ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

University of Sheffield, UK

The Department of Sociological Studies at The University of Sheffield wishes to recruit a Lecturer and a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society, starting on 1 June 2021 or as soon as possible thereafter.

The positions are open to candidates with expertise in digital media as they relate to core sociological issues (such as inequality, diversity, identity, everyday life or work). We particularly welcome applications from people with expertise in race and digital media or Chinese digital and social media.

Successful candidates will play a key role in contributing to the Department’s portfolio, maintaining its high standards of teaching through delivering modules in Digital Media and Society on BA and MA programmes in this area. They will have a PhD in a relevant discipline, expertise in digital media and society and experience of teaching in this area. They will be able to provide evidence of excellent digital media and society research.

The Department of Sociological Studies is committed to understanding society and social change, and to research and teaching that improves people's lives, especially those of the most vulnerable. We are proud to be one of the top social science research departments in the UK, with an international reputation for excellence in research and teaching across Sociology, Social Policy, Social Work and Digital Media and Society. To find out more about our Digital Media and Society research, visit: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/socstudies/research/digital-media-and-society.

Job Reference Number: UOS027412

Contract Type: Open Ended

Working Pattern: Full-time

Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences

Department: Department of Sociological Studies

Salary: Lecturer Grade 8: £41,526 - £49,553 per annum with potential to progress to £55,750 per annum through sustained exceptional contribution.

Senior Lecturer Grade 9. £52,560 - £59,135 per annum with potential to progress to £68,529 per annum through sustained exceptional contribution.

Closing Date: 1st March 2021

Interview Dates: Thursday 25 and Friday 26 March 2021.

To find out more go to: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/jobs

February 15, 2021

Online meeting

Hosted and organised by InnoPSM: AHRC Research Network on Innovation in Public Service Media Policies (https://innopsm.net/) and its event- and work-stream on Envisioning Public Service Media Utopias

Date: Monday, 15 February 2021

Time: 16:00-18:00 (British Time)

Where? Zoom (you will receive a Zoom link plus access data at latest one day before the event per e-mail)

Registration via Eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/public-service-media-in-challenging-times-connectivity-climate-and-corona-tickets-137997106059

In this talk, Prof Graham Murdock will analyse public service media in the challenging times we live in.

The institutions and animating ideals of public service broadcasting have been under continuous pressure for the last four decades. Advocates of marketisation have argued long and hard that they are no longer relevant or needed in a world of digital abundance and infinite choice, pointing to the increasing migration of young people to on-line platforms. These arguments continue to gain traction. A new proposal for an alternative future must place relations between broadcasting and the internet at the centre of argument. Discussions around how these relations might be organised has been underway for some time but recent developments have invested them with new relevance and urgency. 2020 was marked by a global pandemic, an accelerating climate crisis, and an explosion of direct action across the political spectrum. The processes driving these events are still unfolding presenting Public Service Media with both new challenges and new opportunities. The talk will open a conversation of how we might respond.

About our speaker:

Graham Murdock is Emeritus Professor of Culture and Economy at Loughborough University. He has written extensively on the political economy of broadcasting, the idea of a digital commons, and on the politics of risk, most recently in relation to the climate emergency. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Auckland, California at San Diego, Mexico City, Curtin, Bergen, the Free University of Brussels, and Stockholm and taught widely across China. His work has been translated into 21 languages.

Respondents: Alessandro d’Arma, University of Westminster; Minna Aslama Horowitz, University of Helsinki; Klaus Unterberger, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) Public Value; Christian Fuchs, University of Westminster

February 3, 2021

Online seminar

The Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London has the pleasure of hosting a research seminar on Wednesday 3rd February 2021.

Speaker: Dr. Wendy Willems (The London School of Economics and Political Science)

Date & Time: Wednesday 3rd February 2021, 16:00-18:00 (GMT)

All welcome. This is a virtual seminar. Joining instructions will be sent the day before the event. Please complete registration at: Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/beyond-platform-centrism-and-digital-universalism-tickets-137222956557 (open until 1.2.2021)

Details:

The notion of affordance has regained popularity in recent years and has frequently been invoked in relation to work on digital technology, leading some scholars to refer to it as one of the ‘keywords’ in the field of media and communication studies. Linking up with wider debates in our field on the need for ‘dewesternising’, ‘internationalising’ and ‘decolonising’ knowledge production, this seminar will suggest that debates on digital affordances have been characterised by a degree of digital universalism and platform-centrism. Mobile devices and social media platforms are often treated as separate (physical or digital) objects which function independently from each other and from the environments in which they are used. However, mobile phone use has increasingly been dominated by social media apps while social media are frequently accessed via mobile devices, particularly in Global South contexts where users often rely on mobile-only internet access via subsidized/zero-rated social media data bundles. Furthermore, the affordances of mobile social media are shaped by the physical, mediated and political contexts in which they are used. Drawing on research carried out in Zambia, this seminar proposes the notion of ‘relational affordance’ to emphasize the interplay between mobile social media, users and their varied contexts. It examines three ‘relational affordances’ – infrastructure, home-based access and temporality – which help to explain the emergence of active mobile social media publics during political volatile times such as elections.

Biography:

Dr Wendy Willems is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include global digital culture and social change, postcolonial/decolonial approaches to media and communications and urban communication. She has published articles in journals such as Communication Theory, Information, Communication and Society, Popular Communication and Media, Culture and Society. She is co-editor of Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (James Currey, 2014; with Ebenezer Obadare) and Everyday Media Culture in Africa: Audiences and Users (Routledge, 2016, with Winston Mano).

Baltic Screen Media Review

Deadline: March 15, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed physical interaction among people, but it also continues to shape our relations with media and technology. Mediated and distant interaction and communication became the norm. This led to struggles for some individuals, groups, institutions, practices and services, while others blossomed and thrived. Is participatory culture, as we know it, changing as a result of the challenges of 2020?

Building on the 2020 volume of Baltic Screen Media Review, which explored the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to media industries, we now call for papers on participation in the context of the pandemic and related crises.

While the pandemic has posed an incredible challenge in terms of media production, it has concurrently pushed innovation, resulting in a reinvigorated relationship between media and the audiences. Media was the window to the world for locked-down people, and via media and communication technologies people were informed, entertained and able to interact with one another. Yet, the incredible volume of data created from people’s media participation has enhanced rather than diminished the disproportionate power of already powerful platforms and corporations held over access, participation, public speech and cultural discourse.

This has been a fertile ground for new participatory practices to emerge. We as scholars of participatory culture thus need to renew our focus on not only the empirical expressions of participation, but also on how we make sense of participation and how we conceptualize the effects of macro scale changes on it. Therefore, we call for submissions that explore the concept of participation, its present state and its future from both political and sociological perspectives.

In this volume of BSMR, we will accept long (4000 – 8000 words w/o ref) and short (2000 – 2500 words w/o ref) articles and commentaries.

These articles should reflect on and explore a range of issues concerning participatory culture. We invite articles focusing on the Baltic Sea region (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Poland, Germany, Finland, etc.), but analyses of similar issues elsewhere, especially in countries of similar size and circumstances, are also welcome.

Contributions addressing topics such as (but not limited to) the following are particularly welcome:

• Participatory culture in transition
• The future of participation
• Interactive and participatory practices
• Emergence of new forms of audience engagement
• Crisis-specific participation and crisis participatory culture
• Digitalisation and the power of platforms
• Local vs global, local practices, local alternatives to platforms, local information bubbles
• The digital public sphere
• Collective identity and digital engagement

Key dates:

15.03.2021 - Submit abstracts of 200–300 words.

01.04.2021 – Communication of acceptance of abstracts

14.06.2021 – Submit full manuscripts that will be sent for blind peer review.

This issue of BSMR will appear as Volume 9:2, published both online and in print in late 2021. BSMR embraces visual storytelling, we thus invite authors to use photos and other illustrations as part of their contributions.

The editors of the theme volume are Katrin Tiidenberg and Alessandro Nanì. All submissions should be sent via email attachment to Alessandro Nanì (nani@tlu.ee) and Indrek Ibrus (ibrus@tlu.ee).

Further info about the journal can be found at https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/bsmr/bsmr-overview.xml?language=en

May 26-27, 2021

Online conference

Deadline: April 1, 2021

#THINKClimaConference 

Organized by Pompeu Fabra University, Spain

The theme of this virtual conference is found at the intersection of climate change, denial and interest groups (such as lobbies, think tanks and any type of advocacy organization). The event aims to encourage researchers in any area of the social sciences to focus on the role of interest groups in delaying climate policies through an awareness of the complexity of climate change denial. We therefore invite abstracts (of no more than 500 words) related to this complexity promoting climate inaction and the current climate crisis pertaining, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Strategic communication, public relations and media coverage of interest groups involved in climate inaction: media representation, lobbies and think tanks’ rhetoric, discourse analysis, discursive networks, communication strategies, etc.
• Public Affairs, interest groups theory and practice connected to climate inaction: institutional relations, profiles of key pressure groups, network coalitions, the political economy of lobbies and think tanks, etc.
• Anthropocentrism and speciesism in climate inaction connected to interest groups: animal agriculture lobbies, dietary guidelines and lobbies, think tanks related to the industry, etc.
• Androcentrism and patriarchy in climate inaction connected to interest groups: toxic and new masculinities, ecomodernism, industrialism, masculine-driven techno-utopias, etc.
• Neoliberalism, the rise of far-right ideologies and interest groups: conservative narratives, right-wing populism, the making of neoliberal knowledge, the links between the rise of the far-right and climate change denial, etc.
• Other topics connected to interest groups and climate inaction: climate justice, climate change activism, environmental advocacy, the sociology of climate change denial, animal ethics and advocacy, etc.

We strongly encourage critical perspectives. The conference will be held virtually on 26 and 27 May, 2021 (full schedule TBD) and will encompass a mix of both synchronous and asynchronous presentations, including keynotes by distinguished scholars in the field of climate change denial research (TBD).

Check the full Call for Papers here: https://www.upf.edu/web/thinkclima/thinkclima-conference-may-2021

February 3 (17:00, GMT)

Online (Zoom)

iNOVA Media Lab I NOVA FCSH I Universidade Nova de Lisboa

SMART ˚ ˚ Social Media Research Techniques I #SMARTDataSprint

Open Webinar | SMART Data Sprint 2021

We are pleased to announce that José van Dijck is joining SMART Data Sprint 2021 with a keynote open to the public on the theme of a European perspective on platformization. José van Dijck is a distinguished professor at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), and a former dean of the University of Amsterdam. From 2015 to 2018, she also served as president-elect of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Van Dijck's field of research focuses on media studies and digital society. Her work covers a wide range of topics in media theory, technologies and communication, social media, and digital culture. She is the co-author and co-editor of ten books and over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Van Dijck’s book The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2013) was distributed worldwide and was translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Farsi. Her latest book, co-authored by Thomas Poell & Martijn de Waal is titled The Platform Society. Public values in a connective world (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Van Dijck's lecture will be online (via Zoom) and open to SMART Data Sprint participants and the general public under free registration at https://bit.ly/SMARTDataSprint_keynoteJvD.

About SMART Data Sprint

SMART Data Sprint is an international event promoted by the SMART research group (iNOVA Media Lab/NOVA University of Lisbon) that provides an intense hands-on experience, driven by online data and digital methods.

More info at http://smart.inovamedialab.org/.

Tripodos No. 50 – Special Issue

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2021

Publication: June 2021

The 50th edition will cover the crucial issue of gender. In particular, the intersection of gender with communication and technology.

Papers should be sent by March 15, 2021. In order to submit original papers, authors must be registered with the journal (www.tripodos.com) as authors. Following this step, authors must enter their user name and password, activated in the process of registering, and begin the submission process. In step 1, they must select the section “Monograph”.

Rules and instructions regarding the submission of originals can be downloaded at www.tripodos.com. For any queries, please contact the editorial team of the journal at tripodos@blanquerna.url.edu.

Call for papers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fhEwBkIXJS0J1XBbOJZddjlaQwfZ6hQW/view?usp=sharing

Revue Communication & Organization, Issue 60, December 2021

Deadline: March 1, 2021

Whether academic or for practitioners, discussions about influence are dominated by work in marketing and psychology, with influence being conceived as an object that could be theorized, analyzed, quantified, manipulated, or even marketed. Issue 60 of Communication & Organization aims to enrich the conceptual field around the notion of influence through the prism of other notions such as prescription, recommendation, routines and familiarization, trust, the role of a third-party symbolizing, or the place of reputation.

Coordination

• Camille Alloing, Université du Québec à Montréal – alloing.camille@uqam.ca
• Stéphanie Yates, Université du Québec à Montréal – yates.stephanie@uqam.ca
• Benoit Cordelier, Université du Québec à Montréal – cordelier.benoit@uqam.ca

Argumentation

Influence as an object of research in social sciences and in communication (Mucchielli, 2009) mobilizes numerous definitions and approaches, putting at their center both the media (Maigret, 2015) and social interactions (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955). Through a more instrumental prism, we could say that exerting influence consists in getting others to freely do something that they would not have done spontaneously without a given intervention (Massé et al., 2006). Influence can also translate into the status quo, when the objective is, for example, to avoid mobilization (Gendron, 2014).

Influence can be conceived as the result of an act of communication on an audience’s behavior or social representations (Jodelet, 2003), as the result of a process of circulating ideas and opinions (Heath, 2006), or as a set of practices and strategies aimed at persuasion (Breton, 2008).

Whether in academic research or in practitioners’ perspective, work in marketing and psychology dominates discussions about influence as an object that could be theorized, analyzed, quantified, manipulated, or even marketed (see notably François and Zerbib, 2015; Dupont, 2011; Cialdini, 2009; Ouimet, 2008). Indeed, can influence theories be divorced from psychology and marketing? Enriching our conceptual field by discussing influence through the prism of other notions such as prescription, recommendation, routines and familiarization, trust, the role of a symbolic third-party, or the place of reputation in the process would undoubtedly renew our understanding of the concept. This is the avenue we propose here.

First, this call for articles focuses on contextual elements, particularly on cultural dimensions as a substructure - or infrastructure - of influence (Seltzel et al., 2013). We thus question cultural elements, whether they are linked to practices or organizational modes or, more broadly, to societal values that allow influence to be exercised in a given context. Under what conditions influence attempts generate tangible effects, or affects? Can influence be considered as a quantifiable, manipulable object that generates adherence (or acceptance), commitment or mobilization?

Second, we aim at gathering articles analyzing concrete practices that generate influence. Primarily, the central place of the "digital" (its industries, devices, uses, economies) in communication strategies and practices need reflection in order to define this notion better (Coutant, 2013): The web's sociotechnical devices can be complementary to other media (mass or not) as vectors of influence; however, they also generate new difficulties in reaching the different audiences of an organization, sometimes confined in "echo chambers" (Colleoni et al., 2014). Professional practices aimed at producing or instrumentalizing influence, particularly for public relations and organizational communication, are constantly being reorganized (Desmoulins et al., 2018) and lead to an extension of influence and accountability regimes (Cordelier and Breduillieard, 2011). Indicators for measuring influence proliferate on platforms that define their standards and concepts - such as Facebook and "engagement" (Alloing and Pierre, 2019). Influencers, for their part, are becoming unavoidable opinion producers (Poell et al., 2016; Charest et al., 2017). Moreover, trust (re)becomes a central issue when the same platform allows both advertising and disinformation; indeed, digital platforms are shaking up the codes of legitimate knowledge production (Lalancette, Yates and Brouillard, 2020). What is more, the influence on online groups questions the quality and instrumentalization of the social link (Cordelier and Turcin, 2005). In all cases, pre-digital authoritarian models are transformed (DiStaso and Bortree, 2014). In short, the practices of influence deployed in digital spaces produce observable behaviors or discourse with societal consequences that are often highly mediatized; it is, therefore, worth looking into them.

However, even if it seems more obvious to identify changes in the conditions and forms of influence on and through the digital world, organizational practices of influence are not limited to this medium. Traditional approaches to influence thus fully retain their relevance, whether it is a question of reputation management (Turbide, 2017; Huffaker, 2010), lobbying (Koutroubas and Lits, 2011; Juanals and Minel, 2013), astroturfing (Lock and Heath, 2016), patronage or sponsorship (Cordelier and Desaulniers, 2020), advertising (Kapferer, 1978) or press relations (Yates, 2018). However, to be effective, these practices must be in line with the contextual elements mentioned above while taking into account the dynamics taking place in digital spaces, which have a direct impact on their deployment (Hampton et al., 2017), despite the resistance of some practitioners to appropriate them (Kondratov, 2018).

In short, the economy of influence, like the communicational work it involves, is broad and requires us to put this notion into perspective. We wish to explore the contexts and cultural dimensions in which it is deployed and question the practices associated with it to become a lever for organizational strategies.

Issue 60 of Communication & Organization invites proposals for articles addressing the following topics in a theoretical or conceptual, empirical, and/or methodological manner, from three angles. The aim is to construct a real perspective on the notion of influence for/by communication research:

- Is influence an outcome that can be evaluated? And if so, how? Or is it a set of practices aimed at acting in a specific way on the representations or behaviors of given audiences? Thus, this angle focuses on approaches that aim to question the very concept of influence as practitioners use it in info-communication theories or media discourse. It may then be interesting, from this perspective, to discuss the notions often associated with the concept of influence (authority, trust, etc.) but also other forms of communication strategies aimed at influence, such as "engaging communication" or "persuasive communication."

- The cultures and contexts that enable influence techniques to be effective, acceptable, and guide those who use or are exposed to them. Indeed, influencing requires the ability to understand and integrate audiences' values and beliefs into one's rhetoric to generate trust and authority. It also requires an understanding of each organization's culture and the media in which this influence occurs and is exercised. Are there, therefore, cultures of influence? Is influence done differently depending on the organization or are there forms of conventions or even standards specific to the professions?

- Whether professional or amateur, organizational practices participate in these possible cultures of influence as much as they depend on them. This must be described, analyzed and taken into account in their socio-historical contexts. Can be addressed, for instance, questions related to techniques for "producing" influence, communication practitioners deploying actions qualified as influence (online or offline), or the possible forms of marketing influence.

Calendar :

• Abstract submission: March 1, 2021
• Return to the authors of the selection of proposals: March 15, 2021
• Submission of the full article: June 1, 2021
• Return to the authors of the peer review: July 30, 2021
• Return of final articles (reviewed after evaluation): September 2021
• Publication date: December 2021

Proposal writing instructions (summaries)

• 6000 characters including spaces
• Bibliography not counted in the number of characters
• On a cover page: title of the proposal, first and last name of the author, university, laboratory, e-mail address, five key words
• The abstract must allow for a clear identification of the problematization, the theoretical and conceptual framework, the method, the analyses and the discussion.
• Proposals should be sent to the following address: influence.comorg@gmail.com.

Instructions for writing the final articles

- 35,000 characters, including spaces, including bibliography

- Layout standards for final articles are available online on the Journal's website: https://journals.openedition.org/communicationorganisation/5909.

- The final formatting according to the standards provided will condition the final acceptance of the article.

The evaluation of complete articles will be done in double-blind by the journal's reading committee.

You can consult the list of the members of the reading committee on the following page: https://journals.openedition.org/communicationorganisation/5910

DETECt is a large EU-funded research project on crime fiction and European identity. DETECt and Serial Eyes are jointly organinsing an international screenwriting contest. We are looking for proposals for crime TV series for either broadcast or streaming services. An international jury of top industry professionals from HBO, Netflix, Mediaset and Cattleya, will review the final five submissions. The winning author(s) will be invited to attend the DETECt final conference in Rome in June 2021 to meet the jury.

More info available here: https://www.detect-project.eu/contest/

Submission portal: https://serial-eyes.com/detect-contest/

Deadline for submission: 1 March 2021.

Paul Reilly

How are platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used by citizens to frame contentious parades and protests in 'post-conflict' Northern Ireland? What do these contentious episodes tell us about the potential of information and communication technologies to promote positive intergroup contact in the deeply divided society?

These issues are addressed in what is the first in-depth qualitative exploration of how social media were used during the union flag protests (December 2012-March 2013) and the Ardoyne parade disputes (July 2014 and 2015). The book focuses on the extent to which affective publics, mobilised and connected via expressions of solidarity on social media, appear to escalate or de-escalate sectarian tensions caused by these hybrid media events. It also explores whether citizen activity on these online platforms has the potential to contribute to peacebuilding in Northern Ireland.

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719087073/

There will be a book launch hosted by John Coster (Doc Media Centre) on Friday 29 January (1-2pm). Full details on how to register can be found here.