focus away from national narratives or auteurist frameworks, and instead consider a single movie theater, a marginal archive, or a fleeting moment of interruption?

These inquiries resonate with perspectives in architectural and urban history, where buildings are increasingly understood not as static containers but as adaptive structures shaped by
conflict, negotiation, and alternative use (Till, 2009; Chattopadhyay, 2023). Architectural programs often drift from their intended purpose, and cities function not only through
monumental form but through improvised and networked infrastructures that support events across multiple, interlinked sites (Simone, 2004; Graham & Marvin, 2001). Just as a cinema might serve as a shelter, archive, or assembly hall, so too do urban spaces reorganize themselves to hold the ephemeral weight of public experience.