ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Lund University Sweden

Deadline: November 14, 2019

We invite applications for an associate senior lecturer position in our department at Lund University. This is a full time permanent position, aimed at candidates with a PhD and emerging track record as an international researcher in media and communication. We are looking for outstanding scholars who can help shape our strategic research areas, develop funding applications and contribute to our undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. The position comes with research time and mentoring in order to foster an international research and teaching portfolio.

Communication and Media at Lund University is in the top 100 (QS World University Rankings by subject 2018). Our research led teaching critically analyses the study of media, society and culture. Our aim is to broaden understanding of knowledge, power and social relations in national and transnational media environments. Strategic research areas include: media engagement, democracy and cultural citizenship; media industries and creativity; gender, health and society; audiences, popular culture and everyday life.

Projects are funded by organisations such as The Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, The Wallenberg Foundation, The Swedish Institute, and the EU. Our funded research and publications address political and cultural engagement, critical animal studies, media and migration, digital media and everyday life, media scandals, celebrities and cultural industries, mobile socialities, media audiences, urban creative collectives, and visual cultures. We are part of networks and collaborative projects in the Nordic countries, Europe and worldwide. Researchers work with public service and commercial media, policy and production sectors, and NGOs.

We offer teaching and learning at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels in Swedish and English. We are a diverse and interdisciplinary department that has a dynamic research environment with state and privately funded research projects, international publications and collaboration, and regular research seminars and conferences with world class scholars from around the world. Our graduates are working as teachers and researchers, within the public sector, and in the communications and creative industries.

There are two position aimed at candidates who can contribute to teaching and research in Swedish and English in the department. To find out more about the two positions, eligibility, and application process see these links:

English: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:294150/type:job/where:4/apply:1

Swedish: https://lu.varbi.com/what:job/jobID:292478/type:job/where:1/apply:1

Department of Journalism and Mass Communications, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Full-time faculty position, beginning Spring 2020 or Fall 2020.

Responsibilities may include teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Journalism and Mass Communications, conducting research, supervising theses, and participating in the development of department.

Salary is negotiable.

QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD or (MA/MSs from internationally established university) in the field of Journalism, Media or related discipline.
• Fluent English (all courses at the department are taught in English)
• A strong commitment to excellence in teaching
• University level teaching experience is preferred, experience in the industry is also desirable.

GENERAL INFORMATION

As one of AUCA’s oldest departments, JMC has been training and educating competent journalists and media professionals since 1997. We are a small core team of 3 full-time faculty enhanced by a dozen prominent practitioners holding part-time positions. Approximately 50 undergraduate and 10 graduate students major in the department. As a hub of democracy in the region, we focus our education on critical thinking combined with digital tools, such as investigative journalism, data journalism and multimedia. The department is committed to innovation in journalism education, including applied research and collaborations with the industry.

Additional information can be found at https://dss.auca.kg/bachelor-in-journalism-and-mass-communications/ and https://dss.auca.kg/master-in-journalism-and-mass-communications/

APPLICATION PROCEDURES

Please send your cover letter, CV, two Letters of Reference (scanned copies are acceptable) and unofficial transcripts from graduate school (official transcripts are required upon hiring) to the Office of Human Resources at hr@auca.kg, Prof. Lauren B. McConnell at mcconnell_l@auca.kg, and Program Director Anastasia Valeeva at valeeva_a@auca.kg. Applications are due by December 1, 2019. The expected starting date of employment is August 1st, 2020.

ABOUT AUCA

American University of Central Asia is an international, multi-disciplinary learning community in the American liberal arts tradition that develops enlightened and impassioned leaders for the democratic transformation of Central Asia. It is located in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic, and hosts about 1200 students from about 20 countries. Starting June 2011, in partnership with Bard College, AUCA awards US-accredited degrees. For more on AUCA, please visit our website at http://www.auca.kg.

Trípodos

Deadline: April 1, 2020

EDITORS: Guillermo López-García, Germán Llorca-Abad (Universitat de València, Spain)

Publication: December 2020

The rise of populist movements from different ideologies, often linked to Eurosceptical positions, coincides with a context of uncertainty in the European project. From a political perspective, public debate focuses on addressing the European Union project itself. Similarly, the institutional crisis within the EU, whose epicentre now focuses on Brexit, paralyses advances in integration policies. The political fragility of the Paris-Berlin axis, a slowdown in economic growth and the problems emerging from the mismanagement of migratory flows contribute to fostering nationalist, ethnocentric and rejectionist discourses. Taken as a whole, all these issues suggest the loss or decline of the EU’s capacity for advocacy in the context of globalisation.

With such a context, it would be appropriate to analyse whether the media and digital communication reflection of the discussions taking place contribute to its clarification or, on the contrary, increase tensions. The role of mediation and mediatisation of crucial messages is key when defining, firstly, their interdependence and, secondly, the extent of their influence on public opinion, the construction of collective imagination and the impact on electoral processes. Thus, the purpose of this special issue is to analyse the presence and dissemination of these discourses through social media, social networks and other digital communication spaces, as well as their impact on political discourse and electoral results.

Papers should be sent by April 1, 2020. 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.

Trípodos:

• Is indexed in SCOPUS and in Web of Science (WoS) - Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) database.
• Occupies the 6th position in 2018 REDIB Ranking of Ibero-American Journal Rankings in the category of Communication.
• - Is in category C of the CIRC classification (Integrated Classification of Scientific Journals).
• Is indexed, among others, in the following databases and catalogs: Ulrich’s periodicals directory, EBSCO Publishing, Communication Source, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), ERIH PLUS, ISOC, DICE, MIAR, Latindex, Dulcinea, REBID, Library of Congress, British Library, COPAC, SUDOC, ZDB, OCLC WorldCat, Dialnet, Carhus Plus+, RACO.
• Has an h5-index of 9 in Google Scholar Metrics (2012-2016) and an h5-median of 13

University of Texas

The School of Journalism at the University of Texas seeks a faculty member for a new position in Fall 2020. This is an open rank post for an individual to be hired as an Assistant tenure-track professor or an Associate or Full Professor.

The School, which offers a B.J., M.A., and Ph.D., is housed in the Belo Center for New Media. It is part of the top-ranked Moody College of Communication, which includes the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations and the Departments of Radio-Television-Film, Communication Studies, and Communication Science and Disorders.

This position is one in a four-person cluster hiring initiative focused on global media, disinformation and the Internet. The successful candidate will have expertise in the ways that new global media, including Internet-based platforms, create or enhance social and political vulnerabilities, strategies for remedying problems associated with disinformation worldwide, and how the connected world responds.

School of Journalism: https://journalism.utexas.edu/

Moody College of Communication: http://moody.utexas.edu/

Qualifications

Candidates should have teaching and research interests in the following areas: Transnational or global media systems, communication flows, and the evolving information setting plus at least one of the following:

(1) AI-driven media flows and circulation within the platform environment;

(2) user or audience processes involved in using online information;

(3) infrastructural developments (hardware and software, technologies, physical networks, etc.) among media industries that bear on matters of trust, choice, control and democracy;

(4) national and regional Internet and information policies and regulation bearing on disinformation systems.

Candidates must have a Ph.D. with a promising program of research and publication, a commitment to teaching, and interest in mentoring graduate students and undertaking collaborative research. We will consider a range of disciplinary, theoretical and methodological expertise.

Application Instructions

Interested applicants should submit a letter of interest, current curriculum vitae, a teaching statement, and the names of three individuals to contact for references. Confidential letters of recommendation will be requested of finalists.

Screening of applicants will begin immediately and will continue until November 15. Applications must be made via Interfolio's ByCommittee solution. If you do not have a Dossier account with Interfolio, you will be prompted to create one prior to applying for the position. If you have questions about using Interfolio, please email help@interfolio.com or call (877) 997-8807.

Questions can be directed to the chair of the search committee, Professor Sharon Strover at Sharon.strover@austin.utexas.edu.

About the Cluster Position:

The successful candidate for this position will be joining the UT Austin faculty as part of the Cluster and Interdisciplinary Hiring Initiative. This initiative is designed to supplement departmentally-based hiring practices and norms and extend collaborative research and scholarship. This new initiative is authorizing up to 40 new faculty hires whose interdisciplinary areas of knowledge cross the boundaries of existing academic departments. The selected candidate will be expected to actively participate as a core member of The Global Internet, Media and (Dis)Information Initiative.

Contributions to the cluster will be an important facet of the faculty member’s annual performance evaluations and consideration for promotion/tenure. Other hires for this cluster are in process with the School of Information and the Department of Middle East Studies and the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies.

The School of Journalism and the Moody College of Communication are committed to achieving diversity in its faculty, students, and curricula, and we welcome applicants who can help achieve these objectives. The University of Texas at Austin is a tobacco-free campus; for more information visit http://www.utexas.edu/tobaccofree/

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Political Discourse (MAPD)

June 25-26, 2020

University of Liverpool

Deadline: December 15, 2019

Following on from previous “Political Discourse - Multidisciplinary Approaches” conferences in London (2016) and Edinburgh (2018), we are pleased to announce MAPD 2020 (Multidisciplinary Approaches to Political Discourse) will take place in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool on 25-26 June 2020.

The global political arena is changing at an unprecedented pace. We see the resurgence of authoritarianism, nativism/nationalism, sovereignism, populism and far-right movements driving major changes across societies against the backdrop of increasing global inequalities, left/right fragmentation, migration. In addition, we witness power plays between well-established and emerging global players resulting in re-militarization and ‘trade wars’. Obvious manifestations of these turbulent times include phenomena such as Brexit; the rise of political actors like Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Salvini and discursive articulations around hate speech, incivility, Islamophobia and Euroscepticism.

At the same time, we see an increase in the mediatisation and (re)articulation of political discourses (both top-down and bottom-up) through the use of technology and digital platforms. Along with traditional broadcasting and reporting of politicians’ speeches, party political broadcasts, campaign advertisements and government statements, we increasingly experience the political daily in new popular media forms such as Facebook feeds, promotional videos, tweets and online mash ups. These transformations require us to think critically about issues of saturation, manipulation, relations of power, political correctness, interference, influence, counter-discourses, subversion, information bubbles and fake news, to name a few.

The theme for this year’s conference reflects our aim to bring together scholars from a variety of discursive and political approaches to critically examine the challenges we face in such a volatile landscape and the theoretical and analytical responses we can provide. We encourage contributions which explore any aspect of the conference theme of “responding to new challenges”. These may include (but are not limited to):

• The role of social media and/or popular culture in the production, distribution and consumption of political discourses
• New theoretical and analytical challenges to the analysis of legitimation processes in discourse
• The (dis)advantages of present approaches to political discourse (e.g. cognitive, historical, corpus-driven, interpretive policy analysis, cultural political economy, argumentation-based approaches, etc.)
• Mediatization of discourses of authoritarianism, nativism/nationalism, sovereignism, populism and far-right movements
• The politics of the environment, the body, etc.
• (Multimodal) counter-discourses; including the use of social media platforms and new formats such as memes as sites and means of protest, resistance and subversion of hegemonic discourse
• Metadiscourse about the state of public/political discourse and issues surrounding access/voice
• Theoretical challenges: How to address issues of saturation, manipulation, relations of power, interference, influence, information bubbles, fake news, and incivility of political discourse
• Case studies of new social/ political phenomena, top-down/bottom-up political actors and their discursive articulations

Keynote speakers

• Prof Kay O’Halloran (University of Liverpool)
• Prof Michał Krzyżanowski (Örebro University, Sweden)

The conference language is English.

We encourage single papers and theme specific panels

Papers will be allocated 20 minutes with 10 minutes for questions and discussion

Abstracts of 250-300 words (excluding bibliography) of single papers should be sent by email as a Word document attachment to MAPD2020@liverpool.ac.uk

Please include name, affiliation, email address and paper title in the body of the email.

Abstracts of panels (500 word maximum) must be submitted by the panel organiser(s) and should include a maximum of six contributions. Each panel paper must follow the criteria of the single papers outlined above.

Abstracts will be subject to review by an international scientific committee.

Deadlines:

• 15th December 2019: Deadline for submission of panel proposals and individual abstracts
• 31st January 2020: Notification of panels/papers acceptance. Please note that if a panel is not accepted panel papers will be considered individually

Queries about the conference and abstracts should be sent to the conference organisers, Franco Zappettini and Lyndon Way at MAPD2020@liverpool.ac.uk.

Conference Fees (including lunches and refreshments, but excluding conference dinner):

• Full fee: £ 200 - early bird (before 15 April 2020): £ 160
• Post graduates: £ 100 – early bird (before 15 April 2020): £80
• Single day fee: £ 150 – Post graduate Single Day fee: £60
• Conference Dinner: £ 40 (to be booked separately)

There will be reasonably priced accommodation available on campus

Organising Committee

• Ekaterina Balabanova, University of Liverpool, UK
• Sam Bennett, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland
• Massimiliano Demata, University of Turin, Italy
• John Richardson, Sunshine Coast University, Australia
• Laura Filardo Llamas, University of Valladolid, Spain
• Simona Guerra, University of Leicester, UK
• Christopher Hart, University of Lancaster, UK
• Darren Kelsey, University of Newcastle, UK
• Veronika Koller, University of Lancaster, UK
• Michael Kranert, University of Southampton, UK
• Marzia Maccaferri, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
• Douglas Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
• Melani Schroeter, University of Reading, UK

Lusofona University, Lisbon

Deadline: November 11, 2019

Lusofona University, through it's R&D Unit CICANT, hereby opens a competition to recruit a PhD researcher, corresponding to position 49 of the Single Remuneration Table, under the terms of the applicable legislation, with an Open-Ended Employment Contract, within the scope of programme contract between Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P., and the above mentioned University, supported by national funds inscribed in the budget of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) – and carried out in the Research Unit CICANT – Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies.

1 – Main Duties

CICANT – Centre or Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies aims to recruit a Coordinating Researcher for its “Media, Society and Culture” area. The work plan to be carried out aims to:

• Contribute to the implementation of ongoing projects in the unit in the field of media;
• Foster publication in reference journals in the field of the results of the research;
• Foster the creation and reinforcement of a R&D team in the area of media and culture studies;
• Foster the integration of the unit in national and international forums of the field;
• Foster links and joint projects with different public and private entities operating in this field;
• Foster the organization of scientific events which contribute to the increased awareness of the unit in this field and to knowledge sharing and creation.
• Ensure a new impetus for the area as well as its international development fostering, namely and in line with the unit’s strategic plan, the supervision of within the scope of the European programme H2020.

The goal is to recruit a researcher with an excellent publication rate and management of projects in this field of communication studies, with proven experience in leadership and management, in particular at international level.

Keywords: Media Literacy; Media Technologies; Society and Communication

Read more: https://cicant.ulusofona.pt/careers/

Conjunctions. Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation

Article deadline: March 15, 2020

Patterns of cultural participation have been the focus of policy research for decades. Particularly since the millennium, quantitative data, often collected by governments, has established the notion of ‘non-participation’ as a ‘problem’ that the state needs to address (Balling and Kann-Christensen, 2013; Jancovich 2015 Stevenson, 2013, Stevenson et al., 2015). Yet despite decades of policies and projects to address this and a growing body of research, carried out by consultants and academics, celebrating the success of such interventions in addressing social inclusion and increasing personal wellbeing, the same ‘problem’ appears to remain in regard to the diversity of people who engage with state supported cultural organisations and activities (Warwick Commission, 2015). It has even been claimed that Europe is becoming it is becoming a “less cultural continent” (European Commission, 2013).

The way in which many projects, organisation and artists are funded and evaluated, combined with the state of financial precarity in which a large number permanently function, means that stories of failure about how cultural participation policies and projects have been enacted are largely overlooked and even supressed in the dominant discourses of cultural policy. This limits and reduces the capacity for “social learning” (May 1992) which may better facilitate change. Without an honest acknowledgement and critically reflective exploration into the nature and extent of failure present in the existing projects and policies by which cultural participation is supposedly supported, then the legitimacy of the status quo will remain difficult to challenge.

This special edition of Conjuctions invites contributions that explore the role and place of failure in regard to cultural participation. We invite empirical, theoretical and practice informed contributions from across a range of disciplines. Topics may include, but need not be confined to, the following:

• The value and role of recognising, understanding and learning from failure for cultural policymaking OR for cultural objects, artefacts and activities
• Defining and recognising failure in cultural participation projects/policies
• Cases studies of failure in cultural participation projects/policies
• The politics of failure in cultural participation projects/policies
• The morality and ethics of failure in regard to cultural participation projects/policies
• Evaluating and reporting on failure
• The relationship between quality and failure in delivering cultural projects
• Framing failure in evaluations
• Discourses of failure and success in cultural policy/cultural practice

Articles should be between 6000-8000 words, including endnotes, captions and headings. All articles will undergo blind peer review for final selection in the special edition

Any questions related to this special edition can be sent to the guest editors:

• Dr Leila Jancovich: l.jancovich@leeds.ac.uk
• Dr David Stevenson: dstevenson@qmu.ac.uk

Submissions can be made at: https://tidsskrift.dk/tcp/index

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2020

June 4-5, 2020

Athens, Greece

Deadline: (extended) October 30, 2019

A Two-day Symposium

Department of Communication and Media Studies, School of Economics and Political Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) and Information, Communication & Society (iCS).

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ics2020conference/home

The development of young people’s identities and sense of selfhood is widely recognized as being a social activity undertaken through interaction and feedback with significant others. Advancing beyond earlier top-down models of socialization, whereby parents and teachers were largely seen as responsible for transmitting stable cultural norms, knowledge, political attitudes, religious beliefs and social practices to young people, contemporary understanding has instead foregrounded the active, dynamic, co-construction of young selves. Such approaches have not only drawn attention to the active engagement of young people in shaping their own identities but has also emphasized the wider social, political, economic, cultural contexts that frame the possibilities for the interactive realization of personhood. Most profoundly, and the focus of this international symposium, for the current generation of young people, the active construction of self is significantly mediated by and through a digital media ecology of communications networks, algorithms and platforms. These emergent networked environments have led to celebrations about the potential to enhance the development of young selves through wider access to knowledge, cultures, beliefs, identities and the opportunities to perform such self-formation through online interaction with diverse others. But it has also produced moral panics for those concerned about the perceived negative effects of digital media, such as attention deficit, the break-down of authority, dumbing down of education, infantilizing politics, and the weakening of traditional family ties.

Premised upon a notion of youth as a social construction, as well as upon its permeability, and taking into account how young people - whether as young children, tweens, teenagers, or late twentysomething, whether in the West or outside of it- are growing up with significant access to globalized media and transmedia platforms and narratives, this two-day international symposium will critically investigate the issues presented by the construction of young selves within the contemporary digital media ecology. With the aim to grasp the complexity and diversity of most young people’s experiences and practices with online technologies, we invite original research findings and theoretical analysis addressing (though not exclusively) such questions as:

• What role for young people do traditional markers of identity such as social class, religion, family, or geography play in online group interaction?

• As increasingly more young people find themselves geographically dispersed and living transitional lives in immigrant communities or in refugee camps, what kind of possibilities for connectedness, dialogue and identity-making online technologies have to offer?

• What value are social media platforms for gay, transgender, queer, atheist, or differently abled young people as spaces for socialization?

• How much are young people’s political norms and engagement practices facilitated by digital communication?

• How does everyday online engagement affect interaction between young people and significant others such parents, teachers and other traditional ‘authority’ figures?

• Does social networking influence learning practices, competencies or curriculum design?

• What are young people’s attitudes and actual use of digital media in everyday life?

• How should we assess the significance of celebrity culture for young people’s development of self?

• Are young people more likely to develop a transnational outlook as a consequence of the digital media ecology?

KEY DATES

We invite 400-word abstracts outlining empirical, theoretical or policy-orientated papers that address these or related questions.

Abstracts should be accompanied by a 100-word biography of the presenter(s) together with contact details, all sent to Assoc. Prof. Liza Tsaliki at icsathens2020@gmail.com

Abstract submission by 30 October 2019

Notification of decision: 15 December 2019.

A selection of papers presented at the symposium will be published in a special issue of the international Journal Information, Communication & Society (iCS).

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Sonia Livingstone, Professor. DPhil, FBA, FBPS, FRSA, OBE London School of Economics and Political Science
• Mary Celeste Kearney, Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre Director, GeNDer Studies Program University of Notre Dame

Conference Organizers:

• Liza Tsaliki, Department of Communication and Media Studies, NKUA
• Dan Mercea, Department of Media, City University London
• Brian Loader, Editor-in-Chief iCS.

Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg

Deadline: November 18, 2019

Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) invites applications for an Open Topic Tenure Track Professorship Future of Work (W1 / Assistant Professor).

The W1 professorship will focus on the area of communications science, specialising in the area of quantitative social sciences. We would especially welcome specialisation in the use and effects of digital media, social media, online research or corporate communication.

The W1 professorship is to be filled by the earliest possible starting date for an initial period of three years. Upon successful evaluation, the appointment will be extended for another three years. FAU offers the long-term perspective of a permanent appointment to a W2 or W3 professorship if the requirements of the tenure evaluation are met.

Please submit your complete application documents online at https://berufungen.fau.de by 18 November 2019, addressed to the Dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics, and Law.

For more information, please visit: https://www.fau.eu/university/careers-at-fau/professorships/

April 15-18, 2020

Philadelphia, USA

Deadline: November 1, 2019

The Science & Popular Culture Area of the PCA/ACA welcomes papers, panels, and round tables for the upcoming conference.

With the integral place of science in Western and global society as well as theproliferation of science and technology across all media, it is more important than ever to examine what popular culture tells us about science. Studying science in popular culture is essential to understanding how scientific ideas are utilized, explored, critiqued and sometimes exploited outside of their formal contexts and how popular audiences understand science. Popular fascination with science has even created a cultural niche of its own, giving rise to new engagements with scientific knowledge, practice, and technologies. Together with the /Journal of Science & Popular Culture/, this conference area seeks to inspire and promote new investigations into the interrelationship of science and society.

Proposals should be 100-250 words in length. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Representations of science/scientists in television, film, art, print, and other media
• The cultural influence of science/ influences of culture on science and scientists
• Use of popular culture texts (novels, films, television series, etc.) to argue for or against scientific theories such as evolution and climate change
• Internet culture and science
• Science-related cultural artefacts
• Scientists as celebrities / celebrity advocates of science
• Science communication, popularization and education
• Non-Western cultures and Science
• Intersections of science and the humanities
• Use of science in advertising and marketing
• Science fiction / science and fiction
• The artistic dimensions of science / science as art
• Critical examinations of scientifically framed popular beliefs and pseudoscience
• Science denial and science in a ‘Post-Truth’ world
• Public and popular dimensions of scientific debate
• Moments of conflict between scientific discoveries/knowledge/work andculture

Submission are open 1 August – 1 November 2019

To submit a paper: http://pcaaca.org/national-conference/proposing-a-presentation-at-the-conference/