ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

University of Fribourg (Switzerland)

Deadline: April 1, 2019

The Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) in Communication Studies. The position is with the Department of Communication and Media Research DCM. The appointment begins in early 2020 and is limited to five years. In case of a positive tenure evaluation, the assistant professor will be promoted to a permanent full professorship.

Candidates may either focus on societal (macro-level) or on individual (micro-level) issues of communication and media research from a social scientific perspective. The former includes but is not limited to research fields like journalism research, democracy, political communication and the public sphere; cultural and media industries and economics; media systems; and/or media policy and regulation. The latter includes but is not limited to research fields like media reception, use, and effects; audience research; and/or media content and performance. Regardless of a candidate’s field of specialization, they should show an interest in the implications of the digital transformation of communication and media.

Candidates must have completed a Ph.D. in communication studies or a related discipline. In order to promote up-and-coming researchers, the university especially invites scholars younger than 35-40 to apply. Candidates should have demonstrated research ability, a publication record appropriate for early career scholars as well as the potential for publishing in quality journals and for attracting externally funded research. Moreover, they should be committed to teaching excellence, have some professional international experience, and have sound skills in (quantitative and/or qualitative) social scientific research methods.

The teaching load is 4 to 6 hours per week and includes courses in the French-language Bachelor program “Sciences de la communication et des medias” as well as in the bilingual French/English Master program “Business Communication”.

Candidates should have high command of both French and English. Administrative languages at the University of Fribourg are German and French. Thus, a passive knowledge of German is expected in the medium term. The salary is competitive. The University of Fribourg provides equal opportunities for women and men and aims at achieving gender balance.

Candidates should send their complete application in a single PDF file that includes

• a cover letter describing their motivation and qualification for the position;
• a CV including lists of publications, presentations, teaching experience, research grants, and academic service;
• teaching evaluations (if available);
• a one-page statement of research interests and a one-page statement of teaching philosophy;
• the names of three professional references

to the dean’s office (decanat-ses@unifr.ch) and to Mrs. Anne-Marie Carrel, administration secretary at the DCM (anne-marie.carrel@unifr.ch), until April 1, 2019.

The School of Media, Communication, and Sociology at the University of Leicester

University welcomes applications to its interdisciplinary Master’s programme in Media, Gender, and Social Justice. The first of its kind in the UK, this one-year programme offers students the opportunity to critically examine and practically apply theories, concepts, and approaches related to the use of media and communication for addressing inequalities and engaging in social justice work.

This MA is offered by one of the UK’s leading centres for research and teaching in media, communication, and sociology. In addition to offering the expertise of over 50 members of staff in areas related to media, inclusion, politics, and development, we collaborate with colleagues in Criminology, Business, History, Politics, and International Relations to offer students a wide range of courses related to social justice and possibilities for supervision in these complementary subject areas.

The University of Leicester is ideally located in the East Midlands, a well-networked and exciting hub of social, artistic, and political activism. Leicester is widely-known as a welcoming, diverse city, and the University is a socially inclusive institution that celebrates research-led teaching.

Entry Requirements

Students must have a 2:1 degree or equivalent professional qualification. We may consider relevant voluntary/work experience in grassroots, public, private or NGO sectors related to social justice internationally.

Additional information about the programme and application procedures can be found here: https://le.ac.uk/courses/media-gender-and-social-justice-ma

Ramon Lobato

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture.

Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging—including Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service.

Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age.

Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution.

Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

April 10-12, 2019

University of Seville

IV International Congress of Communication and Reflection: The Emergent Communication

Deadline: March 11, 2019

This panel at the IV International Congress of Communication and Reflection conference seeks to reflect about the power of the audience as a producer and diffuser of content in media. We invite you to contribute with reflections about experiences with audiences related with the transformation of the cultural industry, the future of television and the risks and opportunities in the relationships with the spectators. As a matter of fact, the suggested discussion topics of this panel are:

• New ways of consuming media
• New television formats adapted into a visual environment
• Transmedia audiences
• Strategies of the television format with interactive users
• Impact factors of social audience in the audiovisual industry
• The role of the new interactive user and its enrollment in the process of production, distribution and consumption
• The impact in social media of traditional audiences.The measurement of the social audience
• Risks and opportunities of the new content consumption
• Active audiences in radio
• Active audiences in press

To participate as a speaker you must sign up in this adress.

Besides, we remind the assistants that the paper proposals might be included as book chapter. Participants will be able to defend their presentation through video conference or Skype. English papers and presentations are also accepted.

Edited by: Mette Mortensen, Christina Neumayer, Thomas Poell

Far from being neutral, social media platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and WeChat – possess their own material characteristics, which shape how people engage, protest, resist, and struggle. This innovative collection advances the notion of social media materialities to draw attention to the ways in which the wires and silicon, data streams and algorithms, user and programming interfaces, business models and terms of service steer contentious practices and, inversely, how technologies and economic models are handled and performed by users. The key question is how the tension between social media’s techno-commercial infrastructures and activist agency plays out in protest. Addressing this, the volume goes beyond singular empirical examples and focuses on the characteristics of protest and social media materialities, offering further conceptualizations and guidance for this emerging field of research. The various contributions explore a wide variety of activist projects, protests, and regions, ranging from Occupy in the USA to environmental protests in China, and from the Mexican Barrio Nómada to the Copenhagen-based activist television channel TV Stop (1987–2005).

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University of Münster

Deadline: April 14, 2019

The Department of Communication (IfK) at the University of Münster seeks to fill two positions, commencing on 1 October 2019 (or as agreed upon):

• Post Doc position (Akademische Rätin/ Akademischer Rat auf Zeit) (f/m/d) (100 %): https://www.uni-muenster.de/Rektorat/Stellen/ausschreibungen/st_20192002_tb2.html
• PhD Student/ Research Assistant (f/m/d): https://www.uni-muenster.de/Rektorat/Stellen/ausschreibungen/st_20192002_tb2.html

The positions are part of Prof. Dr. Julia Metag’s team. Research and teaching of the team focuses on political communication, science communication and implications of media change and digitalization for these fields. Deadline for applications is April 14, 2019. For further information about the positions, please contact Prof. Dr. Julia Metag: julia.metag@unifr.ch

Ulster University, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Communication and Media

Deadline: March 29, 2019

£51,660-£59,862

Ulster University (Belfast) would like to appoint a Senior Lecturer in Screen Production to lead in the development and delivery of screen production programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and contribute to an outstanding student experience in preparation for industry relevant specialisation and progression into professional life. The ideal candidate would also contribute to the school’s research outputs and environment in Panel 34 in Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management.

Ulster prides itself on its award winning, industry engaged and research led teaching in media. With the launch of the Creative Industries Institute, and the recent success of the AHRC Funded Future Screens NI project, Ulster has confirmed its position as a sector leader within the broadly defined creative industries. As part of the newly formed Ulster Screen Academy, the School of Communication and Media seeks to expand undergraduate and postgraduate provision in both traditional and emerging screen production.

This post offers an exciting opportunity to lead the development of new curriculum that brings together academic scholarship, creative practice and professional skills development. The successful candidate will lead the new degree in Screen Production, and work alongside internationally recognized researchers to design and deliver a screen production curriculum which focuses on television production but also stretches across platforms and addresses both traditional storytelling and narratives for emerging televisual platforms. In particular, they will be teaching professional industry-level practice in broadcasting within various environments – e.g. outside broadcasting, TV studio production, and live television. A strong industrial background is essential.

Closing Date: March 29, 2019

For more information on the post please visit the website

On April 14-15, 2019

European Humanities Universtiry (EHU), Vilnius

Deadline: March 15, 2019

The event is organized by Games & Scholars (Vilnius) in partnership with the Laboratory for Computer Games at the Research Center for Mediaphilosophy (Saint Petersburg) and the Laboratory of Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art (European Humanities University, Vilnius). The conference became possible thanks to support from the EHU Department of Social Sciences.

The conference is a 2 day event aimed at students and young scholars of media studies, cultural studies and other areas of humanities and social sciences. The conference invites game researchers, critics and designers to talk about violence in games on a higher conceptual level than the usual media discourse.

We invite you to discuss the following topics and cases:

• The game is broken: glitch in media studies,
• Difficulty level: impossible (tortureware, exploitationware, masocore games),
• Gamer theory: violent games vs. real world oppression,
• The good, the bad and the ugly: provocative aesthetics of indie games,
• Horror and the non-human: the violent Other,
• Exploitative game design and its moral implications, and other related topics.

We are particularly interested in cases when the game takes the initiative from players and makes them do, see or feel things they would not consent to in a different context. Violence, in this case, is understood as an uncontrollable disruption of the player’s experience. The simplest example, as mundane as it could be, is Flappy Bird, which wobbly controls reportedly made its players smash their phones. That Dragon, Cancer is a more elaborate example of gameplay violence: game’s deceptive affordances frustrate the player in dramatic situations when manipulations with available objects do not produce any results. On the storyline level, disturbing and baffling Doki Doki Literature Club is a violently subversive example. Finally, visual violence comes in many forms in video games, from hyperrealistic gore in horror games to the intricate art of glitch. In the latter case, the game as an automated medium goes rogue and accidentally creates situations which the human practice fails to control.

The question is: why does the game go on, even if it abuses the player? And even deeper: how violence in games produce the epistemological rupture in the playing process? What analytical perspectives can we apply to such cases? Who is being violent, and why? Is it media technology at large, or should we look for violence in the player’s gaze? How can we compare the horror of video games to the horror of other media (to say nothing about horrors of the real world and human existence in general)? May we suggest that all games are violent when they punish players for not following their rules? We will discuss this, and similar questions, after the talks and during panel discussions.

Submission for abstracts will be open on February 19, 2019, via an online form.

Registration will be closed on March 15 for those participants who need a visa to travel to Lithuania. The deadline may be extended until March 31 for those participants who don’t need a visa to travel to Lithuania. The registration form is available online.

The final decision about the program and submitted talk will be made before April 1, and the authors of all submissions will be notified about the result of reviewing process.

The organizers provide visa support and discount prices on accommodation to the accepted speakers who submitted before March 15 and need help with finding accommodation.

Articles based on presentations at the conference will be recommended for publication in the game studies issue of the EHU academic journal Crossroads. The Crossroads is included into EBSCO-CEEAS (Central & Eastern European Academic Source) and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

If you have any questions, please address them to games.and.scholars@gmail.com.

Nordic Production Studies

Deadline: March 31, 2019

Guest editors: Sarah Atkinson (Kings College London), Olof Hedling (Lund University), Mette Hjort (Hong Kong Baptist University) and Pietari Kaapa (University of Warwick).

Production studies has emerged as a vibrant field in contemporary media studies. The work of John Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Toby Miller and Mette Hjort has contributed to developing conceptual and theoretical approaches to the field, working simultaneously on both global and local levels of policy and production management. This work paves the way for a media studies that addresses the internal machinations of an industry often exhibiting egalitarian and liberal values on a textual level while the reality of working conditions tends to diverge considerably from these optimistic projections. While there have been studies of above-, across- and below-the-line labour in the Nordic media industries, these tend to be focused on communicating with highly specialized interest groups (journalists, regulators, film producers, social media marketers, etc.). A much more ‘convergent’ approach to the labour of professionals in the Nordic media industries is clearly required as boundaries between roles and levels of professional specialization are increasingly blurring.

Journal of Scandinavian Cinema has prioritized this emerging field for an upcoming special issue focused on the Nordic creative/media industries. The Nordic countries, especially, pose highly complex challenges for production studies as they continue to be predicated on significant levels of public funding and strict but egalitarian labour regulations. The roles of private capital, competition with imported products, the challenges of digital platforms, as well as an inherently limited scope of the domestic markets of all five countries, translate into a complex media environment where production labour and the constitution of professional roles is constantly revised, or indeed, precarious, as Curtin and Sanson (2015) would argue – this, despite the fact that these countries are often promoted as exhibiting some of the more stable and sustainable societal infrastructures globally. This, in turn, provides the issue with a unique angle on production studies in that it highlights the cultural constitution of Nordic production management, labour conditions, cultural policy and, even, the ability to evaluate how these dynamics are eventually reflected in screen content.

The issue encourages submissions on the following themes and also welcomes work outside/combining these areas:

• The role of film institutes
• The centrality of public broadcasting infrastructure in Nordic media environments
• Welfare politics (egalitarian opportunities and educational incentives)
• Gender politics and labour management (Bechdel test and Sweden; rejection of quotas and Denmark)
• ‘Me Too’ and institutional change
• The role of regional film funds
• Film consultants as stakeholders and tastemakers
• The comparative lack of tax incentives in the Nordic countries
• The role of producers in a publically aided production environment
• Film schools and professionalization of media labour
• Digital platforms and DIY attitudes
• Crowdfunding and other prosumer tactics
• Vimeo and ‘unprofessional’ media
• Labour laws and unionization
• Specific technical roles (ie. score composer, line manager, caterer, VFX artist, etc.)
• Diversity (the consolidation of minority cultures professionals – the Sami etc.)

Timeline for contributions:

• Proposals of 500 words maximum – 31 March 2019
• Full article submission (8000 words maximum) – 30 October 2019

All contributions will undergo double-blind peer review with publication planned for July 2020.

Please email the editors to discuss potential contributions (sarah.atkinson@kcl.ac.uk; olof.hedling@litt.lu.se; mettehjort@hkbu.edu.hk, P.Kaapa@warwick.ac.uk).

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Deadline: March 10, 2019

The UOC Research and Innovation Committee has agreed to publish a call for applications for six places for three-year postdoctoral research fellowships. The positions are open to postdoctoral teaching and research staff in any of the fields of study at the University and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). The deadline for applications, as indicated in the terms and conditions, is 10 March.

Researchers awarded a doctoral degree – whether at the UOC or elsewhere – before publication of this call for applications may apply. Candidates with a doctoral degree from the UOC must provide proof of having carried out a postdoctoral stay at another university or research centre for a period of at least two years.

Those benefiting from these contracts cannot have been contracted by the UOC in the two years immediately leading up to the publication of this call for applications.

The decision regarding this call will be made public on or after 8 April. Candidates must send the application forms to preaward_osrt@uoc.edu.

Call here