July 12, 2019

University of Segovia, Spain

Deadline: April 10, 2019

Organisers: Annette Hill, Peter Lunt, Miguel Vicente, Asta Zelenkauskaite, Erika Polson

The Audiences Section of IAMCR is organising a one day post-conference on the concept of Mobile Socialities. The Audiences section aims to encourage new thinking and approaches to global audience research and to inspire greater interest in exploring and understanding audiences in diverse settings, including non-Western approaches to audiences, the nature of audiences as ‘knowledge communities’, ethnographic approaches to researching them, and the extent to which traditional classifications of audiences (masses, publics and markets) are being challenged by the fluidity and ephemeral nature of virtual and mobile audiences.

The themed post-conference critically examines the bridging concept of mobile socialities across international perspectives, ensuring dialogue on the connections between audience studies, mobilities and mobile communication research. Key questions include:

1) What forms of socialities do we find in mobile times?

2) In what ways are time and place critical to mobile socialities?

3) How do we research the mobile nature of screen content for transnational audiences, users and publics?

Mobile socialities is a bridging concept that links the phenomena of people on the move and the role of mobile media in everyday life. People are on the move across national borders through, for example, economic and forced migration or tourism; people are on the move from rural contexts to urban centres and transitions in social class. There are opportunities and barriers to mobility within working and living conditions and people transition between public and private spheres, home and workspaces through media. These movements question, and sometimes reinforce, existing notions of boundaries, differences and power relations. In such mobile contexts, we find media entangled in audiences’ lived realities, for example in mobile media and place, knowledge work and mobile spaces, or mobile media and time.

This post-conference addresses mobile socialites through empirical and theoretical analysis of audiences in situated contexts. Areas of interest include: mobile media and time, mobile media and geography, mobile communications directed at connecting people to place, transportation and media research, the blurred boundaries between work place-space within mobile communications, transnational audiences for global media; mobile apps and social relations, critical algorithm studies and intimacies, migration and mobile media, conviviality and mobile communications, historical approaches to mobile media and people on the move, methodological challenges for mobile media audiences, as well as other areas of interest.

We encourage multi-method and theoretical approaches to audience research that explores the concept of mobile socialities as something concerned with not only fluidity and movement, or place and scale, but also the possibilities and barriers to being mobile. In such a way, the post-conference addresses the flow and stillness of digital technologies and our lived realities, and the power dynamics of emerging forms of the social in mobile times.

Keynote speakers include Professor Maren Hartmann (Berlin University of the Arts), Professor Peter Lunt (Leicester University) and Erika Polson (University of Denver). The schedule will include a combination of keynote panels, workshops and panel presentations.

The post-conference takes place at the Segovia Campus of the University of Valladolid on Friday 12th July 2019. A fee of 20-50 Euros for participants and IAMCR members covers food and beverages for the day. There are regular high speed trains and buses from Madrid to Segovia; and local hotels ranging from 30-70 Euros per night. There are scholarships of 150 US dollars per person to cover the costs of registration, transportation and/or accommodation to support early-stage scholars from middle or low income countries.

Please send abstracts of 300 to 500 words by April 10, 2019 to Miguel.vincente@uva.es. This section is only able to receive proposals and schedule sessions in English for the post-conference.