April 28-29, 2022

Roskilde University, Denmark

Deadline: November 15, 2021

Confirmed keynote speakers: Nancy Fraser (New School, New York)

Noortje Marres (U. Warwick), Zizi Papacharissi (U. Illinois-Chicago), and Stefania Milan (U. Amsterdam).

The notion of ‘publics’ or ‘the public’ is as well-known as it is elusive of exact definition. In everyday vocabulary, it is most often used in reference to a collection of people – for example, the listening or protesting public – and carries normative ideals of the importance of the public in democratic society. Within academia, the concept itself and the process of the formation of publics have been and continue to be highly theorised across disciplines and in the wake of societal changes, leaving a multitude of different conceptualisations behind.

The conference invites for abstracts (500 words) addressing the following or related questions:

• How are mediated publics forming and transforming in current media environments?
• How are publics imagined, constructed, cultivated and segmented by legacy media, alternative media and datafied civic practices in the digital age?
• How are processes of datafication and platformization affecting the formation of publics and the development of counter- publics?
• How does media in its many forms sustain and contribute to public connection?
• How do processes of digitalisation and datafication transform audience practices in various mediated publics?
• How do these processes impact and bring about new forms of civic engagement and political participation, from connective action to dark participation to data activism?
• What do these transformations look like across countries and continents, media systems, media organizations, platforms, beats, and/or different audiences, movements and publics?
• How can we understand the current transformations and the role of the different media as cultivating publics in a historic perspective?
• How can we methodologically investigate publics in transformation?
• How can we – given these current developments – theorize concepts of publics and citizens’ mediated practices in its different forms?

The conference will consist in a mix of keynote lectures and panels, and a number of thematic sessions. There will also be a digital track. The registration fee is 100 Euros (50 Euros for postgraduate students), which includes lunch, tea and coffee breaks as well as a pre-conference reception on April 27th and the conference dinner to be held on April 28th. Travel to Roskilde/Copenhagen and accommodation is not included.

Read more about the conference here: https://events.ruc.dk/publicsconference2022/