ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

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).

DiGRA 2019 - The 12th Digital Games Research Association Conference

Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto, Japan)

6th of August - 10th of August 2019

 

It is our great pleasure to announce the Digital Games Research Association's 2019 Conference call for papers. Papers are invited under the theme 'Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo Mix', where 'media mix' serves as a starting point for considering games' convergence, transformation, replication, and expansion from platform, technology, and context to another.

For more information and updates, please see: http://www.digra2019.org/

Submission deadlines: 

Full Papers, Abstracts, Panels, and Doctoral Consortium: February 5, 2019

Workshops: April 8, 2019

Emiliano Treré

Routledge

This book is an extensive investigation of the complexities, ambiguities and shortcomings of contemporary digital activism. The author deconstructs the reductionism of the literature on social movements and communication, proposing a new conceptual vocabulary based on practices, ecologies, imaginaries and algorithms to account for　the communicative complexity of protest movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on social movements, collectives and political parties in Spain, Italy and Mexico, this book disentangles the hybrid nature of contemporary activism. It shows how activists operate merging the physical and the digital, the human and the non-human, the old and the new, the internal and the external, the corporate and the alternative.

The author illustrates the ambivalent character of contemporary digital activism, demonstrating that media imaginaries can be either used to conceal authoritarianism, or to reimagine democracy. The book looks at both side of algorithmic power, shedding light on strategies of repression and propaganda, and scrutinizing manifestations of algorithms as appropriation and resistance.

The author analyses the way in which digital activism is not an immediate solution to intricate political problems, and argues that it can only be effective when a set of favourable social, political, and cultural conditions align.

Assessing whether digital activism can generate and sustain long-term processes of social and political change, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching radical politics, social movements, digital activism, political participation and current affairs more generally.

Table of content

• Introduction: the quest for communicative complexity within social movements
  
• PART I. Ecologies
  
• Chapter 1. Media ecologies and the media/movement dynamic　
  
• Chapter 2. An ecological exploration of the ‘Anomalous Wave’ movement
  
• Chapter 3. An ecological exploration of the #YoSoy132 movement
  
• PART II. Imaginaries　
  
• Chapter 4. Media imaginaries and the media/movement dynamic
  
• Chapter 5. The authoritarian sublime of the Five Star Movement
  
• Chapter 6. The technopolitical sublime of the Spanish Indignados
  
• PART III. Algorithms
  
• Chapter 7. The mutual shaping of algorithms and social movements　
  
• Chapter 8. Algorithm as propaganda, repression, and paranoia
  
• Chapter 9. Algorithm as knowledge, appropriation, and resistance
  
• Conclusions: hybrid media activism
  

Gender Studies 2019 Conference: On Violence

24th of October – 26th of October 2019

University of Helsinki, Finland

What is violence? How is violence normalized in some contexts? How do gender, sexuality, race, and class, among other axes of power, intersect making some bodies more prone to experiencing violence? How to subvert and challenge different forms of violence, and what are the respectful and nuanced forms of solidarity and activism that take the specificity of people’s experiences into consideration?

We warmly invite scholars from a variety of locations in the Global North and South to participate in the discussions on violence. This conference in Helsinki will approach multiple aspects of violence across the wide multidisciplinary field of gender, sexuality, queer, trans, disability, postcolonial, and critical race studies. The conference is organized and hosted by the Gender Studies Discipline of The University of Helsinki together with the Association for Gender Studies in Finland (SUNS), Incorporating Vulnerability and WeAll projects.

We open workshop submissions from the 7th of January until the 15th of February. We invite you to submit proposals for workshops in English, Finnish or Swedish. In addition to traditional workshop contributions we also welcome other forms of creative collaborations/presentations/performances.

We welcome workshop proposals particularly in (but not limited to) the following themes:

• Theorizing and understanding violence in feminism, queer, trans, postcolonial and disability and critical race studies
• Debates on what counts as violence in feminism and in multidisciplinary gender studies
• Methodology, methods and ethics in researching violence and vulnerable groups
• Approaches and methods for countering, resisting and transforming violence
• Concepts and conceptualizations of gender, violence and agency
• Power/knowledge –violence
• Violence within feminist movements and scholarship
• Normative violence and violence of norms
• Structural violence, colonial and racialized violences and violations, including microaggressions
• Institutional and institutionalized violence, e.g. in organizations, schools, institutions of higher education, hospitals, military, prisons
• Violence(s) and violations as discrimination in working life and in organizations
• Hate speech and violence on-line
• Narrations and representations of violence in fiction, film, literature, art, media
• Political violence, social movements and violence
• Policy and politics on violence
• Mobility, migration, borders
• Experiences of violence
• Compassion and witnessing of violence
• Secondary trauma and self-care of the researcher
• Violence and vulnerabilities in the context of climate change
• Violence against non-human animals
• Societal impact of research on violence: how to influence positive change

Guidelines for Workshop Organizers:

Workshop organizers will be responsible for selecting papers to be presented in the workshops, planning and organizing the workshop, and communicating with the conference team as well as workshop participants. Sessions will be 90 minutes each; which could be divided on three to four paper presentations as well as group discussions. Alternatively, workshop organisers could utilise time differently according to their specific plans. Please note that paper proposals will be submitted directly to workshop organizers to the email provided in the submission form. Organizers will select the papers for the workshops and inform conference team as well as the participants.

Structure of the Conference Application Process:

1) Workshop organizers submit their workshop proposals by the end of 15th of February and are informed of the acceptance by the 21st of February.

2) Confirmed workshops will be published on the conference website on the 28th of February and the call for papers will open on the 1st of March and close on the 31st of March. The conference team will circulate the call for papers and advertise the conference widely.

3) Paper proposals are sent to the workshop organizers directly and they will inform the participants and conference team of the accepted papers by the 17th of April. The accepted abstracts will be submitted to the conference team for the book of abstracts.

Workshop Submission Details:

Submit an abstract of your workshop (max 2000 characters with spaces), title, keywords, short bio (max 1000 characters with spaces), a chair/chairs, a discussant, and a list of themes for potential papers. Fill in the submission form: 

https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/94401/lomake.html

Important Dates:

• Workshop submission deadline: 15th of February 2019
  
• Workshop acceptance notifications: 21st of February 2019
  
• Call for papers: 1st of March 2019 – 31st of March 2019
  
• Paper acceptance notifications to the participants and conference team 17th of April
  

For more information and updates, please visit the conference websites.