ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

4-7 January 2023

Lisbon, Portugal

Deadline: October 10, 2022

The 3rd Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication is taking a comparative and global approach to the study of media and propaganda. 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 Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Helsinki), the 3rd Lisbon Winter School offers an opportunity for doctoral students and early career post-doctoral researchers to strategize around the study of media and propaganda together with senior scholars in the field.

Call for Applications

At a time in which multiple places around the globe are dealing with the effects of rampant disinformation and misinformation, propaganda is being revealed as a concept before its time. Widely associated with the falsehoods, manipulation and brainwashing that often accompany wartime, propaganda has been generally seen as a negative phenomenon describing the practices of ‘others’ who aim to deceive individuals, groups and societies. But this connotation is far from universal. While states, organizations and groups in the Global North typically reject descriptions of their own activity as propaganda, in many geographies in the Global South propaganda is mostly understood as a less virulent product of political and commercial advertising. Regardless of its meaning, propaganda has always played a central role in human societies, performed by political, economic, religious, cultural and social agents who aim to mold public opinion and people’s perception of reality.

In contemporary media landscapes that are marked by high polarization and a profusion of platforms for the instantaneous sharing of information, propaganda is easily disseminated and customized to allow its purveyors to reach specific targets in the context of wars, election campaigns, health crises and conflicts over identity and inclusion. Over the last decade, social media have become the main tools for disseminating not only state propaganda but also the sentiments of a wide set of interest groups designed to interfere in affairs by spreading untruthful narratives. While such activity has been apparent in multiple regions with the Covid-19 pandemic, political turbulence surrounding elections, mounting racial, gendered and ethnic violence as well as the recent invasion of Ukraine all point to a lingering resistance in the Global North to address these phenomena as propaganda. Instead, concepts like disinformation, misinformation, fake news and post-truth have become prevalent when describing the contemporary circulation of falsities and half-truths. For many, propaganda is seen as a thing of the past, despite its very real existence in these unstable times.

In his seminal book written a century ago, Walter Lippmann noted that “under certain conditions [people] respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities,” adding that “in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.” To what extent is this phenomenon evident today? To which extent is it undermining the possibilities of digital participation? What role is being played by journalists, activists, scientists, medical practitioners and other invested individuals in countering it?

These are some of the questions that will be addressed at the 3rd Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication. 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 propaganda in different geographies and across time. The list below illustrates some of the topics for possible consideration. Other topics dealing with media and propaganda s are also welcome:

· Dis- and misinformation, fake news and hate speech

· Participatory propaganda

· Warfare propaganda

· (International) media and soft power

· Propaganda and foreign policy

· Social media platforms and disinformation

· Fact-checking and other activities designed to counter propaganda

· Media and the dissemination of fear

· Persuasion, strategic communication and information management

· Authoritarian regimes and populist movements and propaganda (both contemporary and historical cases)

· Recreating history for propaganda purposes

· Bots, sock puppets and the dissemination of propaganda

· Deep fakes

· Propaganda in specific national and regional contexts

· Distorting science for propaganda purposes

· Propaganda and climate change

· Propaganda and racism

· Propaganda and misogyny

· Role of education in offsetting propaganda

PAPER PROPOSALS

Proposals should be sent to ucpwinterschool@gmail.com no later than October 10, 2022 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 late- October.

FULL PAPER SUBMISSION

Presenters will be required to send in full papers (max. 20 pages, 1.5 spacing) by December 9, 2022.

Winter School Convenors:

• Barbie Zelizer, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
• Francis Lee, Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Nelson Ribeiro, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
• Risto Kunelius, University of Helsinki
• Sarah Banet-Weiser, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California

For more information, please visit the Winter School website: https://www.lisbonwinterschool.com/

Tallinn University’s Baltic Film, Media and Arts School

Tallinn University’s Baltic Film, Media and Arts School is hiring a research fellow (postdoc) to work on film and TV industry public value creation processes using data science or network science methods. The fellow will be part of the research project Public Value of Open Cultural Data (https://publicvalueofdata.tlu.ee) and soon to be launched Horizon Europe project titled CresCine. The latter will focus on cross-sectional analysis of film industry data from multiple international databases aimed that discovering trends affecting film production and consumption in Europe. This work will be carried out together with Europe's leading film industry institutions and universities. The fellow will be also closely collaborating with our Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab (https://cudan.tlu.ee) team. 

Salary and other conditions are internationally competitive, please contact prof. Indrek Ibrus (indrek.ibrus@tlu.ee) for details. If agreed, the initial 2-year contract period can be extended by at least one year. More info about the position can be found here: https://www.tlu.ee/en/taxonomy/term/84/academic-competition-0

Edited by: Philippe J. Maarek

Explains the when and how of the different government communication strategies to COVID-19

Compares initiatives and methods of various government communication responses to the pandemic

Presents case studies and empirical evidence from all around the world.

Do know that until October 13th, for the launch of the book, yourself or your library can benefit from a 20% discount either on the printed book or on its electronic version by ordering on link.springer.com using at checkout the code QG4zXPSV0X72Bk.

Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies

Deadline (EXTENDED): September 30, 2022

Edited by Charles M. Ess, aline franzke shakti, Elisabetta Locatelli

Since the late 1990s, Internet Research Ethics (IRE) has emerged as a burgeoning field, fueled by an ever-growing variety of ethical challenges and concerns (Zimmer and Buchanan, 2016). To name but a few, questions include how to minimize risks for researchers and research subjects, and issues surrounding informed consent and intersecting interests between corporations and academic approaches: both emphasize the importance of the integrity of researcher but also add challenges to Ethics Committees, who aim to confirm what research can or cannot be conducted (franzke et al., 2020). In recent years, the societal and technological landscape has changed and expanded still again: platforms such as social media and apps aggregate a significant number of users, generating new social, cultural, and media practices to study. Research into these realms is stimulating and challenging but further implies methodological and ethical issues surrounding both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Both ethnographies and big data approaches in particular have different but compelling ethical issues to consider (Zimmer, Kinder-Kurlanda, 2017; Zook et al, 2017). Actually, there is the need to study and comprehend users' behaviors and their socio-cultural implications but users need to be more aware of what may happen to the data they posted and also about the research they are involved into. Moreover, the complex nature of AI technology and platform logics has evoked thunderous academic debates surrounding buzzwords such as fake news, and the importance of taking up misinformation, hate speech and ethical reflection in social media research is more compelling than ever before. In addition to these changes, the role and importance of internet research ethics has grown for over a decade and the approach of having it incorporated by design into the research projects is increasingly more common (Ibiricu, Van Der Made, 2020). For example, when participating in public grants and fundings such as Horizon Europe, the evaluation of the ethics of research is an aspect required from the very beginning also for social sciences and humanities. This entails a specific attention to privacy and developing a new attitude and best practices also for these disciplines, with consequences for how research projects are developed and carried out, including ethics assessments from its very beginning through its dissemination. Among the new challenges there is also the need of making research data open, requiring a further level of reflection.

Considering this landscape, the present issue of Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies focuses on the new challenges of the ethics of social media and internet research through eliciting papers addressing theoretical reflections and research projects across the world especially related to social sciences, media studies, performing arts, and cultural studies. This topic is consistent with the tradition of the journal and its attention to the research on media and its context.

The aim is to make a collection of research experiences as well as theoretical reflections that can serve as useful examples and references for the academic community.

The call for papers invites submission of abstracts regarding the following topics of internet and social media research ethics; abstracts on other topics related to internet research ethics are also welcome:

• Informed consent;
• Possible harms to research subjects (especially when dealing with vulnerable subjects such as children, immigrants and people at the margins, and sensitive issues, such as gender and health);
• Potential harms vis-a-vis the safety and integrity of the researcher;
• Privacy and data protection with small data (e.g., ethnographies, interviews) and big data;
• The role of the research participants in the research project (e.g., considering them as active subjects, as in research with children or in research-action projects);
• Internet Research Ethics across countries (e.g., comparative studies, the role(s) of Ethics Review Boards, etc.);
• Ethics by design and the design of the research process;
• Dissemination of the research and open data.

Submission details

Please send your abstract and a 150 words biographical note by September 30, 2022 to:

redazione.cs@unicatt.it

elisabetta.locatelli@unicatt.it

aline.franzke@gmail.com

c.m.ess@media.uio.no

Abstracts should be between 300 to 400 words of length (in English). All submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, contact details and a short bio for each author. Authors will be notified of proposal acceptance/rejection by mid-October, 2022.

If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article, in English, by February 17, 2023.

Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

Articles must not exceed 5’000/6’000-words (including references)

For editorial guidelines, please refer to the section “Guide for the authors” on the Comunicazioni sociali website http://comunicazionisociali.vitaepensiero.com

Contributions will be submitted to a double-blind peer review process.

The issue number 2.2023 of Comunicazioni Sociali will be published in September, 2023.

“Comunicazioni Sociali” is indexed in Scopus and it is an A-class rated journal by ANVUR in: Cinema, photography and television (L-ART/06), Performing arts (L-ART/05), and Sociology of culture and communication (SPS/08).

References

Franzke, aline shakti et al. (2020) Internet Research : Ethical Guidelines 3.0 Association of Internet Researchers. Available at: https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf.

Ibiricu, B., & van der Made, M. L. (2020). Ethics by design: a code of ethics for the digital age. Records Management Journal, 30(3), 395–414. https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-08-2019-0044

Zimmer, M. and Buchanan, E. (2016) Internet Research Ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-internet-research/.

Zimmer, M., & Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (Eds.). (2017). Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts. Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age. New York: Peter Lang (Digital Formation series). https://doi.org/10.3726/b11077

Zook, M., Barocas, S., Boyd, D., Crawford, K., Keller, E., Gangadharan, S. P., … Pasquale, F. (2017). Ten simple rules for responsible big data research. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(3), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005399

December 9, 2022

Online event

Deadline: October 15, 2022

Continuing our research meetings focused on specific issues of mediatization research chaired by eminent experts (Göran Bolin (2017), Johan Fornäs (2018), Andreas Hepp (2019), Mark Deuze (2020) André Jansson (2021)), this year the workshop will take place online on the 9 December 2022 and it will be led by Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow. We invite all mediatization researchers who wish to discuss their own research projects in a narrow and closed group of media scholars under the guidance of an expert. The title of this year's edition is: Mediatization of War.

READ MORE: https://www.umcs.pl/pl/towards-development-of-mediatization-research-vi-mediatization-of-war,24329.htm#page-1

Recent evidence on the state of mental health among academics paints an alarming picture. Faculty members and PhD students around the world run a high risk of developing mental health issues, such as psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and burnout, at some point in their career. Many of them seek professional help either through their institution or on their own as the availability of institutional support structures varies greatly across universities. 

Overall, studies consistently point to a much higher prevalence of mental health issues among academics compared to most other working populations. COVID-19 has intensified work-related stress for many scholars, but the problem clearly predates the pandemic. The structural conditions of academic work, such as high publication pressure, fierce competition, and a culture of constant evaluation, are known to contribute to unhealthy levels of occupational stress. 

Despite such growing awareness of mental health issues in the academic world generally, we know relatively little about the situation in the field of media and communication studies more specifically. To address this deficiency, ECREA – together with several other international associations of scholars – participates in a joint endeavor to map the state of mental health in scholars of media and communication.

The first step in this effort is an online survey administered to media and communication scholars in late September and early October 2022. The aim of the survey is to gauge the scale of mental health issues in our field, identify structural conditions that produce greater vulnerability, and point to potential ways of improving the situation. The study was initiated and is coordinated by Thomas Hanitzsch and Antonia Markiewitz (both from LMU Munich) and Henrik Bødker (Aarhus University).

Start the survey (active until October 18th, 2022): https://survey.ifkw.lmu.de/AMHiMCS/

Special Issue of Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook

Deadline: October 1, 2022

Deadlines: Abstracts of 400–500 words, together with a brief biographical note, should be submitted by 1 October 2022. Please email these directly to belen.puebla@urjc.es and sgomez@uva.es

Full papers of 6500–7000 words are due on 15 December 2022.

Description and Thematic Areas: 

The contemporary challenges facing the political culture are to be seen as risks to the well-being and proper functioning of democratic systems.

A functioning democracy requires that the role of the media, as vehicles of political socialization, but also as instruments of participation and public opinion, be taken into account. Consequently, the media are seen as both parts of the problem and part of the solution.

The scope of the Special Issue, ‘Pop Politics on a Mutable Screen’, attempts to broaden the vision of political communication beyond hard news and to consider that the messages received by the audience increasingly include soft news and media associated with entertainment and popular culture.

From cinema and television to video games, through the different social platforms and the figure of the prosumer.

For this thematic issue, we invite theoretical and empirical contributions that explore how technological change affects and is affected by political communication processes and what characteristics make up the politainment. We would like to explore a wide range of topics involving political communication, entertainment, digital engagement, platformization, infotainment, screen time and alternative forms of communication as their central themes.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Audiovisual content platforms with politainment formats, selective consumption, and social audiences.

• Viral political content distributed through social media and platforms.

• Gamification, politicking and digital games with political content.

• Myth and ideology in contemporary video games

• Ideological polarization, political spectacularization and hate speech through the reception of information on social networks.

• Social algorithms in personalized information dissemination of spectacular political content.

• Complexity and political discourses in entertainment contexts.

• Mobilization and democratic constraints in the new digital ecosystem of the ideological polarization

• Strategic use of entertainment in social networks for online campaigning and political engagement.

• Democratic consequences and citizen perception of politainment.

The role of the prosumer of political infotainment on the internet.

• Characteristics, transmedia narratives and formats of the new political fiction in cinema and television.

• Political storytelling: storytelling by politicians for strategic purposes.

• Music entertainment to generate engagement among social audiences and other uses of music by political parties.

• New strategies in digital campaigns, disguised advertising through infotainment, and gate-watching techniques to generate campaign content.

• Political personification of politics and appearance of the political figure in unusual media and formats.

• Representation of politicians in political infotainment content.

• Emergence of political movements in new media.

• Technification of politics.

• Political ethics in infotainment.

Full CFP can be found at: https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/66825/1/NewCinema_Pop_Politics_on_a_Mutable_Screen_CfP.pdf

The full author guidelines can be read at: https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/8890/1/NL_NFC.pdf

Special Issue in Digital Journalism

Deadline: November 11, 2022

Guest Editors: Gregory Perreault, Maxwell Foxman, Phoebe Maares, Valerie Hase

This special issue in Digital Journalism invites submissions that theorize, describe, or contextualize epistemological shifts in journalism production. We welcome theoretically-informed and empirically-rigorous articles (using quantitative, qualitative, computational, and/or mixed methods) as well as conceptual articles that speak globally to related issues, including but not limited to:

• (Meta-)theoretical frameworks, discourses, and methodological approaches for studying epistemologies of digital journalism production
  
• The influence of emerging or under-researched news forms and genres (e.g., lifestyle journalism, fashion journalism, gaming/video journalism, podcast journalism, data journalism) on knowledge claims and production in the news.
  
• Shifting journalistic roles, especially journalists' openness and epistemological boundaries, often on emerging platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, podcasting platforms, or messenger apps
  
• Economic, technical, and cultural factors and contexts leading to epistemological shifts in what constitutes journalists and news, for instance the influence of time and economic pressure, precarity, new infrastructures and platforms for news consumption
  
• Audience participation or disengagement with epistemic practices, as well as acceptance or rejection of journalistic claims
  

Abstract deadline: 11 November 2022

Manuscript deadline: 24 February 2023

The full call can be found here: bit.ly/3qUVDcv

Special issue of Frontiers in Communication

Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 October 2022

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 April 2023

Editors: Sylvie Grosjean, Fred Matte, Maria Cherba, & Stephanie Fox

Description: 

Digital health technologies have emerged as a potential solution to transform health care systems into more sustainable organizations, and to support patient-centered care. A shift of health care from hospitals to patients’ homes is encouraged and facilitated by digital health technologies such as telemedicine, telecare-systems, mobile applications, tracking and sensor technologies, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based health technologies. These innovations provide new ways to communicate about health by playing an active role in how patients interact with health care providers or self-manage their disease at home. Technologies aiming to facilitate care at a distance (e.g., through teleconsultation or telecare systems), or to improve tailored health communication (e.g., by using mHealth or AI-based health technologies), affect care practices, care coordination, and social relations of care.

Over the past decade, social science and humanities research has documented changes in the organization of care and the redistribution of responsibilities. Oudshoorn (2011), for example, investigates the redistribution of roles among patients, nurses, and physicians during the implementation of a remote cardiac monitoring device. In the same vein, AI-based health technologies transform how health care systems relate with patients by providing more patient-centered and personalized care services. Some technologies are developed in clinical or hospital contexts to support personalized medicine or improve diagnosis. Others are developed for use by patients and caregivers in their everyday life, and to support self-care and improve access to personalized care resources.

These technologies provide access to tailored educational resources and enhanced health communication strategies. At the same time, their use presents complex social, organizational, communicational, and interactional challenges. Such challenges include building constructive relationships with technology, and improving health communication to engage people in self-care practices or limit possible physical, psychological, or emotional harms for patients. The integration of digital health technologies into clinical practice and the daily lives of patients thus remains a major challenge for health organizations.

This Research Topic will focus on various communication practices related to the use of digital health technologies by patients and/or health care providers and will explore:

(1) The ways in which these technologies reconfigure and transform health care organizations and the patient/provider interaction and relationship. For example:

- How should physical examinations at a distance be performed? How do health care providers create positive relationships at a distance with patients? And what communication skills should health care providers develop to perform teleconsultations?

- What sort of “invisible work” do patients and caregivers do when using telehealth technologies? What skills are needed to integrate these technologies into care practices?

(2) The social and affective relationships people develop with, and through, digital health technologies. Tracing the “sociability” of these innovations, to put it with Pols & Moser (2009, 161) “might teach us something about why people do or do not like to use [them], by attending to what norms or ‘normativities’ they enact, how they structure interaction, and thus in what ways technologies help to shape ways of living with disease.” For example:

- How do patients integrate (or not) telehealth technologies into their daily lives? What are the different ways of using them?

- How can these technologies support self-care practices? How do telehealth technologies reconfigure patient-physician communication?

- How does telehealth impact the coordination of care and the work of care teams?

Empirical studies focusing on the use of care technologies in real-life settings are encouraged (e.g., ethnographic, narrative or visual approaches, interaction analysis based on ethnomethodological approach, conversational analysis, or multimodal analysis).

Instructions: 

Abstract length: 1000 words (max limits)

Abstract format: Your abstract should simply be a summary of the article you plan to submit. Please include the following information in your abstract: purpose of the article, theoretical framework, method, results and discussion. 

To submit your abstract, click on this link, then on Submit (top right) and follow the instructions: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/40425/integrating-digital-health-technologies-in-clinical-practice-and-everyday-life-unfolding-innovative 

November 15-18, 2022

MeLCi Lab

Deadline (extended): September 30, 2022

The Media Literacy and Civic Cultures (MeLCi Lab) Autumn School “Media, gender, intersectionality and mediated social mobilizations”, to be held from 15th to 18th November 2022, aims to introduce PhD students to current discussions in the field, as well capacitate PhD students with a set of hands-on research skills that help them in their projects, supporting their professional development.

By adopting an integrative and multidisciplinary approach, the school will bring together several scholars for a set of workshops and communications to foster research skills related to scientific writing, dissemination, funding applications, and innovative methodologies. 

We will address topics about media representations of gender and sexualities, mediated activisms, civic mobilizations, ethics, etc.

MeLCi Lab Autumn School intends to be an inclusive space, and three equity grants will be available for students from underrepresented communities.

MeLCi Lab is currently looking for proposals of PhD students who want to apply for the Autumn School. 

These applications can be submitted until the extended deadline of the 30th of September.

Read more: https://melcilab.cicant.ulusofona.pt/.../ii-melci-lab.../