June 24-26, 2021

Online

Deadline: March 31, 2021

The Centre for Communication and Media Research (based at the Institute of Communication Studies in Lille) is pleased to announce its inaugural annual conference entitled “The Network Society: Re-evaluation and Applications of a Concept” set to take place on the 24th , 25th and the 26th of June, 2021.

Please submit your abstracts, in English or French, of no longer than 300 words as well as a short biographical note to Dr Mehdi Ghassemi (mehdi.ghassemi@istc.fr ) and Dr Camila Pérez Lagos (c.perez-lagos@ucolaval.net).

Deadline for abstract submission: March 31st , 2021. Post-conference paper submissions will be considered for publication. Announcements regarding this will follow.

https://www.istc.fr/…ch/

The Centre for Communication and Media Research (based at the Institute of Communication Studies in Lille) is pleased to announce its inaugural annual conference entitled “The Network Society : Re-evaluation and Applications of a Concept” set to take place on the 24th, 25th and the 26th of June, 2021.

2021 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Manuel Castells’ trilogy The Information Age that charts the social, economic and cultural transitions from industrial to network societies. The advent of the network as the dominant form of social structure, according to Castells, brings about a “new social morphology” that substantially modifies “the processes of production,

experience, power, and culture” where a “global information economy” and a “culture of real virtuality” underlie every aspect of human life. (Castells, 1996, 1998). Since then, Castells’ ground-breaking body of work has inspired many scholars to use The Network Society as both a powerful metaphor as well as a nuanced model for understanding the social, the cultural, and the political aspects of the digital age.

Our aim is to address not only the relevance and contemporary applications of the concept of the Network Society as it has been elaborated by Castells, but also to engage with its limits as an explanatory framework and to examine the ways in which other scholars have built upon Castells’ theory of The Network Society.

We are pleased to announce that the plenary talk will be given by Professor Manuel Castells himself. We hope that this will encourage colleagues from around the world to contribute to the discussions around The Network Society. We therefore invite scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to present papers related to any aspect of the conference theme.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to :

• Contemporary applications of the concept of The Network Society
• Communication power, politics and networked activism
• Networked spatiality and temporality (“space of flows and timeless time”)
• Cultures of real virtuality (especially in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic)
• Network perspectives on the media
• Networked communication
• Cultural representations of the network society

Submission guidelines

Please submit your abstracts, in English or French, of no longer than 300 words as well as a short biographical note to Dr Mehdi Ghassemi (mehdi.ghassemi@istc.fr) and Dr Camila Pérez Lagos (c.perez-lagos@ucolaval.net).

Deadline for abstract submission : March 31st, 2021

The conference will be held online using the platform Livestorm.

Post-conference paper submissions will be considered for publication. Announcements regarding this will follow.

Scientific committee

• Christine Barats, Université Paris Descartes – CERLIS
• Clément Mabi, Université de Technologie de Compiègne – EPIN
• Daniel Barredo Ibañez, Universidad del Rosario, Colombie.
• Emmanuel Marty, Université Grenoble Alpes – GRESEC
• Fernando Oliveira Paulino, Universidade de Brasília - UNB/Brasil
• France Aubin, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières - CRICIS
• Julien Péquignot, Université de Franche-Comté – CIMEOS
• Nikos Smyrnaios, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse – LERASS
• Tiphaine Zetlaoui, Université Catholique de Lille
• Tourya Guaaybess, Université de Lorraine – CREM
• Van Gorp Baldwin, Institute for Media Studies - KU Leuven
• Zineb Majdouli, Université Catholique de Lille
• Mehdi Ghassemi, Institute of Communication Studies (ISTC) – CCMR
• Camila Pérez Lagos, Université Catholique de l’Ouest (Laval – France) – CHUS-CIM.