ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Vaia Doudaki and Angeliki Boubouka

Examining the news coverage of the economic crisis in Greece, this book develops a framework for identifying discourses of legitimation of actors, political decisions, and policies in the news.

This study departs from the assumption that news is a privileged terrain where discursive struggles (over power) are represented and take place. Incorporating systematic analysis of news texts and journalistic practices, the model contextualises the analysis in its specific socio-political environment and examines legitimising discourse through the prism of the news. Ultimately the book recognises the active role played by journalists and media in legitimating economic crisis related policies and decisions, and how they help dominant actors establish and legitimate their authority, which in turn helps journalists legitimate their own role and authority.

CONTENTS

Introduction: assumptions and foundations, Vaia Doudaki

1. The economic crisis in Greece: short account of events and actors, Angeliki Boubouka

2. Media and representations of the economic crisis, Angeliki Boubouka and Vaia Doudaki

3. Discourses of legitimation in the news: concepts and dimensions, Vaia Doudaki

4. Analysing discourse: legitimation and its mechanisms in the Greek bailout news, Vaia Doudaki

Concluding reflections, Vaia Doudaki

Eva Nowak (ed.)

Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2019

How is journalism education in Europe accredited and assessed? State organisations and the media industry influence the objectives, content and structures of such education and trainings through their accreditation. They set quality standards and, at the same time, interfere with the autonomy of journalism education. Through studies of twelve countries, this volume shows how accreditation influences journalism education in Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

A second part of the book provides a comparative analysis of these studies including an overview on accreditation in higher education in Europe and the European Higher Education Area, EHEA. Another chapter deals with the ACEJMC’s more than seventy years of experience in journalism studies accreditation in the USA.

The volume contains contributions by Maarit Jaakkola, Pascal Guénée, Tina Tsomaia, Ana Keshelashvili, Andrea Czepek, Tibor Mester, Annamária Torbó, Catherine Shanahan, Nico Drok, George Prundaru, Elena Vartanova, Maria Lukina, Carlos Barrera, Manuel Martín Algarra, Guido Keel, Deborah Wilson David, Joe Foote and Eva Nowak.

The editor, Eva Nowak, is a professor of journalism at Jade Hochschule in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Her research focuses on journalism education and media freedom.

Contributions are invited for the new journal Anthropocenes - Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. Submissions are open at: https://www.anthropocenes.net/about/submissions/

Editors-in-Chief

• David Chandler, University of Westminster
• Jane Lewis, University of Westminster
• Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster

Anthropocenes welcomes submissions not so much on the basis of the ‘what’ of the topic covered but rather the ‘how’. Our core readership fields are the social sciences, arts and humanities (broadly construed), although often social and political thought will also be applied to aspects of the natural or ‘hard’ sciences. We are interested in the creative, disruptive and transformative potentials of thought and practices in the Anthropocene. Anthropocenes (published by the University of Westminster Press) is a peer review, open access journal, which makes no charge for publication. 

https://www.anthropocenes.net

Please advise if this suits your listings or if you need additional or re-edited material.

ATEE - Spring Conference 2020

May 20 - 22, 2020

Florence, Italy

Deadline: January 15, 2020

In 2020 the ATEE Spring Conference will be hosted by the University of Florence. As a main theme, the

Conference will take a critical perspective on the role of digital technology and media in teacher education by framing the relationship between technology/media and education in the light of the ever-increasing social inequalities. From this standpoint the Conference will focus on the new challenges and growing demands on education system committed to addressing all forms of disparities in access, participation and learning outcomes, social exclusion and discrimination. A critical approach to the understanding of the implications of technological developments for education is particularly significant in a world dominated by algorithms that are increasingly controlling and regulating the extent to which people do or do not participate in the social life. The central focus of this conference is the relevance of these critical perspectives and approaches in the field of teacher education's research and practice.

Main sub-themes are:

• Teaching critical media/digital literacy in multicultural societies.
• Decommodifying teacher (digital) education.
• Digital technology and equity for inclusive teaching.

We are pleased to invite you to submit an abstract to ATEE Spring Conference 2020.

https://www.ateespring2020.education/abstracts/

Important dates

Abstract Submission

• Abstract submission deadline: 15th January, 2020
• Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: 15th February, 2020
• Final Paper Submission Deadline: 15th July, 2020

Registration

• Opening of registration: 15th December, 2019
• Early Registration Deadline: 28th February, 2020
• Late Registration Deadline: 20th May, 2020

Koç University

Koç University, Department of Media and Visual Arts has two open rank, tenure-track positions: 1) Computational Social Sciences, 2) Interaction Design

1. Computational Social Sciences/Data Science

We are looking for scholars specializing in computational social sciences or data science. Areas of expertise include critical data studies, social media research, natural language processing. The ideal candidate should have applied experience in programming languages such as Laravel, Python, R. Prior experience of participation in interdisciplinary projects focusing on communication processes, critical algorithm studies, culture industries, and emerging media/ Related areas are also desirable. Awareness of and scholarly investment in how identity and social inequalities intersect with algorithms and big data is necessary.

Successful candidates will be expected to teach undergraduate and/or graduate courses and is expected to have an active research agenda. At the time of employment, candidates should have a PhD. We especially encourage applications from candidates whose research agenda is interdisciplinary. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Koç University is a foundation-funded, non-profit institution located in Istanbul, Turkey. The university is committed to the pursuit of excellence in both research and teaching. The medium of instruction is English. MAVA at Koç University offers an interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes media studies, communications theory, media/arts management, film, production, visual and interaction design.

Applicants can submit applications electronically via https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/15515

Deadline for submission of applications is 23 December 2019

• Cover letter summarizing research and teaching approach and goals
• Curriculum Vitae
• Three reference letters

2. Interaction Design: 

Applicants should have a PhD in interaction design or a related field (product design, communication design, user experience design, and HCI) and have teaching and research track record in any one of the following areas:

• design (product design, visual communication design, user experience design, architecture or similar),
• engineering and sciences (computer science, human computer interaction, electrical engineering, or similar),
• social sciences (psychology, sociology, cognitive science or similar)

We are looking for an innovative and dedicated applicant who will strengthen the research and teaching profiles of the department nationally and internationally as well as contributing to Koç University’s core activities in the areas of research, teaching and supervision, talent development and knowledge exchange.

The successful candidate will be expected to teach two undergraduate and/or graduate courses, have an active research agenda, as well as to contribute and collaborate effectively in our research and teaching community. Applicants with interdisciplinary research agenda and the ones who combine knowledge of design theory, methods and research techniques are highly encouraged. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. Koç University is a foundation-funded, non-profit institution located in Istanbul, Turkey. The university is committed to the pursuit of excellence in both research and teaching. The medium of instruction is English. MAVA at Koç University offers an interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes media studies, communications theory, media/arts management, film,production, visual communication and interaction design.

Applicants can submit applications electronically via https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/15514

Deadline for submission of applications is 23 December 2019

• Cover letter summarizing research and teaching approach and goals
• Curriculum Vitae
• Three reference letters

Special issue of Science Fiction Studies

Deadline: December 31, 2019

We invite papers on the role of nostalgia as a structure of feeling that animates speculative, utopian, and (post)apocalyptic texts across media. Although there has been increasing critical attention to the role of memory in these genres, nostalgia is a neglected topic. We seek papers that explore nostalgia as affect and motif in the genre, following Jameson's description of sf as a mode of "apprehending the future as history" (1982), while discussing seemingly future-oriented texts such William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). Nostalgia had already been consolidated within mainstream popular culture via George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) which self-consciously harkened back to earlier eras, texts and subgenres, from the space operas of E.E. Doc Smith to the film serials of the 1930s, from Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956) to Frank Herbert's Dune (1965). In contemporary media, Star Wars itself is now one among many rebooted titles, as mainstream science fiction reanimates its own popular history. As Judith Berman argues in "Science Fiction without the Future" (2001), even the stories of Golden Age pulp sf were less about the future than "full of nostalgia, regret, fear of aging and death."

The genre has frequently been preoccupied with the past as it imagines the future even in cinema, evident in films such as Code 46 (Winterbottom 2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry 2004) which are driven by almost futile search for the lost object.

Further connections may be detected between nostalgia and gernes such as utopia and dystopia. If utopianism produces future-orientated discourses that seek to transform the present into an idealised future, nostalgia might be described as inverted utopianism that generates an ameliorated, utopianized recollection of the past, as is evident in

nineteenth-century utopias, such William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) whose post-apocalyptic future betrays a yearning for a pre-industrial, pastoral era. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001) Svetlana Boym contends that nostalgia can function as as a critical form of remembering that is not bound to a single version of the past, enabling texts to revisit the past to animate different realities and futures, a technique central to works such as Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1974) and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1974). Classical dystopias, on the other hand, such as Eugene Zamyatin's We (1920-21) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) often look to the past as a time of more authentic existence, a motif that continues in recent television series such as The Walking Dead (2010-) and The Handmaid's Tale (2017-), especially in their use of flashback sequences.

Most recently, we have seen widescale interest in sf that nostalgically engages with the 1980s, often through allusions to sf of that era. Netflix has been a major agent in this trend, exemplified by the phenomenal success of Stranger Things (2016-), whose 1980s setting is also contemporary with Jameson's theorization of sf and history.

Other Netflix projects indicate an ongoing interest in nostalgia and this particular decade, such as the German series Dark (2017-), which uses time travel and alternative histories to evoke the 1980s as a consequential turning point in history, or the "San Junipero" episode of Black Mirror (2011-), whose recreation of the 1980s in an online virtual afterlife is often described as the only optimistic episode of the series. This recent cycle of sf might be thought of as second-order nostalgia, that is, texts that encourage young audiences to feel nostalgia about a period they did not live through, one they experienced only via media made at this time. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's theorization of "post-memory," we suggest the term "post-nostalgia" as a way to conceptualize the affective and thematic preoccupations of such work.

We invite submissions that explore these complex intersections of nostalgia and sf. We are interested in papers that revisit the dominant perception of nostalgia as a conservative affective response to a contemporary sense of crisis, and we especially welcome those that explore reflective, critical, or transformative examples of nostalgia that enables a dialectic relationship to the past. We encourage papers that explore how and why nostalgia has resurfaced in genres of the speculative at this particular historical moment. We welcome submissions that explore science fiction in any medium. Indicative yet not exhaustive possible topics include:

• sf, nostalgia and cognitive estrangement
• sf, nostalgia and temporality
• sf, nostalgia and media archaeology
• nostalgia, utopia, dystopia
• reflective nostalgia
• post-nostalgia
• nostalgia and (post-)apocalypse
• identity, nostalgia and counter-memory in (literary, film, television) genre fictions
• steampunk, nostalgia and media archaeology
• commodifying nostalgia and the screen industries: rebooting, franchising, cross-marketing
• nostalgia, sf audiences and fandom

This special issue will be guest edited by Aris Mousoutzanis (A.Mousoutzanis@brighton.ac.uk) and Yugin Teo (yteo@bournemouth.ac.uk).

Please send abstracts of 300-400 words by December 31, 2019 to both editors. After an initial review of proposals, selected essays will be invited to submit full drafts (6,000-7,000 words) due in May 2020. The issue will be published March 2021

Oral History Society Annual Conference 2020

July 3-4, 2020

Bournemouth University, USA

Deadline: December 20, 2019

Oral history and the media have an important but complex relationship. The media has long been a significant producer of, and outlet for, oral history. Classic radio and television productions like The Radio Ballads (1958-1964), Yesterday’s Witness (1969-1981), and The World at War (1973-4) pioneered the use of oral history in the media, giving voice to those who would otherwise have been excluded from both the media and the historical record. Since the 1980s, there has been growing use of oral history in TV and radio documentaries and storytelling, with oral histories now forming an important and popular dimension of history and factual programming and broadcasting. However, the methodological, aesthetic, narrative, and ethical decisions behind these productions – such as who to interview, what questions to ask, and what parts of the interviews end up on the “cutting room floor” - often remain hidden.

The relationship between oral history and the media can also be seen in how oral history has been used to explore the histories and experiences of the media itself, with oral history projects charting the development of media companies and organisation. This has coincided with an upsurge of interest in memory and nostalgia related to the experiences of media, such as memories of cinema, books and music.

Elsewhere, the advent of new media and social media has fuelled the growth of digital storytelling, interactive documentaries, as well as serialised audio podcasts which draw heavily on oral history testimony. Whilst these new technologies, formats and channels offer new ways of creating, disseminating and consuming oral history, they also raise vital questions about ethics, participation, expertise, audiences, and formats in oral history practice.

This conference aims to consider the relationship between oral history and the media, both historically and today, by exploring similarities, differences, opportunities and challenges between media practices and oral history practices, from interviewing to editing, audiences to ethics, covering topics such as:

• The Use and Misuse of Oral History in the Media
• Memories of (the) Media: Film, Books, TV, Radio, Theatre, Music.
• The Influence of the Media on Memory: Mediated Memory and Prosthetic Memory
• Oral History, Media and Editing: Soundbites, Vox-Pops and the ‘Cutting-Room Floor’
• Oral History, Media and Interviewing: Intersubjectivity, Questions, and Emotion
• Journalism, Crisis Oral History and Historical Distance
• Oral Histories of the Media (professions, organisations and companies)
• New Media, Social Media and Oral History
• Changing Media and Formats and its implications for Oral History
• Archiving, Preservation and Re-use of Oral Histories in the Media

PROPOSALS

The deadline for submission of proposals is 20th December 2019. Each proposal should include: a title, an abstract of between 250-300 words, your name (and the names of any co-presenters, panellists, etc), your institution or organisation, your email address, and a note of any particular requirements. Most importantly your abstract should demonstrate the use of oral history or personal testimony and be directly related to the conference theme. Proposals that include audio playback are strongly encouraged. Proposals should be emailed to the ORAL HISTORY AND THE MEDIA Conference Manager, Polly Owen, at polly.owen@ohs.org.uk . They will be assessed anonymously by the conference organisers, and presenters will be contacted in January/February 2020

http://www.ohs.org.uk/conferences/conference-2020/

May 7-8, 2020

McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

Deadline: December 15, 2019

Organized by the Communications Governance Observatory and the Centre for Networked Media and Performance (CNMAP) at McMaster University

Algorithms and digital platforms play increasingly important roles in governing how we communicate and how we discover and engage with media and culture. The ‘platform turn’ in dominant media systems has significant implications for life opportunities, employment, participation in the digital economy (whose content is distributed and prioritized?), the star system (who is promoted and how? what counts as success?), politics (which and whose perspective is dominant? how has political deliberation and debate been re-mediatized?), international relations (whose view of the world is dominant?) and social relations (how are inequities in representation reproduced and transformed?).

This conference will draw together researchers in Canada and beyond to explore the intersections between media/communications/cultural policy and platforms. All submissions related to this theme are welcome, including research in the areas of arts policy, broadcasting policy, communication rights, Indigenous communication and cultural policy, competition policy, cultural industries policy, heritage policy, internet policy, media policy, speech regulation, privacy, smart city regulation, and platform regulation. We welcome analysis and case studies at all levels of policy-making, including municipal, provincial and federal, and Indigenous and international research.

Confirmed keynote speakers and presenters include Edward Greenspon (Public Policy Forum), Jesse Wente (Indigenous Screen Office), Sharon McGowan (Women in Film and Television-Vancouver, UBC), Laura Tribe (Open Media), Philippe Tousignant (CRTC), David Ogborn (McMaster), Jonathan Paquette (University of Ottawa), Philip Savage (McMaster), Leslie Regan Shade (University of Toronto), Tamara Shepherd (University of Calgary), Ira Wagman (Carleton), and Dwayne Winseck (Carleton).

The conference will consider the following key questions:

• How can Canadian media systems respond simultaneously to the challenge of digital platforms and to calls for a greater diversity of on-screen and off-screen voices?
• How are platforms taking on, or failing to take on, regulatory roles in the fields of communication and culture?
• How does the international political economy of platforms play out in media/communications/cultural policy?
• How does algorithmic governance function as regulation and policy setting in these fields?
• How are regulatory bodies in the field of communication and culture reconceptualizing their work in light of platforms?
• What relationships and interactions do regulators, as well as arts, media, and cultural organizations, have with platforms?
• How are regulatory bodies in the field of communication and culture incorporating platforms to conduct their work?
• How do advocacy, activist, and social justice initiatives intercede in the relationships between platforms and media/communications/cultural policy?
• How do comparative political cultures influence national regulatory agendas? What criteria may enable new comparative research?

This conference welcomes submissions from all researchers, including doctoral and master’s students.

Prospective participants should submit a 300-word abstract, along with a 150-word bio, including title and institutional affiliation, for a 15-20 minute presentation to https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=comcultpolicy2020%23 by December 15th 2019 for peer review. Invitations will be announced by January 15th 2020. Contributions may be invited for a publication project after the conference. Questions may be addressed to Sara Bannerman at banners@mcmaster.ca. Visit the conference web site at http://comcultpolicy2020.ca

The conference will be preserved in an online video archive. Conference participants will have the opportunity to contribute to a white paper outlining policy recommendations arising from the conference discussions.

ICA 2020 Pre-conference

May 20, 2020, 9:00am-5:00pm

Sydney Policy Lab, University of Sydney

Deadline: January 20, 2020

Sponsoring ICA Divisions: Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group; Political Communication Division; Public Relations Division.

Organizers: Filippo Trevisan (American University), Ariadne Vromen (University of Sydney), Michael Vaughan (University of Sydney)

Storytelling is central to the persuasion and mobilization strategies of advocacy organizations, activist groups, NGOs, political parties, and campaigns. However, technological, communicative, and political changes have challenged traditional storytelling practices and incentivized significant innovation in this area in recent years. Changes in technology have transformed the scale and pace at which individual stories can be collected, digitally archived, curated, and then distributed through online platforms. Changes in communication and politics have increased the emphasis on personalized advocacy strategies targeted at affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015), as campaigners seek to navigate an increasingly fragmented and polarised information environment. Researchers today face a challenge in representing both the continuity in the narrative dimension of politics while also interrogating emerging and impactful innovations. This raises important questions about power dynamics and representations associated with changing storytelling practices, roles, and relationships between individual storytellers, organizations, and social groups in a constantly evolving media landscape. These questions are relevant to multiple related fields including, among others, the sociology of political communications (Polletta 2006), policy studies (Jones, Shanahan and McBeth 2014) journalism studies (Polletta and Callahan 2017), and public interest communication.

This one-day preconference pays attention to these questions and brings together researchers from multiple disciplinary perspectives to discuss the impact of changing storytelling practices on individuals, groups, organizations, target publics, and public discourse more broadly. We welcome submissions from theoretical and empirical inquiries that examine the following areas:

• Reconciling conceptualizations of storytelling from intersecting perspectives in political life: in particular interest groups, social movements, NGOs, parties and political campaigns, as well as journalism;
• The impact of evolving digital communication technologies, including but not limited to social media, mobile devices, and database technology on the practice of persuasive storytelling;
• How publics and citizens respond to stories;
• The role of storytelling in response to changing political and media contexts, in particular the evolution of information consumption habits and the rise of “fake news;”
• The significance and impact of advocacy storytelling on the (in)visibility of groups that are traditionally marginalized and under-represented in public discourse (e.g. gender, LGBTQI+, race, ethnicity, disability, etc.);
• The outcomes of storytelling in politics, such as successes or failures in public policy;
• The ethics of storytelling and the power relationship between advocacy organizations and individual storytellers;
• Storytelling in a comparative and global context, such as the diffusion of storytelling practices between political actors and countries, as well as their relationship with culture and media environments;
• Innovative methodological approaches to study persuasive storytelling and analyze its impact.

A PDF copy of this call for papers is available here: https://tinyurl.com/ica2020-storytelling-preconf

Submitting your abstract: Please submit abstracts for 15 minutes paper presentations through this Google Form (https://forms.gle/f5PBbd3KGd4NhdzR7) no later than January 20, 2020. Abstracts are limited to a maximum of 4,000 characters including spaces (approximately 500 words).

Contributors will be selected by peer-review and will be notified of decisions on or before February 1, 2020. Authors are expected to attend the preconference and present in person.

All participants must register. Registration costs will be 50 USD and include coffee breaks and buffet lunch. To register, participants should follow the instructions on: http://www.icahdq.org

Key dates:

• 20 January 2020: Deadline for abstract submission
• 1 February 2020: Corresponding authors notified of decisions
• 1 May 2020: Conference registrations close
• 20 May 2020: Pre-conference starts in Sydney

Location: Please note that this event will take place off-site at the Sydney Policy Lab, University of Sydney. The pre-conference will conclude at 5:00pm on May 20, leaving participants ample time to travel to Gold Coast for the opening of the main ICA conference in the evening of the following day (21 May).

5th Helsinki Photomedia Conference in 2020

April 16-18, 2020

Aalto University, Finland

Deadline: November 30, 2019

Submit here

The conference brings together international photography researchers, artists and practitioners. It offers various platforms where artistic, philosophical, social and technological approaches to photography can meet.

“Those who write and make images will have to become envisioners” (Vilém Flusser)

The theme “Images Among Us” refers to the roles of photographic images in a world that is vibrant, transitory and overcharged by affects. The contours and borders of media rearrange themselves in virtual and material environments in various platforms and social spaces. The flicker of their dividing lines becomes intermittently vague and distinct. In this dense historical assemblage, the photographic image itself has become disintegrated and embedded in different media.

Evidently, the present condition is difficult to access through our customary photographic categories and thinking. Photographic images are much more than familiar mediators between the world and ourselves. They have become simultaneously comforting and threatening. Photographic operations have become more and more elusive, with photography becoming less and less reducible to its myriad uses and capacities. However, enduring ontological questions on the essence, materiality and origins of photography have become more significant than ever. For example, photographs still possess traces of the evidential currency that has defined much of photography’s history.

Helsinki Photomedia 2020 invites alternative formulations, critical observations, artistic reflections and presentations of photography projects that react to the present photographic condition in various ways, seeking to instigate productive dialogues.

We invite you to address and challenge these concerns from the perspective of your practice, guided by the following intertwined subthemes:

Theme 1. Artistic Practices

What is the role of photographic art in the present media environment? How is the intimacy of singular imaging practices possible within contemporary visual abundance? How can artistic research contribute? Is the task of the artist to describe and understand or to critically engage? What documentary strategies and imaginary fictions have become most pressing?

Theme 2. Technologies & Cultures

The track technologies and cultures is particularly interested in the intertwinements between visual and material photographic practices. Exemplary questions include, but are not limited to: How are our understandings of photographic images altered by technologies, both “old” and “new”? What kinds of cultural effects do specific technologies have, and how in turn do particular cultures form what photographic technologies are understood to be? What is the relation of photographic technologies to various ecological concerns, to issues of privacy, or understandings of ethical use?

Theme 3. Critical Approaches

What does the concept of “critical” mean (or potentially mean) in the context of contemporary photography? What kinds of current critical photographic practices do we find in the realms of gender, migration, climate change, politics and media? How has the problem of critical practices been articulated in social and political theories of photography? How do the production of visual knowledge and critical practices relate to each other in the “post-truth” era?

Important dates

• 30.11.2019 – Deadline for submissions (500 word abstracts) by 23.59 Finnish time (UCT +2:00)
• Notification of Acceptance will be sent in December 2019
• 31.03 2019 – Deadline for conference registration
• 16-18.04.2020 – Conference at Aalto University