News

ECREA is opening a call for proposals for the hosting and organisation of the 2020 edition of the European Communication Conferences.

The first European Communication Conference took place in Amsterdam in 2005; the second in Barcelona in 2008; the third in Hamburg in 2010; the fourth in Istanbul in 2012; the fifth in Lisbon in 2014; the sixth in Prague 2016 and the 7th will be held in Lugano in 2018.
These conferences are major opportunities to show the know-how and the activities of the organising institution(s) and to foster the energy and creativity of the organisers around a large international project.

The Executive Board of ECREA has developed a framework document – Terms of Reference to define the format and give guidelines for the organisation of such a conference. Terms of Reference document is available here.

Interested members are asked to submit proposals for hosting the 2020 European Communication Conference. The institution hosting the Conference has to be active in the field of communication research and/or education and have sufficient experience and sufficient capacity (staff and support) to prepare and run the event.

The proposal for hosting the 2020 European Communication Conference must take the form of a document where candidate host institutions will: 1) Describe their general vision of the event (including the location, timing, duration and their organisational capacity). 2) Explicitly engage themselves to meet ECREA's requirements described in the Terms of Reference for Organising ECREA’s 8th European Communication Conference 2020 and provide the basic information regarding the way their proposal will meet ECREA's requirements. 3) Propose a draft financial plan. 4) Sketch out the strengths and weaknesses associated with the proposal. Please note that more than one institution can join forces and present a conjoint proposal, as long as they are in the same geographical area.

Deadline and submission
Proposals must be submitted by Wednesday, 15 November, 2017. The proposals must be sent by e-mail (attachment in .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf format) to ECREA's General Secretary Irena Reifová (generalsecretary@ecrea.eu).

The ECREA Executive Board will then select one institution to act as local host, and possibly one runner-up to step in, in case the selected host encounters unforeseen difficulties.

Timeline
ECC conferences are normally held in October-November (unless the local host argues otherwise). The selection of the host for the conference will be decided upon at least two years prior to the event.

The timetable will be as follows:
- 30 June, 2017: the call for applications is open. Each candidate-host turns in a summary project describing how they see the event, where, how, etc.
- 15 November, 2017 : the call is closed. The Board considers applications and selects one which complies with all criteria, including the strategic priorities of the Board. Contacts are made with candidates for further information where necessary.

• 15 January, 2018: The Board announces the selected host institution to all institutional members that have applied. The selected institution is asked to develop a full organisational plan in close cooperation with ECREA’s Board. The full plan is to be ready by end of April 2018. If appropriate, the Board also selects a runner-up institution to host the conference should the selected institution be unable to deliver.
• April, 2018: The Board examines the full proposal and decides on its approval. If the plan is approved, the announcement is made public. If not, organisers are given one more month to fine-tune the proposal (with assistance of the Executive Board).
• 31 October–3 November, 2018: the ECC2020 conference host is announced at ECC2016 in Lugano.
• October – November, 2020: ECC2020 takes place.

For any inquiry, please contact ECREA's General Secretary, Irena Reifová at generalsecretary@ecrea.eu.

We are looking forward to receiving your proposals!

We are sad to inform you that one of the major figures of our field and ECREA Advisory Board member and former ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School lecturer Denis McQuail has passed away on 25 June aged 82.

A tribute to Denis McQuail (1935-2017) by Peter Golding

The news of Denis McQuail’s death on June 25th 2017 will have deeply saddened many scholars and colleagues in ECREA. It is a tribute to Denis’ influence and the respect in which he was held that so many people, young and old, and in so many countries, will feel his loss and have benefited from his many personal and professional qualities.

Denis McQuail met the standards of that old cliché ‘founding father’ better than almost anyone. Trained as an Oxford historian, he was awarded a PhD in social studies from the University of Leeds in 1967 with a thesis entitled "Factors affecting public interest in television plays." His transition from social scientist to communications scholar was more or less complete. He was one of the first UK academics to move to a post in mainland Europe, and in 1977 he was appointed to the Chair in Communications at the University of Amsterdam, where he stayed until his early retirement in 1997. He then moved back to his home just outside Southampton and retained his academic links as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics at Southampton. Retirement for Denis was, of course, notional. As a note to his friends from his family pointed out “was still scribbling notes and thoughts on the back of envelopes and scraps of paper relating to academic theory right up to the end”.

Denis McQuail’s achievements are legion. One signal example is ‘uses and gratifications’. It is now a platitude that we should examine what people do with media not what media do to them. This truism became the demarcating mantra of uses and gratifications research, but refining and operationalising the idea took a lot of work. Denis was perhaps not one of the originators of the concept, but his work was central in its refinement, constructive critique, and development.

We now see political communication, and the role of television especially, in politics, as a familiar concern at the heart of our field. Denis McQuail's work with Jay Blumler and with Joseph Trenaman was seminal in this field. Television and the Political Image, which studied the 1959 general election in the UK, established many of the key tenets and insights for political communication research in the succeeding decades. When his study with Jay Blumler, Television in Politics, appeared in 1968 the Journal of Communication said that “the researcher interested in television and politics could hardly ask for more”.

Denis McQuail was also one of the clearest and most helpful of guides. In Communication Models, first produced with Sven Windahl in 1982, page after page of lucid exegesis and explanation of the many competing models somehow dissolved the fog; as an example of how to generate a lot of insight in a short space it was, and is, invaluable. As a founding editor, with Karl-Erik Rosengren and Jay Blumler, of the European Journal of Communication, Denis launched what was to become, and still is, a key shop window for so much that is best in scholarship and research in our field. The EJC, however, is not Denis’ only legacy to the development of European media research. He was a key and founding member of the Euromedia Research Group for whom he wrote extensively and helped form debates about media policy in Europe and comparative analyses within Europe of questions of media concentration, commerce and politics.

Denis is perhaps best known as a codifier of our field, providing generations of students and scholars alike with authoritative and phenomenally widely read overviews of writing and research in the field. This, as anyone who has written, rather than simply avoided writing, a text book will know, is an extraordinarily difficult task, and we are fortunate in being in a field where the best known text is the work of someone who is a master of the genre.
Mass Communication Theory is now in its 6th edition, and is rightly titled ‘McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory’. It was first published in 1983, subtitled “an introduction”, and ran to a modest 245 pages, compared to the daunting 621 pages of the current edition. The book reigns supreme, and is almost certainly never to be paralleled, not just in our field but as a guiding and insightful text for any field in the social and human sciences.
It is important to recall that even before Mass Communication Theory became the central and unique text that it is, Denis McQuail provided a number of original and defining texts which reviewed, codified, and summarised in a characteristically elegant and helpful way, the range of work in our field. His overview volume Towards a Sociology of Mass Communications, published in 1969 and the collection he put together in Sociology of Mass Communications which came out in 1972 were both seminal in forging the field, then so rudimentary, in the UK. At some distance now we can see not only how original these books were but also how what in retrospect looks easy to accomplish was achieved when no clear oversight of the field existed, and in that sense their originality and influence are immense.

Denis McQuail was so very much more, however, than a summariser and text book master. He always readily put his scholarship and analytical skills to work in assessing media performance and conduct, and his involvement in normative analysis should not be overlooked. His analysis of press content conducted for the 1977 Royal Commission on the Press in the UK remains one of the most thorough and indicative of its kind. As a comprehensive and comprehensible, socially and politically relevant, empirically sound analysis of what the British press provides it remains foundational.

But over the years and in a number of publications he further explored the many complexities of assessing media performance. Whether writing on media policy generally or the more profound questions of how we should assess the role of the media, he made insistently clear the need for analytical rigour in addressing questions of media power and influence.

These are massively important contributions. In reviewing Media Performance Everett Dennis wrote that “When a short list of the most important books on communication media in the last half of the twentieth century is drawn up at some future date, I would not be surprised to see Dennis McQuail’s Media Performance at the top”. His analysis of the core dimensions of media performance remains unsurpassed. As he wrote, “Without accountability communication is simply one-way transmission, limited in purpose, lacking response, guidance, or even known effect”.

But as important as these writings and contributions are, many in the field will remember Denis best for his personal qualities. He was the most charming and amusing of companions, and endlessly generous in support, advice and help to younger colleagues and peers alike. Denis was a great traveller. Many would recall, with frustration, the experience in coming down to breakfast at a conference hotel, to see Denis McQuail, thinking they had got one over on him by saying they’d discovered a wonderful and unexpected local beauty spot – only for Denis to say, as he always did, “yes I walked up there yesterday, it’s really good”.

Denis’ importance in our field cannot be overstated. His loss is devastating for all who knew him and recall his many kindnesses, as well as those, who even if they never met him, have so benefitted from his outstanding scholarship and tireless analysis. Our field has lost a master of research and thought, and many of us within it have lost an irreplaceable friend and colleague.

We are pleased to announce that the 2017 ordinary General Assembly of ECREA has closed. Between 12 and 16 June, 103 members and institutional coordinators participated in the online General Assembly, casting total of 203 votes.

All items were confirmed, suggestions under Any other business will be put forward to ECREA Executive Board and addressed at the next General Assembly in November 2017.

1. Approval of the minutes of the previous General Assembly (12 November 2016)
Approve 188 votes; Do not approve 0 votes; Abstain 15 votes.
2. Vote upon the candidate-representatives of S/TWG/N into Executive Board
Approve 186 votes; Do not approve 0 votes; Abstain 17 votes.
3. Approval of the ECREA accounts for 2016
Approve 176 votes; Do not approve 5 votes; Abstain 22 votes.
4. Approval of the ECREA budget for the budget year 2017
Approve 182 votes; Do not approve 5 votes; Abstain 16 votes.
5. Approval of the ECREA Executive Board Report 2016
Approve 186 votes; Do not approve 0 votes; Abstain 17 votes.

Happy anniversary to all current and former students, lectures and organisers of European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School.

To read more about the Summer School, go to: http://www.ecreasummerschool.org/

Klaus Arnold was the founder of ECREA's Communication History Section

We are deeply sad to inform that Klaus Arnold, founder and first Chair of the Communication History Section, has passed away. In this very sad moment we would like to thank Klaus for the many good things he did in his life and for bringing us all together through the Communication History Section which is one of his many legacies.

The Section Management Teams,
Susanne Kinnebrock
Paschal Preston
Nelson Ribeiro
Gabriele Balbi
Christian Schwarzenegger

ECREA and its Central and Eastern European Network are truly concerned about the proposed legislation endangering the existence of Central European University in Budapest https://www.ceu.edu/. Read the full protest letter below.

ECREA has addressed the following letter of protest to the Hungarian Prime Minister Orban and Minister of Human Resources Balog.
ECREA's CEE Network has published its statement of protest on Network's Facebook page.

Dear Prime Minister Orban,
Dear Minister Balog,

European Communication Research and Education Association ECREA is deeply agitated about the proposed legislative changes which may endanger the status and academic freedom of Central European University.

During the last 25 years of the CEU´s presence in the region it has immensely contributed to the study of media and communication in Central and Eastern Europe. CEU has made substantial difference in building bridges between East and West and brought about principal internationalisation of social sciences and humanities in the region of Central and Eastern Europe without undermining its specificities.

ECREA has a long tradition of endorsing equality for the disadvantaged groups of scholars in Europe with its Central and Eastern European Network being one of the conduits of this effort. We are deeply worried that stability and mission of the CEU as the institution pursuing the same goal may be threatened.

We express our solidarity with the CEU and join the protest of the academic and other public in Hungary and abroad. We respectfully urge the government to withdraw the proposed legislation and enter consultation with CEU. We urge the government to take the action and protect the teaching and research mission of the CEU.

Ilija Tomanič Trivundža (on behalf of the ECREA Executive Board)
ECREA President

New Section, Network and Temporary Working Group representatives have been elected to the ECREA Executive Board.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the election of representatives of networks, sections and temporary working groups to the ECREA Executive Board.

Networks’ Representative
Tereza Pavlíčková is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies at Charles University in Prague and Vice-Chair of Young ECREA.

Sections’ Representative
Göran Bolin is Professor in Media & Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden and Vice-Chair of the Mediatization section.

Temporary Working Groups’ Representative
Michael Harnischmacher works at the Centre for Media and Communication at the University of Passau, Germany, and chair of the ECREA Journalism & Communication Education TWG.

Now available - UPDATED map of events taking place in 2017.

We have prepared an overview of conferences and workshops, organized by ECREA Sections, Networks and Temporary Working Groups.
Download NEW ECREA 2017 Event Map (PDF) here.

The ECREA Young Scholars Network (YECREA) and ECREA invites applications for two grants for doctoral students participating in the ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School 2017.

The grants are intended to encourage and support PhD candidates with limited economic support and with limited opportunities to participate in international academic events. The grants will be awarded to two students who have applied and have been accepted to the summer school.

Each grant is in the amount of 800€ and will cover:
- participation fee
- partial travel refund (up to 240€)*

If selected students are not members of ECREA through their institutions, the grant will also include one year free individual ECREA membership.

*Please note that students who receive ECREA grants will not be eligible for travel refund from the Summer School organisers.

Application procedure
1. Student needs to complete online application to Summer School through http://ecreasummerschool.org/ by 1 April 2017.
2. Student need to submit a separate application for the grant by 1 April 2017.
The grant application should include 1) application form and 2) motivation letter.

Applicants are expected to complete and submit the application form in which they will be asked about their financial and institutional background as well as a motivation letter.

You can download grant application here.

In the motivation letter, students should especially specify the reasons for why they should be awarded a grant. The focus should be placed on the stability of the doctoral position (financial support, time given to complete the PhD, etc.), the academic support (in terms of supervision and opportunities for structured feedback), international academic exposure, and all other topics that might seem relevant to the applicant.

To apply, please send the completed form and motivation letter to info@ecrea.eu by 1 April 2017. For further questions, please use the same contact address. The selected applicants will be notified by 15 May 2017. If no grants will be awarded, the call may be repeated for students that were accepted to Summer School in late May 2017.

Selection criteria
The grants will be awarded based on a number of criteria. The primary aim is to make it possible for young scholars to participate in the summer school, who otherwise would not have the opportunity to participate in a similar event. Evaluations will especially assess applicants’ access to financial or institutional resources. Furthermore, it will be considered in how far an applicant has opportunities to received qualified feedback by high-profile researchers and peers in a way the summer school provides. A jury consisting of the YECREA management team and former Summer School students will carry out the selection process. Only applications of students, who were accepted to the Summer School will be processed. Incomplete applications will not be processed. The applicants will not be reviewed in terms of academic quality.

We are happy to invite you to participate in the ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School 2017 that will take place at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, from July 24 to August 4, 2016 (12 days).

The ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School 2017 brings together members of the European research community to this summer school in order to debate contemporary issues in media, communication and cultural studies. The main emphasis of this summer school is not on a particular theme, but on providing structural and individuated PhD- support for young European scholars, through a variety of working forms, including feedback seminars, workshops, and lectures. The summer school aims to provide a supportive international setting where doctoral students can present their ongoing work, receive feedback on their PhD- projects from international experts and meet students and academics from other countries, establishing valuable contacts for the future.

International director: Nico Carpentier
Programme director: Fausto Colombo
Summer School coordinators: Simone Tosoni, Maria Francesca Murru, Laura Peja

HOW TO APPLY

There are two options to attend the Summer School:

For students who have been selected by the members of the Summer School consortium (http://ecreasummerschool.org/institutional-coordinators.html), the summer school will provide:

• accommodation for the whole duration of the summer school, including breakfast
  -welcome and farewell dinner
  
• WiFi access at the summer school venue
  
• summer school materials (including 2 books)
  
• coffee during the breaks
  
• lunch from Mondays to Fridays
  
• partial reimbursement of travel expenses (between 0 and 1999 KM: maximum 275 EUR per participant; 2000 and more KM: maximum 360 EUR per participant)

Payment of a registration fee of 560 Euros is required for consortium participants.

For all the other students, the summer school will provide:

• accommodation for the whole duration of the summer school, including breakfast
• welcome and farewell dinner
• WiFi at the summer school venue
• summer school materials (including 2 books)
• coffee in the breaks
• lunch from Mondays to Fridays

Payment of a registration fee of 660 Euros is required for non-consortium participants.

The total number of students will be limited to 44, half of them selected by the consortium members.

The working language of the summer school will be English; therefore, a sufficient understanding and ability to express oneself in this language is required.

CREDITS

The Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Faculty of Political and Social Sciences) acknowledges the Summer School activities with 10 ECTS for the participation in the full programme (including the supplementary activities). Furthermore, six of the best students’ presentations and all abstracts of student projects will be published in the Summer School Book.

DEADLINES

The deadline for applications for the summer school is April 1, 2017.

Applicants from consortium universities and from affiliated partners of the summer school must have their application approved by their institutional coordinators before submitting their application to the summer school. Also the applications from consortium university applicants must be received by the summer school before April 1, 2017.

All applicants will be informed about the selection of participants before the end of April.

ECREA GRANTS

ECREA will be awarding two grants for participation at the Summer School. More information on the grants will be available at the ECREA website (http://www.ecrea.eu) after 20 February 2017. This grant programme will be managed by ECREA and not by the summer school organisers.

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Apply for the Summer School

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

Stage One

When applying, each interested student is expected to fill out the application form on the Summer School website. Prior registration on the website is necessary (http://ecreasummerschool.org/registration.html). Uncompleted applications will not be eligible for the selection process. Applications can only be submitted via this website.

The application form includes:
1. a 400 words abstract of the PhD project
2. a time table of the PhD project, indicating the present status of the project
3. a short CV according to the provided forms.

The deadline for submitting the application is April 1, 2017, 23:59 hours (UTC +1). Notifications of acceptance will be sent before the end of April.

Stage Two

In second phase, students whose abstracts are accepted will be expected to fulfil the following requirements:

1. To write 10-page (3000 words) paper on their PhD project as a whole and to upload it on the website. The 10-page paper should be a report of the student’s ongoing doctoral research and not a conventional conference paper or a report of findings. Rather, it is expected that the student will briefly present the focus of the research and then take up aspects of the research process: methodology, theory and practical issues on which he/she would like to receive feedback (deadline: May 28).
2. To write a set of questions (maximum 1 page) with questions or problems that students would like to be discussed during the workshops. This one page needs to be part of the same Word/PDF file that also contains the 10-page paper (deadline: May 28).
3. Based on the abstracts and titles of other student papers, everyone is expected to choose up to 3 papers they would be interested in being a respondent (deadline: June 15; further details will be provided after selection).
4. Additional registration at the Università Cattolica website and payment of the registration fee (deadline: 1 June; further details will be provided after selection).
5. At the start of the Summer School, students have to have a 10-minute seminar presentation ready, covering the main points of their work. Each student is also expected to actively participate in the discussions of their own and other people’s work. In order to ensure maximum benefits of the seminars, everyone will have to read all other participants' papers before the Summer School begins.

SELECTION PROCESS AND CRITERIA

In respect of the selection of doctoral students from consortium universities, each one has appointed a summer school coordinator (http://ecreasummerschool.org/institutional- coordinators.html). The summer school coordinators are responsible for promoting the summer school within the consortium partner institution and to other academic institutions in their country. Consortium partner universities and departments are well-established and of best reputation in the field of media and communication, and have leading scholars in their faculties (see a list of previous lecturers http://ecreasummerschool.org/past-lecturers.html). All participating institutions of the summer school have experience in local, national and international cooperation. The departments have institutional contacts with higher education institutions within their own country and abroad, and well-established doctoral programmes. The consortium partner institutions and their summer school coordinators are fully autonomous in selecting their PhD student(s).

The selection of doctoral students from other institutions are based on a review process organised by the executive committee of the summer school. This process is open to all PhD students (including students from the consortium universities not selected by their institutional coordinators). As already specified, each candidate has to submit electronically a) a 400-words proposal of his/her PhD project, b) a time table of the PhD project, indicating the present status of the project, and c) a CV (work and study history). This application will be subjected to a double blind peer review, coordinated by the summer school local organisers. Based on this review, the executive committee of the summer school will select the participants.

For both pathways, the selection criteria are identical:

• quality of the PhD project, assessed in relation to its i) theoretical approach, ii) methodological standards and iii) potential for innovation;
• the progression of the PhD project (projects in a “middle phase” are strongly preferred);
• the relevance of the aims and objectives of the PhD project within communication and media studies.

CONTACTS

For accommodation, logistic and financial issues: elisa.ballerini@unicatt.it
For issues related to the programme: laura.peja@unicatt.it
For issues related to the website: simone.tosoni@unicatt.it