ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Deadline: November 22, 2024

This CFP, requiring no payment from the authors, is a shared space where scholars and practitioners explore various aspects of everyday democracy, particularly in the context of polarization and radicalization. Polarization, aligning societal differences along a single dimension, poses significant risks to democracy by fostering opposition and conflict (McCoy et al., 2018). Radicalization, often a consequence of polarization, involves individuals or groups moving away from mainstream ideologies toward more extreme positions, sometimes leading to violence (Schmid, 2013). 

By examining how everyday democracy interacts with these processes, this book aims to provide new insights into how democratic resilience can be built in the face of polarization and radicalization. Through a broad approach encompassing various societal systems and institutions, the book explores the complexities and nuances of these challenges, offering a deeper understanding of everyday democracy and its potential to mitigate the risks of polarization and radicalization.  Read more below or at http://lnu.se/en/research/research-projects/project-the-book-everyday-democracy/.

Interested chapter contributors are welcome to propose chapters that showcase the wide spectrum of research on polarization and radicalization in relation to democratic values. Examples of topics chapters can address in the three respective categories that form the framework of the book, include but are not limited to the following:

1. Collaborative Forms:

• How participatory governance initiatives, such as citizen assemblies or deliberative practices, can foster democratic resilience against polarization and radicalization

• The role of digital platforms and open government practices can play in promoting dialogue, common understanding and a cohesive society

• Ways in which citizen professionalism and public-work democracy can foster everyday democratic engagement that counters radical ideologies and polarization

• How collaborative action research methodologies can facilitate depolarization and democratic discourse

• Avenues for interdisciplinary approaches (e.g. politics, sociology, and science) to enhance the effectiveness of everyday democracy in counteracting radicalization

2. Interaction Cases:

• Cities where shared governance of public spaces foster democratic engagement and challenge local extremism or exclusion

• Art and cultural institutions, or local libraries, engaging e.g. marginalized youth in democratic processes

• Schools where democratic practices have been implemented, making use of e.g. participatory decision-making and curriculum design

• Everyday democratic practices in cities or local communities facing different types of crises (such as inequality, climate change, or migration)

• NGOs and community-led fact-checking initiatives aiming to counter microradicalization

• Lessons learned from the Dialogue to Change Approach (also known as Dialogue to Action)

• The contribution by makerspaces, graffiti, and other art forms in contributing to everyday democratic engagement in polarized communities

3 Research-Based Explorations:

• How media and social media shape everyday democratic discourse, both promoting polarization and offering platforms for counter-radicalization and democratic engagement

• The democratic potential of local histories and urban movements to reclaim public spaces for equity and inclusion

• The impact of popular culture—music, films, and literature—on shaping public perceptions of democracy and radicalization, both positively and negatively

• The role of speculative thinking and conspiracy theories in fostering or deepening political polarization

• Commonalities and differences in approaches to de-radicalization across diverse global contexts

• Feminist perspectives on authoritarian populism as seen through the boundary work in everyday life

Submission guidelines

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please submit an extended abstract (max. 500 to 750 words) of your proposed chapter and a short biographical note (max. 150 words) by 22 November 2024, to everydaydemocracy@lnu.se. Chapter submissions and further editorial and peer reviews will be carried out via a publishing platform.

The extended abstract must clearly state the intended analytical goals and empirical/theoretical coverage of the proposed chapter while clarifying how the proposed chapter addresses central themes of the edited volume. If possible, indicate which category your chapter is best suited for, i.e. as Collaborative Forms and Scholarly Approaches, Interaction Cases or Research-Based Explorations.

Please include up to five indicative references you plan to use in your chapter. While these references might change along the way, they are useful to avoid potential overlaps among contributors. 

The targeted academic publisher will be chosen after the selection of abstracts is finalized. All chapters submitted should be original works and must not be under consideration by other publishers. 

Important dates

• Deadline for extended abstracts: 22 November 2024
  
• Notification of accepted chapter proposals: 29 November 2024
  
• Initial chapter draft: 10 January 2025 
  
• Editorial review feedback: 17 January 2025
  
• Deadline for full submissions: 20 February 2025
  
• Peer review: March-April 2025
  
• Submission of revised chapters: 16 June 2025
  
• Expected publication year: Winter 2025/Spring 2026

Editors

Pernilla Jonsson Severson, Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies, Department of Media and Journalism, Linnaeus University, Sweden Contact: pernilla.severson@lnu.se 

Emma Ricknell, Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Linnaeus University, Sweden Contact: emma.ricknell@lnu.se

Contact information

Please contact Pernilla Jonsson Severson at pernilla.severson@lnu.se if you have any questions regarding the chapter proposal.

June 12, 2025

Denver, CO (USA)

Deadline: December 15, 2024

International Communication Association Preconference

Co-sponsored by: Global Communication and Social Change, Communication History Divisions

With the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 1960s, newly independent nations from across the Global South sought to generate channels and protocols for international collaboration that would bypass centuries-old colonial extractive dynamics. What began as a political project of high level diplomacy soon expanded into an ethos that inspired and guided numerous initiatives in the fields of scientific research, cultural production, architecture, and so on. In short, the Non-Aligned Movement was a major disruptor of the political, economic, and cultural status quo of the mid-20th century, and media and communication practices were key to this disruption. Projects like New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), Broadcasting Organization on Non-Aligned Countries (BONAC), and Non-Aligned News Agency Pool (NANAP) aimed to reconfigure the international arena of communication, from reimagining networks and technology exchange to forging new collaborative practices to respond to unique and shifting on-the-ground situations of decolonizing countries in the Global South. These projects troubled and challenged established logics of the existing institutional apparatuses and research paradigms they relied on. However, the histories of these disruptions have mostly remained unwritten or been forgotten by contemporary scholarship.

This preconference aims to examine the conceptual implications and epistemic challenges that NAM disruptions (as well as other forms of disruptions that emerged in media and communication systems of the Global South and are aligned to the spirit and objectives of NAM) continue to pose for media and communication research. How do we account for the varied projects that were simultaneously initiated in and carried out from locations such as India, Iraq, Algiers and Cuba? How does such a fundamentally transnational character of collaborative initiatives expand our grasp of global media histories? What do we make of institutional collaborations that unsettle our understandings of top-down and bottom-up activities? How should we frame the persistence of racial logics that NAM actors faced in the realm of international media governance? And how do NAM’s failures, alongside the simultaneous persistence of its legacies, trouble existing conceptions of media temporalities? We will bring together scholars who are tackling these and other questions to provide a greater depth and geographical scope to media and communication studies’ understanding of the long history of global connectivity. By centering historical projects of media decolonization, we also aim to advance the field’s contemporary efforts to decolonize and de-canonize knowledge production.

This ICA preconference continues from two previous preconferences held in Canada and Australia respectively: “Media and Communication Studies in Global Contexts: A Critical History” and “Repressed Histories of Communication and Media Studies.”

The preconference will be organized as a set of four roundtables and we invite submissions that address one of the following roundtable topics:

• Develop critical histories of the disruptions and consolidations of media industries in postcolonial and non-aligned contexts, with a particular emphasis on institutional and political economic analysis. 
  
• (Re)Assess the role of popular icons in the Non-Aligned Movement (e.g.  from Nasser and Nehru to Mariam Makeba and Bruce Lee) across various media forms including but not limited to films and newsreels, radio, television, posters and pamphlets, music.
  
• Consider Non-Aligned media practices as forms of anti-colonial worldmaking and knowledge production, especially in their relation to transnational feminist, queer, disability, and other justice movements. 
  
• Explore contemporary re-activations of nonaligned visions in response to renewed pressures to align with or against regimes of power in the context of contemporary geopolitics.
  

Information about submissions

Authors should submit an extended abstract of 350-400 words (excluding references) to cargc@asc.upenn.edu. In a single PDF, please include: your name, institutional affiliation, email address, title of your proposed presentation, and abstract.

The deadline for submissions is December 15th, 2025, 23:59 GMT.

Authors will be notified by January 30, 2025 if their abstract has been accepted.

Attendance to the preconference has a general USD 50.00 fee. Please note that we will be able to defray registration costs and provide some travel funding for panelists.

Organizers:

Eszter Zimanyi, University of Pennsylvania

Sima Kokotovic, University of Pennsylvania

Aswin Punathambekar, University of Pennsylvania

Simone Natale, University of Turin

Usha Raman, University of Hyderabad

Emily Keightley, Loughborough University

Jing Wang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Ignatius Suglo, University of Richmond

April 29-30, 2025

University of Minho, Portugal

Deadline: November 30, 2024

Until November 30, 2024, the MigraMediaActs project is accepting submissions for the "Migrations and communication in a planetary age: debates and actions" conference it is organising between April 29 and 30, 2025, at the University of Minho in Braga. Proposals will be peer-reviewed, and the evaluation results will be sent by January 20. Abstracts should be submitted using the form available on the project's website. To value the linguistic diversity and the diversity of forms of communication, proposals (for oral communications, panels and artistic interventions) can be submitted in Portuguese, English, Spanish or French. Still, the sessions will not have simultaneous translation. The conference will have face-to-face and online sessions.

Based on inter-and transdisciplinary approaches, fostering dialogue between different areas of knowledge and other types of expertise, the main objective of this conference is to debate how communication, culture and migration studies can challenge existing notions of diaspora, identities, cultures, nation, family, literacy, digital networks, youth, body, gender, among others, and contribute to building fairer and more inclusive futures. The aim is to discuss the multiple dimensions of communication, art and social activism in order to understand their role in (re)configuring relational spaces and poetics and in promoting attentive listening. In a fragmented planetary context marked by daily "crises", this conference proposes to question, rethink and rebuild community paths through communication.

We welcome contributions on the following topics and other issues in the field of communication and migration:

* Migration, decolonisation of knowledge and science communication

* Intercultural communication and the media

* Mnemonic activism, arts and media

* Media culture, racialisation processes and intersectionalities

* Media productions and artistic practices of migrant and racialised people

* Migrations, media and action research

* Migration, media activism and social change

* Experiences of (im)mobility and their mediation

* Migration and ecotransition

* Transnational comparisons of media practices in the communication of migration

* Media representations of migration

* Mediated experiences of family migration

* Digital technologies and the governance of migration and borders

* Challenges and innovations in methodologies for communication and migration studies

* Others, not named but related to the theme

For submission guidelines and further details, please visit our website: https://www.migra.ics.uminho.pt/en/conference-2025.

We look forward to your contributions and encourage you to share this call with colleagues who may be interested.

Dr. Raquel V. Benítez Rojas, Ph.D, MAC, MBA,CMP and Dr. Francisco Martinez Cano

Revolutionizing Communication: The Role of Artificial Intelligence explores the wide-ranging effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on how we connect and communicate, changing social interactions, relationships, and the very structure of our society. Through insightful analysis, practical examples, and knowledgeable perspectives, the book examines chatbots, virtual assistants, natural language processing, and more. It shows how these technologies have a significant impact on cultural productions, business, education, ethics, advertising, media, journalism, and interpersonal interactions. Revolutionizing Communication is a guide to comprehending the present and future of communication in the era of AI. It provides invaluable insights for professionals, academics, and everyone interested in the significant changes occurring in our digital age.

https://www.routledge.com/Revolutionizing-Communication-The-Role-of-Artificial-Intelligence/Rojas-Martinez-Cano/p/book/9781032733425?srsltid=AfmBOoou3aXpERuMJYYsnLNcTjDEUPY8PmTujAWy0bahHJc1eB2EUHax

November 22, 2024

You are cordially invited to attend the public inaugural lecture of the workshop Towards Development of Mediatization Research VIII. The keynote speaker is Carlos Alberto Scolari, who is a researcher and expert in communication and digital media, interfaces and communication ecology. Building on the tradition of the theories of mass media, since 1990, he has been dedicated to studying new forms of communication arising from the spread of the World Wide Web.

Date: 22.11.2024 (Friday) 

Time: 11:15 - 12:00 CET 

Platform: MS Teams

Link: https://bit.ly/opening-lecture

Any substantive questions about the workshop can be answered by Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, via email: katarzyna.kopecka-piech@umcs.pl

Organizers: 

• Department of Mediatization of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin,
  
• Wroclaw Academic Centre
  
• Academia Europaea Wroclaw Knowledge Hub
  

The School of Communication at Simon Fraser University

Starting February 1st, 2025

The School of Communication at Simon Fraser University (SFU) is inviting applications for a three-year extended research fellowship as part of the Transatlantic Partnership Project EDIT: “An Exploration of Independent Journalism’s Epistemologies: Enhancing Democratic Resilience in the Age of Disinformation.” This fellowship is a unique opportunity for a researcher who wants to join the School of Communication as a PhD student to work under the supervision of Associate Professor Dr. Sarah Ganter while engaging in cutting- edge research and gaining experience in an international academic environment. Information about our PhD program can be found here: PhD in Communication Program

Your work

• You will contribute to and actively engage with the EDIT project

• You will actively support the research process by contributing to conceptual and theoretical work, ethics approval, data collection, data administration, data analysis and interpretation

• You will facilitate research documentation and administration

• You will attend the regular team meetings

• You will collaborate with an international team

• You will participate actively in publishing and public engagement activities

• You will work towards the successful completion of your PhD at SFU's School of Communication under the supervision of Associate Prof. Dr. Sarah Ganter

Your qualifications

• You hold a master’s degree in journalism, media and communication studies, or a closely related field. Practical experience as a journalist is a strong asset.

• You are excited about topics related to independent journalism, the safety and protection of journalists, and journalistic resilience. Interest in media governance studies and academic cosmopolitanism as an approach to research is a plus.

• You have first experience in conducting qualitative research

• You are comfortable working with computers and willing to use new software and project management tools

• Your written and spoken English is excellent, and you may be fluent in other languages

• You have excellent communication skills and appreciate teamwork and collegiality

• You are dedicated, curious, and enthusiastic and have distinct organizational skills

What we offer

• Research Fellowship (20 hrs./week) located in the EDIT project for three years, pending annual review

• Fellowship salary is between $29,000/year to $32,000/year

• Acceptance into the PhD program at the SFU School of Communication

• Possibility to work with the data from the Canadian part of the project as part of your PhD thesis

• Additional funding to present work from the project at conferences

• Additional funding opportunities for your PhD accessible via the university

• Workplace on SFU’s Burnaby Mountain Campus

• Training in research design, conceptual work, qualitative methods, and project management

• Access to an international network of scholars and an active local student community

• Professional mentorship beyond the project

• Access to additional training programs as provided by SFU Library

• We advocate for and value work-life balance in academia

• We advocate for and value diversity and collegiality in academia and beyond

Application Requirements

Interested candidates are invited to submit the following documents in a single PDF file:

1. Letter of intent (1page): Please include your motivation for applying, your research interests, and how they align with the fellowship and SFU School of Communication.

2. Academic curriculum vitae: Include academic degrees, achievements, research experience, and professional background. If applicable, include a list of your research publications and conference presentations.

3. Names and contact details of three academic referees

4. Transcript of records: Provide academic transcripts of your degrees.

5. MA thesis: Include a copy of your completed thesis in PDF format.

6. PhD proposal draft adressing questions related to independent journalism, safety of journalists/protection of journalists, and journalistic resilience. The draft (2 pages text plus time plan and references) will include (a) a statement of relevance, (b) a short literature review, (c) research questions, (d) a methodology section, (e) a time plan, (f) references.

Application Process

Please send your complete application as a single PDF file by December 2nd to sganter@sfu.ca with the subject line: Transatlantic Research Fellow Application—[Your Name]. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and the position call will be closed once a suitable candidate is identified.

About the SFU School of Communication

Located in Metro Vancouver, Canada, the SFU School of Communication is a leading school for research and education in communication studies. Our faculty is committed to fostering a vibrant, diverse academic community that addresses critical issues of public concern through interdisciplinary and collaborative research.

For questions about this call, please contact sganter@sfu.ca.

We look forward to receiving your application and welcoming you to the School of Communication at SFU!

May 20 - May 23, 2025

New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Deadline: November 30, 2024

https://www.websci25.org/

Important Dates

• Sat, November 30, 2024 Paper submission deadline
  
• Tue, January 31, 2025 Notification
  
• Tue, February 28, 2025 Camera-ready versions due
  
• Tue - Friday, May 20 - 23, 2025 Conference dates
  

About the Web Science Conference

Web Science is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex and multiple impacts of the Web on society and vice versa. The discipline is well situated to address pressing issues of our time by incorporating various scientific approaches. We welcome quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research, including techniques from the social sciences and computer science. In addition, we are interested in work exploring Web-based data collection and research ethics. We also encourage studies that combine analyses of Web data and other types of data (e.g., from surveys or interviews) to help better understand user behavior online and offline.

2025 Emphasis: Maintaining a human-centric web in the era of Generative AI 

Web-based experiences are more deeply integrated into human experiences than ever before in history. However, the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (including large language models) has drastically shifted the interactions between humans in the digital environment. The Web has never been more productive, but the integrity of human connection has been compromised. Trust and community have been eroded during this current era of the Web and researching alternative aspects of life on the Web is as essential as ever. Bots, deepfakes, and sophisticated cyberattacks are proliferating rapidly while people increasingly navigate the Web for news, social interaction, and learning. This year's conference especially encourages contributions investigating how humans are reconfiguring their Web-based engagements in the presence of artificial intelligence. Additionally, we welcome papers on a wide range of topics at the heart of Web Science. 

Possible topics across methodological approaches and digital contexts include but are not limited to: 

Understanding the Web        

• Trends in globalization and fragmentation of the Web
  
• The architecture, philosophy, and evolution of the Web
  
• Automation and AI in all its manifestations relevant to the Web
  
• Critical analyses of the Web and Web technologies
  
• The Spread of Large Models on the Web
  

Making the Web Inclusive       

• Issues of discrimination and fairness
  
• Intersectionality and design justice in questions of marginalization and inequality
  
• Ethical challenges of technologies, data, algorithms, platforms, and people on the Web
  
• Safeguarding and governance of the Web, including anonymity, security, and trust
  
• Inclusion, literacy and the digital divide
  
• Human-centered security and robustness on the Web
  

The Web and Everyday Life     

• Social machines, crowd computing, and collective intelligence
  
• Web economics, social entrepreneurship, and innovation
  
• Legal and policy issues, including rights and accountability for the AI industry
  
• The creator economy: Humanities, arts, and culture on the Web
  
• Politics and social activism on the Web
  
• Online education and remote learning
  
• Health and well-being online
  
• Social presence in online professional event spaces
  
• The Web as a source of news and information
  

Doing Web Science      

• Data curation, Web archives and stewardship in Web Science
  
• Temporal and spatial dimensions of the Web as a repository of information
  
• Analysis and modeling of human and automatic behavior (e.g., bots)
  
• Analysis of online social and information networks
  
• Detecting, preventing, and predicting anomalies in Web data (e.g., fake content, spam)
  
• Novel analysis techniques for Web and social network analysis
  
• Recommendation engines and contextual adaptation for Web tasks 
  
• Web-based information retrieval and information generation 
  
• Supporting heterogeneity across modalities, sensors, and channels on the Web. 
  
• User modeling and personalization approaches on the Web.

Format of the submissions

Please upload your submissions via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=websci25 

There are two submission formats.

* Full paper should be between 6 and 10 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.). Full papers typically report on mature and completed projects.

* Short papers should be up to 5 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.). Short papers will primarily report on high-quality ongoing work not mature enough for a full-length publication. 

All accepted submissions will be assigned an oral presentation (of two different lengths).  

All papers should adopt the current ACM SIG Conference proceedings template (acmart.cls). Please submit papers as PDF files using the ACM template, either in Microsoft Word format (available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template under “Word Authors”) or with the ACM LaTeX template on the Overleaf platform which is available https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-sig-proceedings-template/bmvfhcdnxfty. In particular, please ensure that you are using the two-column version of the appropriate template.

All contributions will be judged by the Program Committee upon rigorous peer review standards for quality and fit for the conference, by at least three referees. Additionally, each paper will be assigned to a Senior Program Committee member to ensure review quality.

WebSci-2025 review is double-blind. Therefore, please anonymize your submission: do not put the author(s) names or affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, and do not include funding or other acknowledgments in papers submitted for review. References to authors' own prior relevant work should be included, but should not specify that this is the authors' own work. It is up to the authors' discretion how much to further modify the body of the paper to preserve anonymity. The requirement for anonymity does not extend outside of the review process, e.g. the authors can decide how widely to distribute their papers over the Internet. Even in cases where the author's identity is known to a reviewer, the double-blind process will serve as a symbolic reminder of the importance of evaluating the submitted work on its own merits without regard to the authors' reputation. 

For authors who wish to opt-out of publication proceedings, this option will be made available upon acceptance. This will encourage the participation of researchers from the social sciences that prefer to publish their work as journal articles. All authors of accepted papers (including those who opt out of proceedings) are expected to present their work at the conference.

ACM Publication Policies 

1. By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

2. Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper.  ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors.  The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022.  We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts. 

Program Committee Chairs:

Fred Morstatter (University of Southern California)

Sarah Rajtmajer (Penn State University)

Vivek Singh (Rutgers University)

Marlon Twyman (University of Southern California) 

For any questions and queries regarding the paper submission, please contact the chairs at websci25@easychair.org

University of Fribourg

PhD student/research assistant (100%, German language required) in the field of strategic communication, organizational communication and public diplomacy from February 2025 (or later) with an interest in topics such as digitalization, artificial intelligence and their impact on the reputation and strategic communication of companies and states wanted at the chair of Prof. Dr. Diana Ingenhoff, University of Fribourg:

https://www.unifr.ch/dcm/de/assets/public/files/jobs/2410-WiMiDok_Orgakomm.pdf

The application deadline would be 15.12.2024.

Edited by: Gabriele Balbi and Roberto Leggero

Link to access the contents (3 chapters in Open Access)

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003424536/communication-maintenance-longue-dur%C3%A9e-gabriele-balbi-roberto-leggero?fbclid=IwY2xjawFx0GVleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHYkXfgNcwq4Kxrl5b-tYl_oGeXJm1GQZACIbskoP7EDGR0_YIuI2MyI1dg_aem_y9Myk8Ammo7udpkYosyfYg

Description

This interdisciplinary volume focuses on the politics, economics, technologies, uses, and cultures of maintenance of different forms of communication over long time or in Longue Durée.

Throughout the chapters, contributors from a wide range of fields explore transversal and trans-temporal issues of communication maintenance. Among these are the struggles to keep communication infrastructures functioning, the hidden work of maintenance done by both experts and non-experts such as everyday users, the political significance of maintaining communications (or not maintaining them), and the different habits and significance of maintenance in different times and world regions. The forms of communication covered include broadcasting, telecommunications such as the telegraph and telephone, digital and popular media as computers and mobile phones, mostly forgotten media like pneumatic tubes, transportation infrastructures, maps as used as tools to politically control land, the clock as a medium and a material artifact, and many more.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of communication and media studies, the history of science and technology, general history, geography, maintenance studies, and other related disciplines.

The Introduction, Chapter 5 and 8 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Table of content

Communication Studies Long for Maintenance Cultures: A Theoretical Introduction to the Book

Gabriele Balbi and Roberto Leggero

Part 1: Temporalities

1. The Clock of the Long Now in Longue Durée: Maintaining a Communication “Cool Tool” Through Millennia

Julie Momméja

2. Endless Frontiers of Maintenance: The Longue Durée of Communication Infrastructure in the United States

Andrew L. Russell

3. Sense Perception and the Maintenance of Pneumatic Mail Tubes in the Longue Durée: Feeling the Air, Preventing and Fixing Failures

Laura Meneghello

4. The “Technical Time” of the Luxembourgish Telephone System: Reflections on the Transformative Power of Maintenance

Stefan Krebs and Rebecca Mossop

Part 2: Theorizing

5. Power and Maintenance in the Alpine Middle Ages: A Long-Term View

Roberto Leggero

6. Maps as Maintenance. Designing and Controlling the Kingdom of Sardinia and the State of Milan’s Boundaries and Rivers in the 18th Century

Blythe Alice Raviola

7. Communicative Redundancy as a Maintenance Resource. The Dose Makes the Poison

Kirill Postoutenko

8. We Are All Maintainers: Everyday Practices of Media Maintenance in the Domestication of Technologies

Corinna Peil

Part 3: Infrastructuring

9. A Low Place in High Country: Maintaining Infrastructural Clearance Along the Backbone of the World

Sam P. Kellogg

10. Large-Scale Infrastructure System in Lisbon: Politics of Repair and Maintenance in the European Periphery in the 20th Century

Felipe Beuttenmüller Lopes Silva

11. Maintenance of a Monopoly: The Digitalization of the Telephone Network as an Attempt to Preserve the Telecommunications Monopoly for the Longue Durée

Matthias Röhr 

Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia 

Start date: Semester 1/2025 (enrolment by 24 February 2025) 

Stipend: A$32,192 per annum for a maximum duration of 3.5 years / A$45,000 per annum for Indigenous candidates (tax-free) 

For further information, see https://www.qut.edu.au/study/fees-and-scholarships/scholarships/polarisation-and-partisanship-in-australian-and-international-public-debates-2-phd-scholarships and contact Prof. Axel Bruns (a.bruns@qut.edu.au). 

Research Outline: 

We offer two scholarships on this topic, and specifically seek at least one Indigenous Australian candidate. Students from diverse and multilingual backgrounds are also especially encouraged to apply. 

Candidates may come from a range of backgrounds within the humanities and social sciences, and have an interest in working within media and communication studies, with a particular interest in populism, propaganda, and/or polarisation. At least one candidate should also have an interest in affect, emotion, identity, and fandom in public and political communication, and the way that these factors overlap and intersect with partisanship and populism. 

Candidates should have an interest in, and early experience with, working with qualitative, quantitative, and/or mixed-methods research approaches; our work provides options for drawing on big data from news media and social media sources as well as for deep analysis of small, targeted collections of content. In particular, this may also include multi-modal approaches which investigate the "video first" Internet and the way that this emphasis on audiovisual content affects the dynamics and drivers of partisanship and polarisation. 

Indigenous Australian candidates are welcome to address any relevant topic. Indigenous candidates may be interested in addressing topics like the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia and/or similar processes elsewhere in the world; however, there is absolutely no requirement for Indigenous candidates to address only such topics. Successful Indigenous Australian candidates will be eligible for the Indigenous Postgraduate Research Award (IPRA), which supersedes the 'Polarisation and Partisanship in Australian and International Public Debates' scholarship stipend. 

These two PhD projects will contribute to the work of the Australian Laureate Fellowship project Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate, a groundbreaking research project led by Prof. Axel Bruns and funded by the Australian Research Council for the period of 2022-27, and join a team of more than ten doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on related issues. 

The successful candidates will be supervised by Professor Axel Bruns and other members of the Laureate team, and have the opportunity to engage in an innovative and highly active team of researchers using cutting-edge qualitative and quantitative methods ranging from in-depth manual content analysis through computational social science to AI-enhanced analysis of public communication data from news media and social media sources. 

The candidates will join the vibrant scholarly community of the world-leading QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), and have an opportunity to connect with researchers across its domestic and international partner networks. As a member of the DMRC, you will also join a supportive and welcoming environment that prides itself on our respectful and diverse community.