ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

The Department of Communications and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University is seeking to hire a tenure-eligible Associate Professor of Digital Strategies for Fall 2019. The individual filling this position will play a leadership role in shaping the department’s growing public relations concentration, supervise graduate students on digital strategic communications projects and research, and will serve as the founding executive director of a student-led digital services firm that designs and implements multimedia campaigns for real-world clients.

We are seeking a scholar-practitioner with strong commitments to entrepreneurial research, community-engaged research, service learning, and enhancing diversity. The ideal candidate will have worked in digital strategic communications, audience cultivation and engagement via social media, public relations, crisis communications, or user experience design both in and outside of academia, for either private, public, non-profit or grassroots organizations, and maintains an active research agenda in one or more of those areas. The successful candidate will have a demonstrable commitment to promoting and enhancing diversity. The candidate should possess strong networking and stakeholder cultivation skills, and possess the ability to develop interdisciplinary partnerships with other communication-related academic disciplines.

The candidate must hold a Ph.D. in Communications, Digital Media Studies, Public Relations, or a related field. They must have a research portfolio and track record worthy of tenure and the rank of Associate Professor at a Carnegie-designated High Research Activity institution.

They must have a minimum of 5 years teaching experience at the University level (with experience teaching both undergraduate and graduate students strongly preferred).

We are interested in candidates whose research interests also intersect with qualitative research methods, organizational communications, media industries studies, platform studies, health or science communications. Grant writing skills would be a valuable asset. Digital campaign management experience is also an asset.

To be considered for the position, applicants must provide a letter outlining their experience and interest in the position, a CV, a writing sample, an example of a digital strategic communications project/campaign they have worked on, and a list of three references.

References will not be contacted until the campus visit stage of the interview process. Evaluation of applicant packets will commence January 15, 2019 and continue until the position is filled. Interested applicants can do so at: http://jobs.odu.edu/postings/8839

For questions, please contact the search committee chair, Dr. Fran Hassencahl, at fhassenc@odu.edu or department chair, Avi Santo at asanto@odu.edu

Old Dominion University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution. Minorities, women, veterans and individuals with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.

The publication aims to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area of child rights and the media in Africa. It will examine media roles, challenges, theories, and strategies to ensuring the realisation of the rights of the child.

Recommended Topics include but not limited to:

• Theoretical and basis of media for child rights in Africa
  
• Child rights and print media in Africa
  
• Broadcast media and child rights in Africa
  
• Media, social mobilisation for child rights in Africa
  
• Child rights and media corporate social responsibility
  
• Pattern of media coverage for child rights in Africa
  
• Media narratives of child rights in Africa
  
• Media and child abuse in Africa
  
• Constraints to media for child rights promotion in Africa
  
• Media impact on child rights in Africa
  
• Media and childhood education in Africa
  
• Audience perception child rights media campaign
  
• Media ethics and child rights coverage
  
• Media, child rights and sustainable development goals
  
• Media studies and child rights in Africa
  
• Indigenous language media and child rights in Africa
  
• New and social media and child rights in Africa
  

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before January 24, 2019, a chapter proposal of 1,000 to 2,000 words clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors will be notified by February 23, 2019 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by April 5, 2019, and all interested authors must consult the guidelines for manuscript submissions at http://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/ prior to submission.

Note

There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book publication. All proposals should be submitted through the eEditorial Discovery®TM online submission manager. Use the link below to access and click on Propose a Chapter.

Abstracting and Indexing: Clarivate Analytics, Scopus, Inspec, PsycINFO, Compendex

Publisher: This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global and it is anticipated to be released in 2019.

https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/3682

The American University of Beirut (Lebanon)

6th - 7th September 2019

Abstract deadline: 15th March 2019

Organisers: Prof Kari Anden-Papadopoulos (Stockholm University) and Dr. Dima Saber (Birmingham City University) in collaboration with Dr May Farah (The American University of Beirut)

This two-day conference entitled ‘Archiving Dissent: Post-2011 Arab imagery, memory and vernacular representations of conflict’ aims at exploring the mounting challenges but also opportunities posed by the ever-expanding collections of crowdsourced digital content documenting eight years of revolution and struggles in the Arab region. It brings together academics, activists, lawyers, archivists and artists from the MENA and beyond, to map out existing documentation of the 2011 revolts in both online and offline forms, and to think critically and strategically about issues such as preservation, use, value, access, ownership and control.

With the democratisation of image production and dissemination, the lack of documentation of pivotal events, including human rights violations and war crimes, is no longera primary issue. Rather, main challenges are capturing and preserving the overwhelming proliferation of digital imagery coming out of the Arab uprisings, along with ensuring the integrity, reliability and accessibility of such records. In a context of increasingly contested narratives, when the revolutionary moment has slipped into civil wars, violence andthe return to emboldened oppression, these vernaculararchives become ever-more valuable as grounds for efforts to bring about ‘truth’and ‘justice’. As such, eyewitness recordings play a critical role not only in documentingadvocacy efforts, but increasingly also in ensuring the preservation of a crowd-sourced historical knowledge and memory of war

and revolution, the protection ofrights, and the potential prosecution of atrocity and war crimes.

Another urgent issue is also the over-reliance of grassroot image producers on Facebook, YouTube and other corporate tech platforms to distribute and archive their footage. It is critical to observe that these hyper-commercial platforms are not designed to facilitate activism, and that preservation is neither a purpose nor a practice of theirs. Indeed, tech platforms have increasingly taken on the responsibility of policing their user content and activity, through, for example, systematically removing content and channels deemed ‘offensive’. Alarming figures now reveal that YouTube has removed more than 400 000 Syria-related videos since August 2017, when it started using machine-learning to flag and mass delete so-called ‘extremist’ content, with a total lack of transparency regarding its newly developed content moderation algorithm.

These disputable takedowns, which put at risk the entire audiovisual history of the Syrian war, reinforce existing rising concerns about the precariousness of the digital and the costs of the activists and archivists’ over-reliance on platforms they have little to no agency over. In addition, there are also increasing challenges posed by the corrupt melding of state and commercial forms of surveillance and data exploitation on these platforms, in contexts such as Egypt, Palestine and Turkey more regionally, bringing issues of user privacy and security to the fore.

This conference provides a forum in which scholars and practitioners collaborate to address the challenges - representational, political, ethical, technical, organizational and financial - that preserving the post-2011 Arab image archives present for both present and future representations of conflict and revolt in the region.

Participants are invited to address topics including, but not limited to:

• (Innovative) strategiesand open-access tools and infrastructures for archiving, processing, preserving and disseminatingpost-2011 Arab image records
  
• Historical precedents for both documentation and archiving practices in the MENA region
  
• Key challenges and opportunities that crowd-sourced content offer for a constitution of a digital memory of post-2011 wars and revolutions in the MENA region (we particularly welcome here contributions from historians, memory studies and archival studies scholars and practitioners)
  
• Learnings from regional and international/global protest movements such as Gezi Park, #metoo and #Blacklivesmatter campaigns, that could benefit activists and archivists in the MENA
  
• Ethical considerations regarding the roles and rights of image creators themselves, notably in terms of considering issues of ownership, consent, harm, vulnerability, subjectivity and objectification, security, agency and responsibility.
  
• Key challenges in terms of funding, selection, metadata, policy, quality, access, and strategic uses entailed in such archiving efforts
  
• Strategies for mapping and securing non-governmental and regionally-based efforts to build infrastructures that allow for the collection,preservation and distribution ofthese materials
  
• How to protect image records from being destroyedand insure the sustainability of the archives even when they are available in both online and offline forms
  
• Issues of power, ownership and control
  

The organisers welcome proposals for 20 minute academic papers and panels, and/or project-based presentations.

Please send 250-words abstracts, with a 50-word biography to: resistancebyrecording@gmail.com

Journal: /JOMEC Journal/ (Cardiff University Press)

Deadline for Articles: 20th June 2019

Publication Date: December 2019

This issue of /JOMEC Journal/ seeks focused cultural and media studies articles on advertising and China. (The word ‘and’ in the phrase ‘Advertising and China’ includes meanings such as ‘in, on, using, involving’, etc.) This special themed issue will be called ‘Advertising China’ and the editors seek articles that engage with topics such as (but not limited to) the following:

• advertising in China
  
• the use of China and Chinese imagery in advertising
  
• comparative studies of advertising involving China and other national geographical and cultural regions
  
• differences and similarities in advertising across cultures
  
• issues in gender, ethnicity, cultural value
  

The editors are particularly interested in works that contribute theoretically, methodologically and/or analytically to our understanding of the place of advertising in culture and society, with specific reference to China and/or the status of Chinese imagery in other cultural contexts.

The journal homepage is here: https://jomec.cardiffuniversitypress.org/

Submission guidelines are here: https://jomec.cardiffuniversitypress.org/about/submissions/

Enquiries can be made in the first instance to Professor Paul Bowman: BowmanP@cardiff.ac.uk 

Lund University is seeking to hire two doctoral students for a full time PhD scholarship in the area of media and communication studies. The scholarships cover fees and living expenses for four years and are available for home, EU and international students undertaking research in the areas of media and communication and linked to the research strategy of the department.

Media and Communication research at Lund University focuses on the study of media, society and culture. Our research addresses media and communication structures and processes in modern life. 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. Researchers in our department specialize in 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 offer teaching and learning at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels in Swedish and English. Our department 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.

Please see the link below for the application process, criteria for applicants, and deadline of 31st January. For further information email Annette Hill, annette.hill@kom.lu.se

More here 

Special Issue on Media and Communication in Development and Social Change: A Tribute to Joseph Ascroft (Volume 29, No. 02, December 2019)

Guest Editor: Dr. Srinivas Melkote, Professor, School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green, State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403, USA

Development communication, as an area of scholarship and practice, has been engaged in finding a niche for media and communication in the efforts to tackle the problems of underdevelopment and marginalization of people and communities worldwide. What should be the mission of the field of development communication in critical social change? What are the different ways in which media and communication have been used in projects tailored to specific development outcomes? What are the lessons learnt?

This special issue of Asia Pacific Media Educator will be dedicated to the memory of Prof. Joseph Ascroft, University of Iowa, USA, an early pioneer in the use of media and communication as a support for development. Submissions are welcome from media professionals, scholars, and educators from all regions within the context of social change and development. Selected papers will attempt any of these objectives: document, study, analyze, construct, and deconstruct the role and place of development communication and media scholarship in the process of directed social change.

The submission guidelines are here:  https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/asia-pacific-media-educator#submission-guidelines

Please submit 250-word abstract to the Guest Editor at: melkote@bgsu.edu by January 31, 2019.

Submission deadline of complete paper for peer review: April 30, 2019.

Manuscripts and all editorial correspondence should be addressed to the journal administrator at https://peerreview.sagepub.com/ame

Friday 10th May 2019

University of Nottingham (UK)

Abstract Submission Deadline: Friday 15th February 2019

A one-day conference hosted by the Digital Culture Research Network, and supported by the Midlands3Cities DTP (M3C) Cohort Development Fund

This year’s theme of "ACCESS" seeks to respond to the continued ways in which digital technologies are profoundly impacting social, cultural, and institutional interactions with content, data, and platforms. Rapidly changing modes of knowledge and value production, means of accessibility, and concerns around privacy and censorship have given rise to increased scrutiny of the current digital landscape and our interactions with(in) it.

Submission

For this one-day conference we invite researchers, particularly early-career researchers, from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to present theoretical and empirical research related, but not limited, to the following topics:

• Access to data, platforms, and (digital) environments, and resulting issues of inclusion/exclusion
  
• Algorithmic forms of governmentality and their impact on (in)equality
  
• Uses and users of digital platforms
  
• Approaches to disability in digital contexts
  
• Methodological challenges for studying digital phenomena and the
  
• question of research ethics
  
• World-making capacities of digital cultures
  
• Internet censorship and the decentralized web initiatives
  
• Artistic, philosophical, and activist approaches to participation in digital cultures
  
• Digital implications on and of language and translation
  

To encourage proposals from doctoral researchers, we are awarding up to ten joint travel/accommodation grants to successful proposals. Further details below. There will be no fee for presenting at, or attending, this conference. Submissions should follow the below format and be submitted to digitalcultureconference@gmail.com by 23:00 GMT on Friday 15th February 2019.

• Paper Title
  
• Speaker Name
  
• Speaker Contact Email
  
• Abstract (Up to 250 words outlining the paper's main arguments, methods,
  
• and relevance to the conference theme)
  
• Speaker Biography (Up to 100 words)
  
• Keywords (3 terms relevant to the paper)
  

Funding

We are pleased to offer up to ten joint-travel/accommodation grants, each of which includes one night’s accommodation at the University of

Nottingham (arranged by the organising committee) and up to £50 travel expenses.

The grant is open to all doctoral applicants, but at least five of the grants are reserved for non-M3C-funded applicants based at the DTP’s six institutions (Uni. of Nottingham; Nottingham Trent; Birmingham City; Uni. of Birmingham; De Montfort; Uni. of Leicester). Those currently funded by M3C are not eligible to apply for this grant. This grant will only be offered to doctoral students whose papers have been accepted for the conference.

If you wish to apply for the grant, please complete a Grant Application Form – which can be found here – and submit it along with your abstract. Grants will be awarded on the basis of the conference organising committee’s collective consideration of submitted applications.

12th - 13th September 2019

Cardiff University (UK)

The School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC) at Cardiff University will host the seventh biennial Future of Journalism conference.

The conference will take place in JOMEC's new state-of-the-art home in Cardiff's city centre. The theme will be “Innovations, Transitions and Transformations.”

Our distinguished keynote speakers are Professor Andrew Chadwick (Loughborough University), Professor Adrienne Russell (University of Washington), and Professor Nikki Usher (University of Illinois). Please see their bios below.

The call for abstracts is now open. We invite contributions on all aspects of journalism, with those addressing the conference theme particularly encouraged. Issues to be addressed may include:

• How are definitions of journalism changing in an evolving news ecosystem?
  
• What is the future for today’s journalist in an environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, big data, algorithmic processing and "liminal" journalism practices?
  
• How are standards of quality, balance and fairness changing, including with regard to the perceived decline of ‘mainstream media’ and the rise of hyper-partisan outlets?
  
• To what extent are social media democratising citizens’ engagement with news across mobile platforms?
  
• How best to encourage new cultures of experimentation and innovation for rethinking journalistic form and practice?
  
• How should journalism studies respond to these shifts, conceptually and methodologically?
  

A selection of papers presented at the conference will be published in special issues of the international peer-reviewed journals Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies. Routledge / Taylor & Francis have kindly agreed to sponsor the conference.

The conference will take place on Thursday 12th and Friday 13th September 2019. The registration fee will be £250 (£200 for postgraduate students), which includes tea and coffee breaks as well as the conference dinner (to be held on the evening of 12th September).

The deadline for submitting abstracts (250 words maximum) for papers is January 31st, 2019. Please submit your abstract via the conference email address: FofJ2019@cardiff.ac.uk

Please do not submit more than one abstract as first author, with no more than two abstracts in total.

Should you have any questions, please contact Bina Ogbebor at FofJ2019@cardiff.ac.uk

The Media Fields Research Collective at UC Santa Barbara is excited to announce its call for papers for /Media Fields Journal/ Issue 15: Media Cultures of the (Inter/Anti)Imperial Pacific

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2019

Recent controversies—from protracted battles over international tariff structures to renewed nuclear sabre rattling between the United States and North Korea, and from the brutalities of offshore migrant detention in places like Nauru to the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea—have thrust the Pacific theater to the forefront of global geopolitical attention. But while these disputes often appear in the guise of crisis, as urgent, largely unanticipated outbreaks of acrimony, they are in many ways historically implicated. As Kornel Chang writes, the Pacific has long been a deeply vexed geopolitical and cultural domain, a vast theater of “interimperial” encounter striated by the violences of colonial settlement, neocolonial retrenchment, capitalist exploitation, racial domination, and military conquest. But if these are political and cultural histories, they are at the same time media histories. Indeed, since at least the mid-19th century, media and communication technologies have played a central role both in the consolidation of imperial ambitions across the Pacific, as well as in the manifold ways these ambitions have been sabotaged, undermined, and refused. Seeking to thematize these complex and ongoing histories, issue 15 of /Media Fields Journal/ will explore the media cultures of the (inter/anti) imperial Pacific.

In recent years, scholars of media and technology have turned often toward the Pacific, showing how the region’s overlapping histories of colonization and imperial expansion have fundamentally shaped global communication infrastructures, and vice versa. Nicole Starosielski, for instance, has shown the remarkable degree to which contemporary undersea cable networks, particularly those that connect the west coast of North America with the Asia Pacific, retrace nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial trading routes, transposing the lineaments of territorial empire into a fiber optic register. Ruth Oldenziel, similarly, has read the Pacific as a techno-imperial palimpsest, uncovering the surprising geographic and logistical continuities between colonial coaling stations, early electric telegraph networks, and the shortwave communications infrastructures that proliferated across the Pacific in the Cold War years. Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, finally, have reconstructed in painstaking detail the emergence of coherent communications markets in and around the Asia Pacific after about 1860—a project that played out through a baffling choreography of interimperial negotiation and corporate shell gaming.

In the hopes of extending these important contributions in new directions, we seek original scholarship that explores how media have functioned as tools of imperial governance in the Pacific since the 19th Century, as well as their involvement in struggles for otherwise Pacific worlds and decolonial futures. To this end, we invite contributions that bring media history, theory and analysis into sustained conversation with such fields as Native American and Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, critical race and ethnic studies, island and ocean studies, and archipelagic American studies (see Roberts & Stephens, 2017). However, we encourage submissions from all those whose work explores the richness and vitality of Pacific media cultures—whether historical, contemporary, or emergent—through the lenses of imperiality, coloniality, and/or decolonization. Moreover, even as we acknowledge the abiding hegemony of the United States across much of the Pacific theater, we strongly encourage submissions that provincialize US- and Anglo-centric perspectives, and approach the question of Pacific imperiality from alternative national and/or geopolitical contexts.

Potential topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• Indigenous media theory, history, and critique
  
• Comparative and differential Indigeneities
  
• The technopolitics of imperial administration
  
• Activist media: anti-imperialism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty
  
• The aesthetic and representational politics of (de)colonization
  
• Piracy, hacking, and sabotage
  
• Trauma, memory, and the archive
  
• Oceanic media infrastructures
  
• Colonial and imperial nostalgia
  
• South-South/East-East solidarities
  
• Critical political economy: tariffs, trade, intellectual property, informality
  
• Gender, sexuality, and desire
  
• Past futures: Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, Nuclear Non-Proliferation
  
• Environmental disruption and resource extraction (seafloor dredging, artificial island construction, mining, dumping, pollution, sea level rise)
  
• Media policy and regulation in/of colonial states
  
• Media, technology, and discourses of development
  
• (Mili)tourism
  
• Techno-orientalism
  
• (Revisiting) the cultural imperialism thesis
  
• Analytics of migration and settlement: the settler, the ‘coolie,’ the arrivant, the ‘free laborer,’ the indentured, etc.
  
• Asian settler colonialism (see Okamura & Fujikane, 2008; Saranillio, 2013)
  
• Empire and/as media distribution
  
• Media and scalarity: locality, regionality, nationality, globality, and the hemispheric
  

For any inquiries, please contact issue co-editors Tyler Morgenstern (tylermorgenstern@ucsb.edu) and Xiuhe Zhang (xiuhezhang@ucsb.edu).

Submissions should be approximately *1500–2500 words*, and should include at least one image or audio or video clip related to the essay topic. Email submissions to submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org.

For more information and complete submission guidelines, please visit http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org

References:

Kornel Chang, /Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands /(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

Jonathan Y. Okamura and Candace Fujikane (editors), /Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai/ (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008).

Ruth Oldenziel, “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in /Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War/, edited by Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 13-41.

Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (editors), /Archipelagic American Studies /(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017).

Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Why Asian settler colonialism matters: a thought piece on critiques, debates, and Indigenous difference,"/Settler Colonial Studies 3/, 4 (2013), 280-294.

Nicole Starosielski, /The Undersea Network /(Durham and London: Duke University Press,2015).

Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, /Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930/ (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

Tallinn University invites applications for the position of "Professor of Cultural Data Analytics" to commence in Summer 2019 (negotiable).

The position is funded by the EU ERA Chairs programme and the initial contract can lasts for 60 months. After that tenure become possible.

ERA Chair programme funding enabled TLU to launch a new initiative titled Cultural Data Analytics (CUDAN) Open Lab (see here: http://cudan.tlu.ee/). The project would enable the new professor to design her/his team consisting of at least 6 senior research fellows and several junior research fellows together with administrative support team. The professor will decide on the research directions of the CUDAN Open Lab team.

In case of interest, please find more information here: https://www.tlu.ee/en/professor-cultural-data-analytics

The deadline of submitting the application documents is 26th February 2019 (including).