ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

November 20-22, 2022

University of Bonn/Germany (and online)

Deadline: October 23, 2022

An international Conference of the Research Group “Autonomy and autonomous Systems” of the Universities Bonn & RWTH Aachen

Autonomy, originally a core concept of the Enlightenment epitomizing aspirations of modernity, has become one of the central and particularly high-profile concepts in debates on digital transformations.

The discourse figures of this debate mostly comprise a polarizing perspective that oscillates between the restrictive or dangerously uncontrollable effect of digital technologies, such as facial recognition, surveillance or 'autonomous weapons' and the liberating, autonomy-enhancing function ('smart home', 'assisted living'). Contexts of application include e.g. administration, military and police, social and health- related services, medicine and education, and not to forget, the digital economy with its diverse challenges regarding the future of work. Today, in times of digitalization, datafication, and an increasing influx of artificial intelligence into many sectors of society, the concept of autonomy needs re-definition and reflection under contemporary technological conditions.

Our starting point for the reflections on understanding of autonomy in the digital age is a conceptual sensitivity that asserts the possibility of autonomy for both personal-subjective and collective-social relations. On both levels, conditions for autonomy are subject to rapid change. Outlining the distinction between autonomous and automatic systems, different degrees of autonomy can be distinguished - from weak forms, in which it is a matter of gradual absence of external control, to strong forms, in which the respective 'autonomous' entity is able to set its own laws (rules).

With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and the increasing use of robots in everyday life technological transformations have come along with social changes and new conflicts. Questions of privacy and data use, the future of work or the subsequent dawn of a 'post-capitalist' society, as well as the discussions about the consequences of autonomously acting combat robots and the ethical regulation of warfare are just a few examples of the present challenges and those still to come. Meanwhile, discourses of technological autonomy address an array of issues concerning the future of democracy. Global digital dependencies, the delegation of authoritative power and the rise of global platform companies challenge the political autonomy of democratic states and their technological sovereignty. On a cultural level, the integration of autonomous systems into society launches a discussion about a technologically induced crisis of humanist values and question the ideals of the enlightenment for today’s socio-technical practices. Studies related to trans- or posthumanism construe technologies as an opportunity to improve or even overcome the human condition. Visions of human enhancement, virtuality, cyborg-societies mingling with autonomous machines and artificial superintelligence might sound utopian today, but perhaps not anymore tomorrow. The reasoning in both optimistic assumption and skeptical anticipation illustrates the urgency of re-defining not just our idea of personal autonomy within the digital, and datafied society but also the need to theorize and analyze new forms of autonomy to understand the next phase of digital society. Interdisciplinary research on the concept of autonomy is needed in order to substantiate our normative, functional, and epistemic claims on the development of the relationship between humans and technology in the future.

The conference “Autonomy in the Digital Age: Rethinking Relationships between Humans, Technology, and Society” aims to encourage a conversation among all disciplines interested in issues concerning ‘Autonomy and Technology’, allowing for diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives. We intend to explore the significance of autonomous living in our digital societies, to question the humanist concept of autonomy itself in our technological reality and to analyse the implications of our interaction with (semi)autonomous systems.

Submissions from all social sciences, humanities and technology disciplines related to the following topics and questions are highly welcomed, but do not need to be limited to these:

Section 1: Theoretical approaches & interdisciplinary perspectives:

How are digital data practices in public and private life enabling or hindering informational self- determination? How do we reconfigure notions like privacy and surveillance? How will the growing influence of autonomous systems affect social structures, political systems, labour and governmental control measures?

Section 2: Contexts:

How are (emerging) modes of (technical) autonomy and agency reshaping societies and personal life- worlds? Which different puzzles of “autonomy” emerge in practical contexts and fields from art, medicine and political institutions? Are we as a digital society at the beginning of a cultural opposition of humanism and technicity? How can cultural and systemic differences in technology policy be reflected and specified on the basis of the innovation of autonomous systems?

Section 3: Norms and ethics:

Which (post-Eurocentric) epistemologies and vocabularies question/enrich the debates about “autonomy” and Humanism in the new digital reality? Are agens/patiens ethics suitable as a theoretical framework for ascribing moral status (person and actor status) to autonomous systems? Should autonomy be understood as an intrinsic quality or as an effect in a relationship characterized by power relations? What normative requirements must autonomous systems and infrastructures meet in an ethically engaged digital society?

Section 4: Conversations:

How to conceptualize Human-Machine Interaction and machine-machine interactions in social sciences? Are individualistic or collectivistic designs of the digital society the vanishing point of technical autonomy issues? What is the status of the idea of autonomy in a digital society in which mutually autonomous interactions between humans and technology have become a reality?

Section 5: Systems and machines:

What degree of autonomy do we ascribe to robots? What synergies arise from the collaboration between humans and autonomous systems in different contexts? What role do autonomous robots play in hybrid decision-making-processes? Can autonomous robots be conceptualized as part of an automated process? Which criteria guide the human-centered design of autonomous systems?

 Keynote Speakers

We are pleased to announce the keynote speakers for the conference:

• Professor Dr. Lucy Suchman
  
• University of Lancaster (UK)
  

Submissions

The CfP invites contributions to: (1) individual presentations, (2) thematic panels. If possible, submissions should be assigned to one of the topics above. Please let us know whether you would like to come to Bonn or only participate online. This is not a final decision. We will ask you for a final decision during the registration process (October 2022).

(1) Submissions for individual presentations: Submissions for individual 20-minute presentations include an abstract of max. 2000 characters (including spaces, title and bibliography with max. three titles plus a short CV). Please make clear in the submission whether the submitted talk can be considered for a short talk and poster presentation, if applicable.

(2) Submissions for thematic panels: Proposals for thematic panels include three to four individual papers (per individual paper an abstract of max. 2000 characters incl. spaces, title and bibliography with max. three titles as well as a short CV) as well as a frame text (max. 2000 characters incl. spaces, title and bibliography with max. three titles) outlining the topic of the panel, the context of the papers as well as the fit to the conference topic. Please include a proposal for the panel moderation.

Please submit via email to thimm@uni-bonn.de or phengel@uni-bonn.de

Review

All submissions will be reviewed by the members of the research group ‘Autonomy and autonomous Systems’ in a double-blind review process. The following evaluation criteria apply to (1) individual presentations:

1. Clarity and conciseness of the presentation

2. Originality and innovativeness of the contribution 3. Relevance of the research question

4. Quality of the theoretical framework

 5. Quality of methodology/approach

6. Fit of the contribution to the conference topic

For (2) panel submissions, the entire panel, rather than the individual presentations, will be evaluated, and therefore will be judged based on the following criteria:

1. Clarity and conciseness of the presentation

2. Fit of the individual contributions to each other

3. Relevance of the panel within the conference topic

Deadline and Notifications:

Deadline for all submissions: October 23rd, 2022 Notification for acceptance until November 1st, 2022

Contact: Prof. Caja Thimm (thimm@uni-bonn.de) or Phillip Engelhardt, M.A. (phengel@uni-bonn.de)

Fees: The conference is free of charge.

Venue:

Universitätsclub Bonn e.V. Konviktstraße 9

53113 Bonn

More information: www.autonomy-research-group.org

October 13, 2022

I am pleased to invite you to the next in the series of IPRA Thought Leadership webinars. The webinar Rising to the challenge: how to protect reputation when crisis strikes will be presented by Jonathan Hemus on Thursday 13 October 2022 at 12.00 GMT/UCT (unadjusted).

What is the webinar content?

When crisis strikes, an organisation's reputation, value, and the livelihoods of its stakeholders are all in jeopardy. The ability of leaders to do and say the right things at this moment will determine the fate of the organisation and all those affected by it. Given this intense pressure, it's not surprising that some leaders falter. PR professionals can play a major role in helping their senior management colleagues to navigate through a crisis but only if they fully understand the context in which they are working and the pitfalls to avoid. Calling upon twenty-five years' experience in crisis management, Jonathan Hemus will share with attendees: why smart people do irrational things in a crisis; the most common mistakes made by leaders in a crisis; 10 golden rules for crisis management success; and how to become a trusted advisor.

How to join

Register here at Airmeet. (The time shown should adjust to your device’s time zone.)

A reminder will be sent 1 hour before the event.

Background to IPRA

IPRA, the International Public Relations Association, was established in 1955, and is the leading global network for PR professionals in their personal capacity. IPRA aims to advance trusted communication and the ethical practice of public relations. We do this through networking, our code of conduct and intellectual leadership of the profession. IPRA is the organiser of public relations' annual global competition, the Golden World Awards for Excellence (GWA). IPRA's services enable PR professionals to collaborate and be recognised. Members create content via our Thought Leadership essays, social media and our consultative status with the United Nations. GWA winners demonstrate PR excellence. IPRA welcomes all those who share our aims and who wish to be part of the IPRA worldwide fellowship. For more see www.ipra.org

Background to Jonathan Hemus

Jonathan is the founder of crisis management consultancy Insignia. He was previously global head of crisis and issues management at Porter Novelli. Jonathan works with business leaders to ensure they have the capability to do the right things under the intense pressure of a crisis. Driven by a passion to prevent the needless harm caused by a mis-handled crisis, he enables his clients to successfully prepare for cyber-attacks, catastrophic accidents, management misdeeds, product contamination or environmental incidents. He is the author of Crisis proof – How to prepare for the worst day of your business life. He is a visiting lecturer at Henley Business School, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the University of Central Florida.

Contact

International Public Relations Association Secretariat

United Kingdom

secgen@ipra.org 

Telephone +44 1634 818308

The European Audiovisual Observatory, which is part of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, is recruiting Junior Analysts for both its Market and Legal Departments. Eligible candidates must be aged under 32 and hold the citizenship of one of the Members of the Council of Europe.

The deadline for applications is the 18th of October 2022.

More information can be found here: https://www.coe-recruitment.com/files_pdf.axd?id=36f8e95f-3635-4755-b14a-aa65d74e0c3a&filename=1961_VacancyDetails.pdf

Crisis is always upon us. One after another and often overlapping, we live in a constant state of crisis. Journalism plays a fundamental role in such context fostering public deliberation and holding those in power to account. In this sense, two researchers from the University of Coimbra and the University of Edinburgh are launching, between September and November, a crowdfunding initiative for publishing a book on crisis and journalism, under the perspective of scholars and professional journalists.

The crowdfunding campaign is held and supported through the scientific crowdfunding channel of the OPERAS Research Infrastructure, which supports open scholarly communication in the European Research Area for the Social Sciences and Humanities and gathers 54 organisations in 18 countries.

The goal of the campaign is to gather 6,200 euros for covering the costs of the book publication, which will invite scholars and professional journalists to discuss a wide range of perspectives of crisis and journalism, in six thematic areas, connecting theory and practice. The crowdfunding campaign is being run from Tuesday, 27 September to Friday, 11 November 2022.

About the book

Journalism provides crucial and accurate information for better decision-making among citizens and can promote necessary debates to help policymaking at the governmental level. During the current Covid-19 pandemic, journalism sounded the alarms. Helped to raise awareness and clarified a virus that was yet unknown, defended vaccination programs and denounced world leaders doing a poor job of managing a global health crisis.

However, journalism faces a crisis of its own struggling with radical changes in the media system amidst disinformation and infodemics. At the same time, different crises affect different countries in different ways. Therefore, it is time for a book that analyses the dynamics within the relationship between crisis and journalism, taking these aspects into account. Furthermore, a book that can abridge the theory and practice divide as well as go beyond Western or Global North perspectives.

The book will be divided into six specific thematic areas under the broader theme of journalism and crisis (politics, economics, public health, climate change, migration, and war and conflict) Each of the areas will form a chapter with two key papers, being always addressed by an invited diverse range of academics and professional journalists. Then, each thematic area will be addressed one time from the perspective of Journalism Studies by academics and one time from the perspective of those who produce the news, who will have the opportunity to critically reflect on their experiences. 

About the editors

Juliana Alcantara, PhD candidate in Communication Sciences and master’s in journalism and Communication at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra. In 2018/2019, she received the 3% Award of the Best Students of the UC. In 2022, she was also a visiting PhD Scholar at Utrecht University. Juliana has postgraduate degrees in Business Communication and Teaching in Higher Education. Bachelor in Social Communication with a major in Journalism. Plus, she has more than ten years of professional experience as a public relations and journalist, working in the Brazilian mainstream media. She is currently working on her PhD thesis funded by the Portuguese national funding (FCT) on gender and journalism in the context of the covid-19 public health crisis.

Ricardo Ferreira Ribeiro, PhD candidate in Politics and tutor (teaching assistant) at the University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science. His research analyses the roles of journalism in processes of democratic backsliding. Ribeiro’s thesis is shaped by his experience as a journalist, which includes 18 years as a reporter, editor, and international correspondent for major Brazilian news outlets. Ricardo also has a master’s in journalism and Communication from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, where he received three awards for outstanding academic performance.

About OPERAS

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH.

OPERAS aims to make Open Science a reality for research in the SSH and achieve a scholarly communication system where knowledge produced in the SSH benefits researchers, academics, students and more generally the whole society across Europe and worldwide, without barriers. 

Link to the crowdfunding webpage:

https://wemakeit.com/projects/crisis-and-journalism  

Contacts and more information:

Ricardo Ribeiro Ferreira - ricardo.rf@ed.ac.uk  

Juliana Alcantara - alc.juli@gmail.com

For the OPERAS crowdfunding channel info: arasteh@maxweberstiftung.de  

Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2022

Edited by Frédérik Lesage and Michael Terren

As part of Palgrave Macmillan’s “Creative Working Lives” series (edited by Susan Luckman and Stephanie Taylor) 

The tools, instruments, and media used to create cultural artefacts have always played a key role in culture: they enable and constrain how creators express themselves through their works, and in doing so shape our understanding of skill, formal conventions, and the social order of culture and creativity. An increasing number of these tools for creative practices are software whose use is a near-compulsory aspect of the contemporary working lives of their practitioners. Despite the ubiquity of software tools in contemporary cultural production, and while there are studies that consider individual fields or industries, there have been few opportunities to consider this condition from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This book will explore how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced through these digital products and services — a process we refer to as softwarization. We use this term as a kind of provocation that speaks to historically and materially specific sensibilities that shape contemporary cultural practices and creative industries. While softwarization draws particular attention to application software as the quintessential contemporary creative tool, we use the term to encompass a more complex digital assemblage that includes complementary processes in the composition of creative tools including their remediation, platformization, and datafication (to name only a few). If, as we argue, creative tools and softwarization are key to understanding contemporary cultural production, it is essential that we understand them as articulations of political forces, economic interests, and cultural forms in their own right.

Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production aims to advance this concept from a variety of creative disciplines and practices, toward a more holistic understanding of the relations between cultures and their contemporary means of production. By bringing disparate creative and methodological traditions together in one volume, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of approaches for understanding this complex, emerging, and dynamic field that speaks beyond the disciplinary-specific categories of ‘tool,’ ‘instrument,’ and/or ‘software’. This edited book will make a unique intervention in the fields of cultural production and the cultural and creative industries.

This edited volume is to be published in late 2023 in Palgrave Macmillan’s “Creative Working Lives” series, edited by Susan Luckman and Stephanie Taylor. We welcome contributions from researchers, instructors, and creative practitioners from any discipline. We also welcome contributions from anywhere in the world.

Examples of creative tools:

We acknowledge that ‘creative tools’ and ‘software tools’ are imprecise terms that point to the lack of shared vocabulary across disciplines — thus, we find it appropriate to suggest example types of tools that we are particularly interested in:

1.       Digital audio workstations (Pro Tools, Ableton Live, GarageBand), plug-ins, software synthesisers, and peripheral hardware

2.       Image editors (Photoshop, Sketch) and historical visual editors (e.g. Flash, Corel Draw) 

3.       Video editors (Premiere Pro, Final Cut)

4.       Game engines (Unity, Unreal), middleware (Wwise), and in-game creative tools (Roblox, Minecraft)

5.       3D modelling (CAD, Blender) and animation software (Maya)

6.       Bespoke text editors (e.g. Scrivener, Ulysses) and mainstream text editors used in literary production (Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice)

7.       Suites, software bundles, and parent companies (Adobe Creative Cloud, Avid, Apple, Autodesk) and historical examples (Macromedia)

8.       Presentation software (PowerPoint, Canva)

9.       Social media content creation functionality (e.g. video editing in TikTok)

The chapters for this book will be between 6000-7500 words and will be organised into the following broad areas: 

Creative tools and technologies for cultural production: theoretical perspectives

Chapters in this section will examine various definitions of creative tools and their implications for cultural production along various theoretical and methodological perspectives (ex. historical, ethnographic, political economic, etc.). How can scholars of cultural production take the role of media technologies and digital tools seriously without falling into technological determinism? In what ways does the softwarization of artistic and creative practice shape cultural production? What theories of techno-social relations can account for the rise, proliferation, and in some cases hegemonic status of softwarization? How can we reconcile changing conceptions of creativity and artistic agency with advancements in theories of technological mediation? How do existing conceptions of creative tools reproduce existing gendered and racialized inequities (to name only two)? How might we better critique such conceptions?  

From tools to platforms: developing and maintaining technical ecologies

Processes of softwarization for creative tools sometimes embrace the logic of the platform, bringing creatives, third-party developers, and secondary content creators together in some sort of mediated exchange of cultural goods. Distinct from content distribution platforms like Amazon, Spotify, or Netflix, the platformization of creative tools can foster new industries, such as audio plug-ins or 3D model libraries, bringing reputation and diversity to the platform. However, developing for privatised platforms carries risks and contingencies, and, as attested by Photoshop’s transition to Creative Cloud, can be captured into proprietary ecosystems. In this section, we consider the political, economic, and infrastructural effects of organising cultural production and tool development in this way. We also consider adjacent processes and structures of development such as certified educational programmes, proprietary or third-party hardware, application programming interfaces (APIs) for creative tools, and software-as-a-service pricing models. 

Cultures of creative tools: communities of practice and their individuation 

Commercial interests continue to co-opt and reify artistic and creative methods into tools as a means of establishing a particular, neoliberal kind of creative working life. This engenders new forms of community and participation, from social media platforms and forums dedicated to certain creative tools to communities of artistic and creative practitioners organising to design and disseminate and use creative tools that challenge this alienating creativity dispositif. In this section, we collect case studies and examples of collaborations, remixes, hacks, and any other alternative approaches to creative tools for cultural production. 

The following is a list of potential topics:

• Bridging theories of technology and cultural production
  
• Categorical distinctions between software tools and digital media
  
• Theoretical perspectives on creative agency and its mediation/mediatization through creative tools
  
• Cultural/creative industries of software and creative tools
  
• The material assemblages of creative tools
  
• Affordances of softwarization and creative tools
  
• The marketization, financialization, and/or assetization of creative practice through software
  
• Cultural work of designing creative tools
  
• Creative labour with creative tools
  
• Critical pedagogical perspectives on creative tools
  
• (Con)figurations of creativity through creative tools
  
• Representations of creative subjectivities through advertising and grey literature on software tool
  
• Gendered subjectivities of creative tools and their communities
  
• Global perspectives on creative tools and their intersections with race, class, and cultural capital
  
• Colonizing and decolonizing creative practice through software
  
• Alternative uses of creative tools
  
• The aesthetic economies of plugins and patches 
  
• Social media as creative tools
  
• Gaming and creative tools
  
• Music and creative tools
  
• Graphic design and creative tools
  
• Video and creative tools
  
• Memes and creative tools
  
• Presentations and creative tools
  
• Visualization and creative tools
  
• Photography and creative tools
  
• Conceptualizing creative tools for cultural production 
  
• Exploring the various modalities of creative tools
  
• The platformization of creative tools
  
• Designing software tools greater creative autonomy for practitioners
  
• Creative tools and the culture industry

Potential list of approaches and methodologies invited to discuss these topics:

• Software studies 
  
• The political economy of creative tools
  
• Comparative studies of softwarization
  
• Historical studies of creative tools
  
• Case studies of creative tools for alternative forms of co-creation and distribution
  
• Case studies of the softwarization of creative practices
  
• Communities of practice and creative tools
  
• Creative organizations and creative tools
  
• Art worlds and software tools
  
• Fields of cultural production and softwarization
  
• Cultural techniques and softwarization
  
• Media archaeologies of creative tools
  
• Ethnographies of creative software development
  
• Tool criticism and analysis

About the editors:

Frédérik Lesage is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, whose research focuses on the intersections between digital culture and cultural production. His work can be found in academic journals like Convergence, Fibreculture, and the International Journal of Communication. 

Michael Terren is an academic and musician based in Boorloo/Perth, Australia, whose research focuses on digital audio workstations and their relationship with contemporary forms of labour, venture capital, and music culture. He works at Edith Cowan University and the University of Western Australia.

Submission Instructions:

Please send a 500 word chapter proposal by Monday 31 October 2022 to both Frédérik Lesage <flesage@sfu.ca> and Michael Terren <m.terren@ecu.edu.au>. In the subject line of your email, include “CTSCP Chapter Proposal”. In the body of your email include:

Chapter title

Section you are submitting to:

Section 1: Creative tools and technologies for cultural production: theoretical perspectives

Section 2: From tools to platforms: developing and maintaining technical ecologies

Section 3: Cultures of creative tools: communities of practice and their individuation

500 word proposal

100 word bio of the authors

Name of author(s), title(s), institution(s), & email addresses. 

We will send out confirmations by Monday 14 November 2022. First drafts are expected by Monday 6 February 2023. All chapters will be 6000-7500 words including notes and references.

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