Welcome to Reel Pakistan: A Screen Studies Forum, with working papers from the annual CLCS Screen Studies Symposium at LUMS. This open-access publication serves the mission of promoting and disseminating research on media texts, production, and reception, with particular emphasis on encouraging undergraduate research. The journal is dedicated to creating a forum for academic discourse on Pakistani screen studies, using a variety of approaches and on a scale from the local to the transnational. We encourage academic writings on fiction film, documentary, television, new media, and other forms that develop in the Pakistani context.

This journal emerged out of the annual CLCS Screen Studies Symposium, in which students presented the work they had completed for the Research Seminar in Screen Studies course under the supervision of Dr. Zebunnisa Hamid and Dr. Gwendolyn S. Kirk. The first Symposium took place in May 2019, and the second in December of that same year. Symposia feature, in addition to student presentations, keynote talks from academics and film writers, film screenings, and most recently our Short Film Competition.

In the future, we imagine an expanded Symposium showcasing the work not just of Research Seminar students but also of scholars from the wider academic community. Look out for these developments and more on Reel Pakistan.