ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

January 9-12, 2024

Lisbon, Portugal

Deadline: December 15, 2023

The 4th Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication takes a comparative and global approach to the study of media and ambivalence. Jointly organized by the Faculty of Human Sciences (Universidade Católica Portuguesa), the Center for Media@Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania), the School of Journalism and Communication (Chinese University of Hong Kong), the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (University of Southern California) and the Helsinki institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (University of Helsinki), the 4th Lisbon Winter School offers an opportunity for doctoral students and early career post-doctoral researchers to strategize around the study of media and ambivalence together with senior scholars in the field.

Call for Applications

It is perhaps paradoxical that media scholars tend to regard ambivalence in ambivalent ways. Many maintain that ambivalence undercuts and undermines the media environments it inhabits, introducing a level of uncertainty that obscures not only multiple aspects of the media’s workings—including its messages, roles, technologies, practices and effects—but also what is most patterned and exceptional about the media writ large. Others see ambivalence as a necessary complication of the tired and overused binaries of late modernity, sustaining what the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the “test of a first-rate intelligence,” whose “ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” would produce generative opportunities built around the “the improbable, the implausible, often the impossible.”

Regardless, then, of how positively or negatively scholars feel about ambivalence, its presence is a clear component of media environments everywhere. But what kind of presence does it have? What are its primary attributes and pitfalls? In what ways does ambivalence make media environments better or worse? In what ways does it foster or complicate widely-adopted notions of media practices, processes, production, consumption and effects? How does it foster resistance and under which conditions?

This Winter School will examine the pairing of media and ambivalence in all its recognizable forms. Orienting to the broad spread of ways in which ambivalence can be understood to inhabit the media, it aims to develop a fuller understanding of why ambivalence is such a longstanding inhabitant of media environments. Possible questions stretch across the wide range of entry points for contemplating the media that allow for media representation and processing, media use and media refusal, media production and consumption. They include, how do the media and ambivalence shape each other? What role do the media and associated technologies play in structuring ambivalence, and what role does ambivalence play when associated with the media? Under which conditions does ambivalence emerge? How is it represented and where? How is it recognized and by whom? What impact does it have on media fare, the representation of marginalized groups or the shape of audience engagement? How does it affect the capacity to form identities, make informed decisions or embrace polarization? How does it figure in decisions to refuse or reject the media? How is ambivalence being weaponized in current political climates, and to what end? How has it been weaponized in the past? 

We welcome proposals by doctoral students and early career post-doctoral researchers from all over the world to discuss the intertwined relation between media and ambivalence in different geographies and temporalities. The list below illustrates some topics for possible consideration. Other topics dealing with media and ambivalence are also welcome: 

·       Ambivalence towards media platforms, content, practices or effects

·       Ambivalence and AI

·       Techniques to counter ambivalence 

·       Ambivalence and identity formation

·       Ambivalence and human rights

·       Promoting ambivalent representations of the past

·       Ambivalence in the public arena in specific national or regional contexts

·       Ambivalent discourses on science and climate change

·       Ambivalent discourses on racism, misogyny, classism, settler colonialism 

·       Ambivalence and journalism

·       Ambivalence and popular culture

·       Resistance to media, including media rejection, media detox, pushback on social media, news avoidance or domestic practices to control media usage

·       Children and media ambivalence 

·       Ambivalence, media and imaginative future 

·       Ambivalence and conflict

·       Ambivalence and overload

·       …

PAPER PROPOSALS

Proposals should be sent to lisbonwinterschool@gmail.com no later than 30 September 2023 and include a paper title, extended abstract in English (700 words), name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning ongoing research. Applicants will be informed of the result of their submissions by mid-October.

FULL PAPER SUBMISSION 

Presenters will be required to send in full papers (max. 20 pages, 1.5 spacing) by 15 December 2023.  

FOR MORE INFORMATION visit lisbonwinterschool.com

University of Zurich, Switzerland 

The Media & Internet Governance Division (Prof. Dr. Natascha Just) of the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich invites applications for an open position of Research and Teaching Associate/PhD (60%). Start of employment: at the earliest possible / upon agreement

The Media & Internet Governance Division studies media policy and media economics in the convergent communications sector. Alongside research on traditional mass media, the division focuses on Internet Governance and Platform Studies. The successful applicant will work on dedicated topics that align with the division's research program.

Further information and application details: https://jobs.uzh.ch/offene-stellen/research-and-teaching-associate-doctoral-position/03bfe57c-e347-41d7-b001-35a6f643c460 

Review of applications starts immediately, but the position will remain open until a qualified candidate is found.

Please contact Alena Birrer, MA (a.birrer@ikmz.uzh.ch) if you have any further questions.

September 7-8, 2023

Budapest, Hungary

Deadline: June 30, 2023

The Youth Research Institute and the Institute of Marketing and Communication Sciences of Corvinus University of Budapest invite contributions to the conference on “Clout Culture: Youth Cultures in Changing Societies”, to be held in Budapest, Hungary on 7-8 September 2023.

The aim of the conference is to investigate contemporary youth cultures in all of its facets. We thus invite contributions for poster presentations (for Day 1) and oral presentations / panel discussions (for Day 2) on the following themes / topics in both English and Hungarian:

• High and Popular Culture
  
• Arts and Marketing
  
• Language and Communication
  
• Contemporary and Traditional Culture 
  

The conference is free of charge. Join other researchers about youth cultures for professional development and networking opportunities. The organizers of the event will provide accommodation for oral presenters and panelists.

General Paper Submission Guide

• Abstract submission: 30 June 2023
  
• Contributions from either individual author or multiple authors are welcome.
  
• Abstracts must be between 300 and 500 words.
  
• For the poster section we will only accept submissions from PhD students.
  

More information on our website: https://ifjusagkutatointezet.hu/en/news/conference-call

Further information and submissions: info@ifjusagkutatointezet.hu

October 13-14, 2023

University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin (Hardenbergestraße)

Deadline: June 15, 2023

A symposium

This international symposium engages with the concept of domestication as it stands today. It celebrates on this occasion the first ever international Routledge Handbook of Domestication of Media and Technology, scheduled for release in summer of 2023.

(https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Media-and-Technology-Domestication/Hartmann/p/book/9781032184142). The conference brings together authors from the book with other researchers as well as interested colleagues and students from the UdK. The symposium focuses on questions such as:

• What is the domestication concept’s potential value for future research? 

• How does it differ from other concepts - or where are the overlaps? 

• How does domestication work in times of surveillance capitalism?

The concept of domestication of media and technology is not new. In fact, it was first formulated in the late 1980s, early 1990s. While it has never managed to take center stage, researchers in media and communication studies have used it ever since and the application and development of the concept are still thriving. Additionally, it has been used in other fields, such as technology assessment studies, in design studies, in management studies. 

It focuses primarily on the question of what users (of media and/or technologies) do with these, especially when they are new. How do they adopt them into their everyday lives, how do they adapt to the technologies (and vice versa)? These practices are seen to relate to values that are developed over time (the moral economy of the household), both individually as well as socially. The concept also offers an emphasis on the combined notion of media as technology (object) and content (double / triple articulation). At the time of its first development, the emphasis on the users’ ability to act and interpret was high. Since then, this has seen quite a bit of differentiation. Today, the question of the relationship between users and producers as well as technologies is facing new challenges, to which the domestication concept is seen to contribute important notions.

A keynote by Prof. Maria Bakardjieva (University of Calgary, CAN) will introduce some of the key concerns. Throughout two days, the symposium’s contributors will delve into the above-mentioned questions both theoretically as well as with reference to current empirical material. 

The symposium will take place at the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin (Hardenbergestraße).

It will begin with a book launch on Thursday, the 12th of October 2023. This will be followed by a symposium on Friday and Saturday (13-14 October), ending mid-day on Saturday.

Interested parties are invited to submit an abstract (300-500 words) to Maren Hartmann (hartmann@udk-berlin.de) until the 15th of June, 2023.

Feel free to contact us with any additional questions/ comments you might have - and feel free to circulate amongst domestication lovers :-)

November 15-17, 2023 

TU Dresden, Germany, hosted by the Chair of Digital Cultures

Submission deadline: 14 July 2023

Format: in-person presentations

Confirmed keynote speaker: 

Dr Iván Chaar-López, University of Texas Austin 

The conference is organized in collaboration between the Chair of Digital Cultures at TU Dresden, Germany, and the Department of Media and Communications at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. The event is funded by the Internationalization Strategy of TU Dresden and the LSE Global Research Fund. 

Organizing team:

Dr Michelle Pfeifer (TU Dresden): michelle.pfeifer1@tu-dresden.de 

Dr Philipp Seuferling (LSE): p.seuferling@lse.ac.uk 

The buzzword “smart borders” commonly captures the widespread digitalization and automation of migration control and the expansion of racial capitalist security regimes by technological means. Yet, the term describes only the most recent instance of media technologies constituting and enabling state bordering. While states around the world rely on and invest in ever newer “smart” technologies to control migration, these developments stand in longer historical continuities, not least hailing from projects of mobility and population control of colonialism, racism, eugenics, or carceral regimes (Chaar-López, 2019; Weitzberg, 2020; Pfeifer, 2021; Leurs & Seuferling, 2022; Tazzioli, 2023). 

This conference aims to address the international research field on temporalities and histories of smart borders, to trace genealogies and longue durées of media, communication, and information technologies in the control of borders and migration. Such histories can be traced on different levels: materialities of media technologies, uses and practices around them, struggles against bordering tactics and technologies, as well as socio-technical imaginaries of what these technologies can and cannot do – all of which are characterized by continuities and change. While media shape borders across time, media technologies are also shaped by and emerge from projects of bordering. In this sense, borders can be better understood by attending to their media, and vice versa, media histories more generally can be explored at the border – a “technological testing ground” (Molnar, 2022) historically and today. 

Questions guiding the conference are: 

How can we understand histories of the “smart border” within histories of media technology and digitalization, as well as within histories of territorialization, biopolitics, racial capitalism, colonialism, and bordered states? How are technological innovation as well as processes of digitalization and computation historically tested, developed, and trialed in the context of border and migration control?How has the entanglement of media technologies with borders evolved over time?How can historical perspectives on smart borders advance critiques of violence and discrimination enacted by smart border regimes today?  

We explicitly welcome papers that engage with queer, feminist, decolonial, postcolonial, abolitionist, and critical race perspectives on the histories of mediated bordering.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Theoretical perspectives on “smart borders” across time Methodological approaches to historicizing “smart borders” Histories of digitalization and automation, in contexts of mobility, migration, and border controlStudies of historical empirical contexts of mediated borders Histories of border and technological regulation, policy-making, and law The role of risk, uncertainty, and security in genealogies of border and migration controlGenealogies of datafication of people on the moveHistories of biometrics, surveillance, policing, and carceralityMediated containment, surveillance, and control of people on the move, mobility, and movement concerning imperatives of digitalization, automation, and artificial intelligenceHistories of struggles against and contestations of “smart border” regimes 

Submission guidelines:

Submissions should include an abstract (300-400 words), as well as a short biographical note (100-150 words). Please use this form: https://forms.office.com/e/fmhfvNQE5T 

The submission deadline is 14 July 2023. We plan to notify applicants about proposal acceptance by 4 August 2023. 

Funding will be available to support travel and accommodation of invited speakers. Please note whether you need financial assistance in the submission form. 

Koen Leurs, Utrecht University

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/digital-migration/book269996#description

“A revelation for digital researchers and a provocation for migration scholars… It introduces an insightful, inspiring, and inviting way of making sense of the messiness without losing hope of changing things.”

- Nishant Shah, Chinese University of Hong Kong

“A must read for everyone who is concerned with questions of human mobility, media and communications and the digital border.”

- Myria Georgiou, LSE

“A much-needed addition to scholarship on mobility, technology, and migration… The book is poised to become a touchstone text.”

- C.L. Quinan University of Melbourne

In contemporary discussions on migration, digital technology is often seen as a 'smart' disruptive tool. Bringing efficiencies to management, and safety to migrants. But the reality is always more complex.

This book is a comprehensive and impassioned account of the relationship between digital technology and migration. From 'top-down' governmental and corporate shaping of the migrant condition, to the 'bottom-up' of digital practices helping migrants connect, engage and resist.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Digital Migration explores:

• The power relations of digital infrastructures across migrant recruitment, transportation and communication.
  
• Migrant connections and the use of digital devices, platforms and networks.
  
• Dominant digital representations of migrants, and how they’re resisted.
  
• The affect and emotion of digital migration, from digital intimacy to transnational family life.
  
• How histories of pre and early-digital migration help us situate and rethink contemporary research.
  
• The realities of researching digital migration, including interviews with leading international researchers.
  

Critical yet hopeful, Koen Leurs opens up the unequal power relations at the heart of digital migration studies, challenging us to imagine more just alternatives. 

Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

All author royalties for this book will be donated to the Alarm Phone, a hotline for boatpeople in distress. 

November 9 - 10, 2023

Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (conference will be held onsite with inclusion of 1 online panel)

Deadline (EXTENDED): June 19, 2023

Conference of the ECREA Temporary Working Group "Communication and Sport"

The myriad technological, economic, and social changes that have been going on in contemporary societies have had a dramatic impact on sports communication, bringing new issues to deal with and new actors coming into what was previously in a European context considered to be mainly a domain of journalism. In this conference, hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague on November 9 - 10, 2023, the ECREA Temporary Working Group on Communication and Sport calls for papers exploring the transition of sports communication from various perspectives. We would like to help expand the contemporary research on topics from different scholarly fields like media studies, cultural studies, sports journalism studies and sports strategic and PR communication, and sports audience studies, not necessarily only from Europe. 

The conference will feature one online panel that will allow participation of a select number of researchers who are unable to travel to Prague. 

With regard to the overarching topic of the conference, here are many issues that have arisen in recent years, including:

• the massive development of so called in-house or team media, which in combination with direct usage of social media and many access restrictions, partially enforced by COVID-19 pandemics, but welcomed by major sports organisations, resulted in sports journalists struggling to find an original and interesting story more than ever; 
  
• the strategic and often performative use of new media platforms by hitherto marginalized individuals or groups in sport 
  
• the cases of cross of interest, when underpaid journalists have to start with moonlighting at PR positions; 
  
• the wide reach and independence of successful athletes with their own channels (specially social media);
  
• the increase of sports bloggers that was enabled by the technological development when everyone can create their successful website or podcast and enrich the sports journalistic field from its peripheries, sometimes even heading directly to its centre, reversing existing power balance; 
  
• the discussions whether sports journalists and athletes should or should not speak up when for example the sports events are organised by countries where human rights have been repeatedly violated and their leaders only want to whitewash their reputation, or female athletes or spectators are not allowed to participate; 
  
• the audiences (e.g., increasingly fragmented sports media repertoires in high-choice media environments and massive uncertainty about audience's expectations of sports media content) 

This list is not exclusive, and we call for papers which in a broad sense deal with shifts in sports communication, including both theoretical and analytical perspectives on the tensions, conflicts, many dilemmas and negotiations involved, focusing on the sports communication creators, the sports media content itself or its audiences.

We invite abstracts between 300-500 words (excluding references) submitted in English language by June 19, 2023 via email to the main organiser Dr. Veronika Macková (veronika.mackova@fsv.cuni.cz). The submission should be anonymized.

The abstracts can be both for individual papers and panel proposals. Each panel proposal must include an abstract of the cover topic and the titles of 4-5 involved papers with the names of the authors. Each paper in the panel needs to be presented by people from different universities. Please indicate clearly whether the abstract is for individual paper or a panel proposal.

To support the integration of as many scholars as possible, we will hold approx. 5 onsite panels and 1 online panel for the colleagues who have difficulties travelling to Prague on the dates of the conference. Please indicate clearly whether the abstract is for onsite or online presentation. 

Edited by: Manuel Puppis & Christopher Ali 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.48335/9789188855756 (open access) 

Public Service Media (PSM) across Europe and beyond are increasingly under pressure, with both their role in a digital environment and their funding widely scrutinised. As a result, PSM organisations are constantly in a defensive position. Following attempts to demonstrate their "public value", discussion is now turning towards PSM's "contribution to society", a concept pushed by the European Broadcasting Union. Yet, to be meaningful for society and to influence PSM organisations, the concept must be more than just an instrument of legitimacy management. While communicating the valuable contributions of PSM is important, the concept is useless if limited to the question of how to better sell the contribution of PSM to citizens instead of guaranteeing that PSM actually serves the public interest and makes a contribution worth funding and discussing.  

This volume critically engages with the analytical value and usefulness of the contribution to society concept, related both to the EBU's conceptualisation and to the larger, normative question of contribution. Such critical analyses are not only a worthwhile task for communication and media scholars, but also for practitioners and policy-makers involved in debates about PSM's future. The first section of this volume defines and refines how PSM can serve the public interest by meeting the communication needs of society in unique ways that commercial media cannot. The second section discusses what PSM can be beyond broadcasting, touching upon personalised on-demand services, new forms of mobile distribution, and public service bots. The third section focuses on organisational change and innovation, ranging from citizen participation to transparency.  

We at mediastudies.press are happy to announce the opening of our annual proposal window from 1 June to 30 July, 2023. During this date window, authors are encouraged to submit a proposal for review.

mediastudies.press welcomes submissions from scholars across media, communication, and film studies. We currently publish in four series:

• Media Manifold series — monographs and other book-length works of contemporary media scholarship
  
• Public Domain series — reprints of neglected classics, in new critical editions anchored by framing introductions
  
• Open Reader series — themed collections of openly licensed, public domain, and linked materials curated and introduced by leading experts
  
• History of Media Studies series — monographs and other original scholarly works centered on history of media, communication, and film studies
  

We are small and artisanal by mission, and aim to publish just five books a year. Given the volume of proposals that we receive—and with our production schedule in mind—we maintain an annual proposal window (1 June to 30 July), for the review of manuscripts slated for publication in the following calendar year. You are welcome to send informal queries outside these dates, but our general practice is to only consider proposals within the annual window. Each year, we review proposals with an initial reply by August 15, with the aim to conduct peer review of proposals of expressed interest by the end of September.

mediastudies.press is an open-access publisher for the media and communication studies fields. The press is nonprofit and scholar-led. We publish living works, with iterative updates stitched into our process. And we encourage multi-modal submissions that reflect the mediated environments our authors study. 

Publishing with mediastudies.press is free on principle. Our aim is to demonstrate, on a small scale, an open-access publishing model supported by libraries rather than author fees. Open access for readers, we believe, should not be traded for new barriers to authorship. 

All our published works are rigorously peer-reviewed, and receive unusual editorial attention. We prioritize discoverability through careful metadata, library records, and directory listings. As a scholar-run operation, our publicity outreach is uncommonly informed by the fields’ intellectual contours. 

We kindly ask that proposals be submitted as a single PDF (at this link). Proposals should include the following elements, in addition to at least one draft chapter:

• Proposed title and subtitle
  
• A 500- to 1000-word narrative description of the book
  
• Short bios of author(s) and/or editor(s)
  
• Proposed series (see above)
  
• Tentative table of contents, preferably annotated
  
• Estimated word-length
  
• Multi-modal components, if any
  
• Status of the book (i.e., expectation of completion date, the portion now complete)
  
• At least one draft chapter
  

To submit your work to mediastudies.press please follow our submission link.

If you have any questions at all about the proposal process for books, please contact us at press@mediastudies.press

Jeff Pooley, director of mediastudies.press

Dave Park, associate director of mediastudies.press

June 12-13, 2023 

Loughborough University, UK

As the PANCOPOP Symposium 2023 is just one week away, we invite you to take a look at the schedule and register for the event. The symposium will take place on 12th and 13th June 2023 and will be held in person (Loughborough University) as well as streamed online. Further details will be sent to registered participants. Whether you are attending online or in-person, PANCOPOP Symposium 2023 is free of charge.  

To register and view the symposium schedule, simply visit: https://www.pancopop.net/pancopop-symposium-2023/.  

Also, you can access the full programme for our upcoming symposium on our website. 

About the PANCOPOP project: 

The PANCOPOP project develops the first comprehensive, comparative study of health crisis communication in the context of populist politics, bringing significant advances in knowledge at the intersection of political communication and public health. The focus is on four countries that were led by populist leaders during the pandemic, and which capture different types of populist responses to the pandemic: Brazil, Poland, Serbia, and the USA. The project is led by Professor Sabina Mihelj, Loughborough University, and involves a team of five Principal Investigators, six researchers and a project administrator, working across three continents. 

For further information please visit the project website https://www.pancopop.net/ and follow us on Twitter @pancopop.