ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

University of Brighton

The School of Media, University of Brighton is inviting applications for AHRC-funded /technē/ Doctoral studentships for October 2021 entry. We are looking for motivated and engaged individuals to study across our research strengths in Media & Communications, Arts and Humanities. Applicants will be educated to Masters level or equivalent and meet AHRC eligibility criteria for funding.

Your application will go through a two-stage process, being considered first by the University of Brighton Doctoral College.

AHRC-funded technē Studentships /Technē/ is a Doctoral Training Partnership funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), aiming to create a new model for collaborative research skills training for research students across nine higher education institutions in London and the South East (Royal Holloway; Brunel University; University of Brighton; Kingston University; Loughborough University, London; Roehampton University; University of Surrey; University of the Arts London; and University of Westminster). /Technē/’s vision is to produce scholars who are highly motivated and prepared for academic, public or professional life.

Fully-funded studentships (stipends and fee waivers) will be awarded by /technē/ to the best students put forward by its member universities. Successful applicants will benefit from a rich and diverse training programme with a focus on interdisciplinarity career development both in and beyond higher education and they will be able to draw on supervisory expertise from across the partnership. The /technē/ training programme is enhanced by input and placement opportunities provided by 13 partner organisations, including the Barbican, Natural History Museum, Museum of London, BFI and the Science Museum.

The School of Media and Centres for Research Excellence

The University of Brighton’s School of Media fosters a thriving community of theorists and practitioners working on the development of new knowledge around media cultures, technologies and practices. Our research encompasses a broad range of media forms, from television and film to digital media, videogames, VR and AR and it focuses on different stages of media production, representation, distribution and reception.

More specific areas include innovative research on the media and: identity politics (e.g. gender and sexuality); power and resistance (e.g. activism, democracy); memory and history; sustainability and environmentalism, among others

Research is supported through specialist centres and groups. Doctoral supervisors are active in research in

• the Centre for Digital Media Cultures: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/digital-media-cultures/index.aspx
• the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/secp/index.aspx
• the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/ctsg/index.aspx
• and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/centre-for-research-in-memory-narrative-and-histories

Additional Research & Enterprise Groups that provide further opportunities for networking, collaboration and support are the ones on

• Screen Studies: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/organisations/screen-studies-research-and-enterprise-group
• Photography in Practice; Photography in Theory: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/organisations/photography-in-practice-photography-in-theory-research-and-enterp
• Creative Sound & Music: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/organisations/creative-sound-and-music-research-and-enterprise-group
• Cultural Informatics: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/organisations/cultural-informatics-research-and-enterprise-group

The City of Brighton and Hove gives our PhD students access to one of the UK’s most lively media economies. We foster research that takes advantage of these relationships with a history of community engagement and industry-based research projects.

For more information about the School research culture, please visit the School of Media research website: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/organisations/school-of-media/persons/

For more information about the scheme, please visit the Technē website: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/organisations/school-of-media/persons/

For more details and how to apply, please visit the relevant University page on Funding Opportunities and Studentships: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/research-and-enterprise/postgraduate-research-degrees/funding-opportunities-and-studentships/dtp-ahrc-techne-general.aspx

Important dates:

*University of Brighton deadline:* Monday 4 January 2021.

*Interviews: *Week beginning 20 January 2021

For further information please contact the Postgraduate Research Coordinator Aris Mousoutzanis (A.Mousoutzanis@brighton.ac.uk)

Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media

Deadline: December 11, 2020

This is a CFP for a special issue of 'Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media' that will be themed around Nightmares, Nations and Innovations. This edition will focus on horror outside of film/TV and will be published on Halloween 2021.

Articles (3-8k words) will explore the ways in which the horror genre functions in all its multifarious forms outside of film/TV, to explore the synergies between the horror film and popular culture. By approaching horror away from the screen, it hopes to examine the interconnections between the complex forces at work on both sides of the horror equation: the economies of modern entertainment industries and production practice, cultural and political forums, spectators and fans.

Articles sought in and around the following areas:

- Appropriation and use of horror texts by fans

- Immersive horror & Hallowe’en experiences - Dark rides & haunted attractions

- Horror in video games or horror themed DLC & modding

- Horror podcasts

- Synergies between the horror film and popular culture

- Horror-centric social & cultural internet phenomena (Images, Memes, GIFS)

- Horror and transmedia storytelling

- Cosplay, apocalypse-ready (pandemic) fashion, Halloween costumes - Monsters as pop culture heroes & monster merchandise

Please send a short abstract and author bio to Gerard Gibson and John Kavanagh by Dec 11. Articles will be selected in Dec and should be completed by May.

Here's a little more info on our special edition:

Ndalianis (2012) theorises that horror is about the crossing of boundaries, suggesting that horror manifests where order falls into chaos and meaning collapses. Jowett and Abbott (2013), persuasively assert that horror has long ago successfully entered the mainstream, permeating popular culture. If these are so, have scholarly distinctions in horror been outmoded by new technologies, experiences and audience practices? Are academic distinctions in horror supported, complicated or eroded by such developments? If horror has transcended cultural boundaries can national ones be far behind? Horror films and literature are marketed internationally.

Creations like Carpenter and Hill’s homicidal Michael Myers are international brands, almost global folk characters, and worth millions. Popular Halloween experiences, immersive horror and dark rides take the intellectual chills of the horror story and embody them for corporeal, haptic experience, transforming the narrative into the material, fright into flesh. Horror, Cherry (2009) reminds us, is highly adaptable, finding expression in a multitude of forms; nationally, internationally, globally and across a wide palette of media. The aesthetics of horror and cute culture collide/converge in merchandise, figures toys and GIFs.

Monsters, serial killers, demons and ghosts are conventionalised on children’s clothing and as plushies. Do stories and characters remain in the hands of the creators and production companies or are they, as Jenkins (1992) argues, poached and appropriated by the fans? How does such poaching manifest in fan participation? Where do concepts of authorships sit in such a participatory culture? How have audiences taken horror and made it their own? Do narratives combine and storytelling practices intermingle? Does proliferation affect mainstream tastes and interests? Has it informed fashion? Has horror stepped off the screen and into our everyday lives? Might this erode the power of horror? If the transgressive is now the everyday, what remains taboo?

Call for Chapter Contributions 

Deadline: December 7, 2020

Please see below for editorial contacts and instructions for initial submissions.

Edited by Sarah Woodland (Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, Australia) and Wolfgang Vachon (School of Social and Community Services, Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Canada)

Due for publication in early 2022

About the book

This edited collection aims to investigate the use of sound and audio production in community engaged participatory arts practice and research. The popularity of podcast and audio drama, combined with the accessibility and portability of affordable field recording and home studio equipment, makes audio a compelling mode of participatory creative practice. Working in audio enables a flexible approach to participation, where collaborators in sites such as prisons, schools, and community settings, can engage in performance and production in flexible ways, while learning valuable skills and producing satisfying creative outcomes. Audio works also allow projects to reach wider audience (and for longer) than an ephemeral performance event, extending the potential for diverse perspectives to be heard beyond prison walls, across borders, and between different communities and cultures.

The book will map current projects occurring globally and imagine where participatory audio creation could lead us. This will be done through a series of case study chapters that exemplify community engaged creative audio practice; theoretical analyses that illuminate and extend ideas of community-created sound practices; and methodological considerations in developing and implementing participatory audio-based research.

Chapters will focus on audio and sound based arts practices that are undertaken by artists and arts-led researchers in collaboration with (or from within) communities and groups. These practices may include: Applied audio drama, community engaged podcasting, community engaged sound art, sound and verbatim theatre, sound walks, community engaged acoustic ecology, digital storytelling, oral history and reminiscence, radio drama in health and community development … and more. (Please note: Although some of these practices may incorporate music and there can be crossover between certain forms of sound art and music, the work in this collection will not have music as its primary focus). The emphasis will be on collaborative creative audio-based work with communities towards artistic, social, pedagogical, and/or research outcomes.

Call for Contributions

We are seeking contributions from practitioners and researchers that consider the ethics, aesthetics, and practice of the work, investigating the role of sound in areas such as community building, wellbeing, education, and social or environmental justice. Contributors will be welcome to submit non-traditional papers, including interview transcripts, scripts, and audio files (for inclusion on the online Routledge Performance Archive). Contributions will represent a breadth of different practices and voices, across diverse community, cultural, and global contexts. Authors may consider (but are not limited to):

• What are some of the tensions and possibilities of using sound and audio in community engaged arts practice?

• What contribution can creative sound and audio practice make as an arts-led, participatory research methodology?

• How might activist approaches to creative sound and audio practice work from within communities to resist existing structures of power and knowledge? (E.g. how might these approaches contribute to feminist, queer, decolonising or antiracist actions and discourses?)

• What contribution can sound and audio technologies make towards supporting and strengthening situated, local, or cultural knowledges and practices?

• What are the aesthetic implications of using sound and audio in community engaged arts practice? How does working in sound/audio impact on aesthetic engagement, listening, representation, and cultural production?

• What are the ethical implications of using sound and audio in community engaged arts practice? What tensions and opportunities exist in terms of access, equity, participation, ownership, and voice?

• What role do creative sound and audio practices play for communities responding to contemporary global crises, events, and movements such as the climate crisis, migration and displacement, COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, etc.

By focusing on practices that work collaboratively with and within diverse communities and groups, the collection will engage with and extend fields such as applied theatre, sound art, qualitative inquiry, and sound studies to place the emphasis on sound and community engaged participatory arts practice. As such, it will provide the first extensive analysis of what sound and audio brings to participatory interdisciplinary arts-led research and practice, representing a vital resource for community arts and performance practice and research in the digital age.

Chapters will be maximum 8000 words (including references), shorter contributions in the form of provocations, reflections on practice, scripts, interviews etc. will be welcome.

In the first instance, please submit a 300-word proposal and 150-word author biographies to the editors by the closing date: Monday 7th December 2020.

Please also feel free to email us to discuss the volume or your proposal prior to submitting. *

Editor contacts:

• Sarah Woodland: sarah.woodland@unimelb.edu.au
• Wolfgang Vachon: Wolfgang.Vachon@humber.ca

December 4-5, 2020

Virtual conference

Deadline: November 25, 2020

Since the mid-nineties researchers have developed a monumental theory of information and communication technologies, within the conceptual framework of the network society – an ideal type transcending economic, cultural and political changes that took place in the 20th Century. Communication networks enabled by the internet are rapidly expanding along various codes and values.

In the global context of networked society the problematic of community and locality are again on the researchers’ agenda, due both to the loosened traditional ties, and to the emergence of new communities, furthermore, the question rises, whether the issue of locality is worth discussing in the context of global networks. Our relationships regain their value in a networked world, either as real or virtual togetherness. Issues worth exploring are the impact of global knowledge on local practices, mediated by online networks, just as the formation of specific local social processes influenced by the globalization and the phenomenon of online networks.

We started the discussion of these questions in our 2019 conference. This year, restricted into the online space in the context of pandemic, we would like to dedicate our conference to the further discussion of the above issues.

This year’s conference is aimed at exploring the changes of our communities and localities in the era of the networked world: innovative practices, new lifestyles, local social responses to global challenges. How does the internet affect the real and virtual community formation, and which are the factors contributing to the emergence of new types of groups of consumers and users?

Topics proposed for discussion:

• Local consumer and producer practices: glocalized worlds
• New consumer cultures and subcultures
• Local discourses in the online space
• Inequalities in the age of global networks: localities lagging behind
• vs. catching up localities
• Our digital worlds: social challenges for technology
• The effects of pandemic on local societies

We expect papers from the fields of social sciences and cultural studies, in Hungarian or English language.

Papers may be presented in one of the following ways:

15 minutes online oral presentation inHungarianorEnglishlanguage, or An English language poster uploaded to the Conference website. The conference organizers will offer prizes for the most original three posters uploaded to the English language poster section (coherence and creativity of the dissemination, visual representation of data). Prizes will be Amazon Kindle books of speciality literature

The conference is open for MA and PhD students as well.

No registration fee.

Short abstracts in Hungarian or English including the type of the prospected presentation (paper or poster) should be sent to Laura Nistor at nistorlaura@uni.sapientia.ro by 25 November 2020.

Organizer: Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Faculty of Economics, SocioHuman Sciences and Engineering – Department of Social Sciences / Applied Social Sciences Research Centre

http://csik.sapientia.ro/en

Carolijn van Noort

This book demonstrates how infrastructure projects and the communications thereof are strategized by rising powers to envision progress, to enhance the actor’s international identity, and to substantiate and leverage the actor’s vision of international order. While the physical aspects of infrastructure are important, infrastructure communication in international relations demands more scholarly attention.

Using a case-study approach, Carolijn van Noort examines how rising powers communicate about infrastructure internationally and discusses the significance of these communication practices. The four case studies include BRICS’s summit communications about infrastructure, Brazil’s infrastructure promises to Africa, China’s communication of the Belt and Road Initiative in East Africa, and Kazakhstan’s news media coverage of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Van Noort highlights the fact that the link between infrastructure, identity, and order-making is arbitrary and thus contested in practice, with rising powers operationalizing infrastructure communication in international relations in varied ways. She argues that both communication organization and the visuality of strategic narratives on infrastructure influence the international communication of infrastructure vision and action plans, with different levels of success.

Infrastructure Communication in International Relations is a welcome and timely book of interest to students and scholars in the fields of international relations, global communications, and the politics of infrastructure.

Table of Contents

1. Strategic Narratives on Infrastructure 2. BRICS and Infrastructure 3. Brazil, Africa, and Infrastructure 4. China, East Africa, and the Belt and Road Initiative 5. Kazakhstan, China, and the Belt and Road Initiative 6. Conclusion

Author(s)

Carolijn van Noort is a Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy in the School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. In 2018, she obtained her PhD from the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research interests include strategic narratives, rising powers, and the politics of infrastructure.

https://www.routledge.com/Infrastructure-Communication-in-International-Relations/Noort/p/book/9780367557362

February 8-13, 2021

Online conference

Deadline: November 20, 2021

Keynote: Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, University of California, Irvine

This conference is designed as a sequel to our 2015 event/Turning the Page: Digitization, movie magazines and historical audience studies/.

That conference focused on the development of the study of historical fan magazines in recent decades, with a particular emphasis on the impact of increased digitization (by the Media History Digital Library, among others) on this development. In this context, we particularly emphasised the importance of “reclaiming” the fan magazine – an ephemeral and often academically neglected object – as an important research tool for the study of stars, fans, Hollywood and non-Hollywoodfilm industries and cultures, and more.

The purpose of this follow-up event is two-fold. Firstly, we wish to investigate the ways in which the field of historical fan magazine studies has evolved over the past five years. Secondly, we wish to focus, for this event, specifically on the design of the magazines and the relationship between the visual aspects of the publications and their contents. This choice is partly motivated by the online nature of the conference: since we will all be consuming the conference papers on a small screen, this format is excellently suited to an in-depth and detailed study of magazines’ visual elements.

With this focus, we particularly want to emphasise the importance of talking about the fan magazine holistically, as a complete and multi-layered object often consumed by its original readers in unorthodox and non-linear ways. As Sally Stein noted in the context of Ladies Home Journal in 1985:

"Studies of magazines have usually treated literary texts, or editorial images, or ads, as independent entities, and have proceeded to analyze their meanings divorced from their original context. This strategy flattens our conception of the way magazines came to be assembled and then received. For these elements are certainly not apprehended in isolation; rather images and texts, ads and editorial matter, are each designed to work off each other within the larger ensemble of the magazine." (Stein, 1985: 7)

While some scholars have appreciated this importance of taking a holistic approach, we believe that much coverage of the fan magazine as a research object still tends to treat the visual and textual elements as easily separable from each other, failing to appreciate the holistic reading experience these periodicals offered their readers, who often consumed them in their available “scraps of time.” (Stein, 1985: 6)

The organisers are delighted to announce that an online exhibition devoted to movie magazines will be held at the same time as the conference. “Design and Desire: The Glamorous History of the Movie Magazine” relates the history of the movie magazine from its modest beginnings in New York in 1911, via its global spread and glamorous heyday in the 1930s, to its decline and absorption into the celebrity gossip publications we know today. In their heyday in the 1930s, there were more than twenty movie magazines released every month in the USA alone. Providing information on new releases but even more on their stars, movie magazines purveyed more than - often dubious - facts: primarily they sold dreams, just as movies themselves did. This exhibition relates the story of these glamorous publications through displays, maps, music, films and interactive features.

We welcome abstracts of 350 words for recorded PowerPoint presentations, as well as video essays or other digitally shareable innovative approaches. The conference, which is free to attend, will make selected presentations available asynchronously, while a number of scheduled live sessions will also be organised via the Zoom platform, including a roundtable focusing on archives and digitization.

We encourage colleagues to consult the excellent online collections of movie magazines at https://lantern.mediahist.org/ and www.archive.org, amongst others, in preparing their submissions.

Presentation topics may include but are not limited to:

* Visual analysis of a historically significant single magazine

* Synchronic or diachronic investigation of multiple magazines

* Comparisons of different magazines’ treatment of specific stars, films or products

* Assessments of magazines’ different reading strategies

* Consideration of the dominance of Photoplay in recent scholarly work on movie magazines

* Approaches to studying the fan magazine in the age of the pandemic

* Examinations of the importance of the magazine cover

The closing date for submissions is midnight (BST) on 20 November, and authors will be notified of acceptance by 4 December 2020. Recorded presentations will be due by mid-January 2021. Please submit your abstract to normma.network@gmail.com.

Conference organisers: Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Lies Lanckman and Sarah Polley

Twitter: @design_desire

Instagram: design_desire2020

www.normmanetwork.com

Special issue of Animation: an interdisciplinary journal

Deadline: March 31, 2021

Guest Editor: Professor Paul Ward, Arts University Bournemouth

The study of animation has grown enormously in the past two decades. Historical and theoretical research, along with teaching the practice of animation in a variety of settings – from schools and colleges, to universities and other contexts – is now commonplace. One area that has been overlooked to date, however, is explicit/critical discussion/of/how and why/we teach animation in the ways that we do. There are a number of ‘traditions’ at play here: the teaching/training/inducting of people into the/craft/of making animation; courses that educate people whose goal is to work in more mainstream studio animation; courses that examine animation as an artistic practice overlapping with other areas such as Fine Art or Experimental Film/Video. There often appears to be a bifurcation into ‘animation education’ on the one hand and ‘animation training’ on the other: part of the point of this Special Issue would be to challenge and interrogate such a simplistic binary way of thinking.

The recent turn to ‘production studies’ (e.g. the work of John Caldwell) and critical examination of media industries (e.g. the work published in/Media Industries/online journal) ties in with a more detailed exploration of animation production pipelines, and how these ‘normative models’ are taught and passed down to future practitioners is part of the next stage of important research that needs to be done. Likewise, the role of animation in learning more generally – animation as a potentially radical pedagogic tool – also needs further critical examination.

The Special Issue welcomes submissions on any aspect of animation and education, including but not limited to:

• Animation in the university, school and other formal educational settings;
• Animation’s ‘interdisciplinary’ status;
• Animation Studies/animation practice as a recognizable ‘knowledge area’;
• Animation education’s relationship with industry (mentoring, industry liaison);
• Formal and informal modes of animation education;
• Communities of practice, on-the-job training, continuing professional development;
• Fostering diversity via animation education (e.g. issues of race, class, gender, dis/ability);
• The relationship between animation practice, animation theory, and animation professional discourses;
• The ways in which animation can be used to educate about other things – e.g. History, issues in healthcare, social care, etc;
• Case studies of specific examples of animation pedagogy;
• Animation and the philosophy of education.

As well as welcoming articles of 6-9000 words, we also welcome shorter ‘critical reflections on animation education’ (2-3000 words), where educators can share examples of best practice.

Deadline: Submissions to reach the Guest Editor (pward@aub.ac.uk) by 31 March 2021.

All submissions will be subject to the journal’s peer review processes.

Please refer to the journal's Submission

Guidelines: https://journals.sagepub.com/…ANM

March 2-3, 2021

Online conference

Deadline for abstracts: January 5, 2021

A two-day virtual conference on the diversity of film audience experience in the UK

Full details: https://www.beyondthemultiplex.net/…pdf

‘Audiences beyond the multiplex: understanding the value of a diverse film culture’ marks the final event for the AHRC-funded project ‘Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised film in English Regions’.

For more information on the project see: https://www.beyondthemultiplex.net/

Pawel Surowiec, Ilan Manor (editors)

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-54552-9?fbclid=IwAR3B8sdP9OjaE7bu96Yh3d1mug3sx9ppHxFsqH_pWFmAFI3BAt0Ve2Gtksk#about

This edited book explores the multi-layered relationships between public diplomacy and intensified uncertainties stemming from transnational political trends. It is the latest wave of political uncertainty that provides the background as well as yields evidence scrutinised by authors contributing to this book. The book argues that due to a state of perpetual crises, the simultaneity of diplomatic tensions and new digital modalities of power, international politics increasingly resembles a networked set of hyper-realities. Embracing multi-polar competition, superpowers such as Russia flex their muscles over their neighbours; celebrated ‘success stories’ of democratisation – Hungary, Poland and Czechia – move towards illiberal governance; old players of international politics such as Britain and America re-claim “greatness”, while other states, like China, adapt expansionist foreign policy goals. The contributors to this book consider the different ways in which transnational political trends and digitalisation breed uncertainty and shape the practice of public diplomacy.

Paweł Surowiec is a Senior Lecturer in Strategic Communication at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Ilan Manor is a Digital Diplomacy Scholar at the University of Oxford, UK.

Keywords: post-truth politicsPublic DiplomacyUncertaintysoft powerilliberal trends

November 2, 2020

Online

We're thrilled to share with you the GigaNet symposium program, happening next week!

The GigaNet Annual Symposium will take place on Day 0 of the IGF, this year due to the pandemic it will be remote via Zoom.

Please notice that you have to register to the conference - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0apZyD5ca71xKOWDeVO-NL-eJ6rsy-z_64HqzdlCX7nT0Xg/viewform

AND the IGF website as well to be able to participate - https://www.intgovforum.org/multilingual/content/igf-2020-registration

To check out the full program go to this link -> https://www.giga-net.org/2020-annual-giganet-symposium-program-katowice-poland-remote/ but we wanted to give you a teaser of what's on->

GigaNet Symposium at IGF – Monday, 2nd November, 2020

Join the debate on our live tweeting-> @Giganetr #GigaNet

13:40-13:55 UTC – Welcome and Introductory Remarks

Dmitry Epstein, GigaNet Chair

Roxana Radu, GigaNet Program Chair 2020

14:00-15:15 UTC – parallel sessions 1

panel A1: Platform governance

Panel B1: Internet governance and the Covid-19 pandemic

15:20-16:35 UTC – parallel sessions 2

Panel A2: Data Governance

Panel B2: Stakeholders and their role in internet governance

16:40-17:55 UTC – parallel sessions 3

Panel 3: Governing standards and infrastructure

Panel B3: Cyberconflict and Cybersecurity

18:00-19:00 UTC – GigaNet meeting