ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Deadline: January 22, 2024

https://iamcr.org/phd-webinars/call-for-convenors-2024

IAMCR invites PhD researchers to submit their applications to convene an IAMCR Presidential PhD Research Webinar with a topic of their choice. Read this information carefully if you are an IAMCR member PhD student and would like to convene an IAMCR Presidential PhD Research Webinar.

The IAMCR Presidential PhD Research Webinars provide a forum for critical dialogue for PhD researchers in the field of communication and media studies. The central goals of the webinars are to give visibility to doctoral research in the global field of communication and media studies and stimulate interaction and cooperation among PhD students. 

Eligibility  

The convenor(s) must be members of IAMCR and PhD students. The proposed topic must be relevant to communication and media studies, and it should be intellectually stimulating and potentially innovative.

How to apply  

If you want to organise a webinar, download and complete the application form (*).  

The completed application form should be emailed with the subject "IAMCR Presidential PhD Research Webinar:  {title of your webinar}” to Mazlum Kemal Dağdelen (**), the coordinator of the IAMCR Presidential PhD Research Webinar and the assistant of the IAMCR President, Nico Carpentier.  

If there are several convenor(s), each convenor is required to submit an application form. All forms must be sent in one application email to the coordinator of the presidential webinar. If there are similar proposals related to the selected topic, the convenors may be grouped as co-convenors in consultation with the applicants.

The topic and the convenor(s) are selected based on the academic quality of their proposal and its relevance to our field.

Timeline

Applications for hosting/convening a webinar should be submitted by 22 January 2024.

The webinar is expected to take place in April. The actual timeline for the organisation of the webinar will be decided together with the convenor(s).

Please do not send paper proposals in stage 1. This call is for hosts/convenors only. When the convenor(s) and their proposed topic are selected, the second open call for speakers and abstracts for presentations on that topic will be launched in collaboration with the selected convenor(s).

(*) https://iamcr.org/sites/default/files/convenor_topic_form_2024.docx

(**) mazlum@iamcr.org (mazlum /at/ iamcr /dot/ org)

Joke Hermes

https://www.routledge.com/Cultural-Citizenship-and-Popular-Culture-The-Art-of-Listening/Hermes/p/book/9781032265629 

Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book uses a series of case studies to show how popular media are important to us, as a source of pleasure and entertainment, but also in communicating about the world with others.  Social media platforms have changed how we talk about what we like and dislike in our popular media use. 'Cultural citizenship' shows how these discussions speak to 'belonging', to what we feel our rights and responsibilities are in today's polarized world. Cultural Citizenship and Popular Culture is based on audience-led research and does not privilege textual analysis as a starting point for taking popular media use's measure. Instead, it offers research tools to listen to others.  This book offers scholars and students of media and creative industries a means to understand their professional position as one in which they engage with rather than assume to know what users of popular cultural texts and products think and feel.

July 5-6, 2024

Bled (Slovenia)

Deadline: February 5, 2024

The 31st edition of International Public Relations Research Symposium (BledCom) will be held on July 5 & July 6, 2024, Lake Bled - Slovenia. The main theme of the jubilee 31st conference is Public Relations and Human Well-being.

When viewed from the prism of human well-being, our definition of, and orientation to, publics will invariably become broader and more holistic than it has been for almost five decades of public relations scholarship. A more holistic view of audiences will also include the well-being of the underprivileged and vulnerable groups of a society such as children, migrants, minority groups, and those disadvantaged economically and socially. For these and many similar reasons, mindfulness as a strategy for well-being has received a lot of attention lately helped by initiatives such as the International Day of Yoga suggested by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and adopted by the United Nations in 2014. This theme certainly has the potential to broaden the horizons of our field and thus contribute to better its reputation as well. 

Please note that the chances of your abstract being accepted are enhanced if you observe the following format in preparing it: Introduction and purpose of the study (and research question if there is one) – helps summarize the purpose and rationale of your study. Literature review – Helps place your work in context with the existing body of knowledge. Methodology – Define the main method used for gathering data including sample size, and state the rationale for using this method. Results and conclusions – Helps summarize the answers to the research questions while also outlining the implications of the results. Summarize the limitations of the study and offer suggestions for future research. Practical and social implications – Offer the potential implications both for practice and society. Also provide us with 3 to 5 keywords that highlight your study. Abstracts should come as blind copies without author names and affiliations, who are to be identified on on a separate cover page. Please use the suggested headings to structure the abstract. A list of literature is not necessary, but if it is provided it is included into the word count.

BledCom invites abstracts that are between 500 and 800 words (including title and keywords) with up to 5 references. We welcome ALL papers that are relevant to public relations and communication management and not just papers that discuss the conference theme. We also welcome panel proposals. Please submit paper abstracts and panel proposals via email to bledcom@fdv.uni-lj.si by February 5, 2024 (Midnight CET).

Decisions will be made by March 4, 2024 after peer review. Full papers not exceeding 6.000 words will be due by September 21, 2024 for inclusion in the conference proceedings.

BledCom 2024 Call for Papers is available here:  https://www.bledcom.com/my-post

Briony Hannell

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/feminist-fandom-9798765101803/

Examines how fannish and feminist modes of cultural consumption, production, and critique are converging and opening up informal spaces for young people to engage with feminism. 

Adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and bringing together media and communications, feminist cultural studies, sociology, internet studies and fan studies, Hannell locates media fandom at the intersection of the multi-directional and co-constitutive relationship between popular feminisms, popular culture and participatory networked digital cultures. Feminist Fandom functions as an ethnographic account of how feminist identities are constructed, lived and felt through digital fannish spaces on the micro-blogging and social networking platform, Tumblr.

Please consider requesting a copy via your university library. You can also use the following discount codes to save 35% on Feminist Fandom via Bloomsbury Academic: bloomsbury.com/9798765101803

UK and EU Customers: GLR TW2UK

USA: GLR BD8US

Canada: GLR BD8CA

Reviews of Feminist Fandom

“While the pedagogical value of digitally-mediated fandoms is often asserted, here Briony Hannell critically engages with the complexities and contradictions of how a feminist pedagogy functions in online fan spaces. Through its exploration of a range of practices and debates from reflexive un/learning to “SJW fatigue” in these communities, this book complicates exclusively celebratory claims about fandom’s links to rising feminist consciousness. While Hannell’s arguments are deeply attuned to the socio-technical features of Tumblr, her sophisticated theoretical, methodological and analytic approach is an exemplar of critical and nuanced digital feminist media analysis that makes this book a must-read in the field.”

— Alison Harvey, author of Feminist Media Studies (2019) and Associate Professor of Communications, York University, Canada

“Fandom as a pathway to feminism is understudied, yet after reading Feminist Fandom, the two seem inseparable. This book offers a compelling account of the intersection of digital cultures, feminisms and popular culture. As such, it is recommended reading for scholars in participatory culture, audience studies, gender studies, feminist studies and fandom studies. This is a book about the power of stories, the importance of Tumblr as a platform of first-person narration and the centrality of storytelling for social movements and their reinvention.”

— Katrin Tiidenberg, co-author of tumblr (2021) and Professor of Participatory Culture, Tallin University, Estonia

“Feminist Fandom is a rich, qualitative study of Tumblr as a site for social justice. It’s a deep dive into fandom and audience creativity. With its insights on feminist user cultures and pedagogies, Feminist Fandom explains why and how online platforms act as a space for identity construction and activism.”

— Nicolle Lamerichs, author of Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures (2018) and Senior Lecturer in Creative Business, HU University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands

Gabriele Balbi

Link: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-digital-revolution-9780198875970?cc=us&lang=en&

The book is a history of the ways in which the digital revolution has been narrated, of the rhetoric, the narratives, and the overt or implied debates that have accompanied it and continue to accompany it today. It aims to tell the story of an idea, which I define as one of the most powerful ideologies of recent decades: that digitalization constitutes a revolution, a break with the past, a radical change for the human beings who are living through it. The four chapters investigate the origins of this idea, how it evolved, which other past revolutions consciously or unconsciously inspired it, which great stories it has conveyed over time, which of its key elements have changed and which ones have persisted and have been repeated in different historical periods, , how it can be considered a quasi-religion. All these discussions, large or small, have settled and condensed into a series of media, advertising, corporate, political, and technical sources and so, in the book, readers can also find new, previously-unpublished historical sources. The main aim of the book is to deconstruct what looks like a “natural” and incontestable idea and to help rethink digital societies today.

Joke Hermes and Linda Kopitz

https://www.routledge.com/The-Pocketbook-of-Audience-Research/Hermes-Kopitz/p/book/9781032325118 

Focusing on qualitative methods, The Pocketbook of Audience Research uses contemporary, global television and cross-media examples to explain essential approaches to audience research and outline how they can be employed.

This handy guide is divided into three parts: the first part, ‘Watching Post-Television’, offers ‘television’ as a shortcut to understanding today’s platform media and gives an introduction to key theoretical terms such as representation, identity and community. The second part, ‘Methods with Method’, introduces different methodological tools to study cross-media texts and practices from an audience-led perspective. With individual chapters covering ethnography, textual analysis and visual methodologies, this part also functions as a toolset and starting point for small research projects. The third part, ‘Methods in Action’, offers a variety of recent case studies to show how these methodological principles work in practice.

Drawing on different genres from drama to sports, The Pocketbook of Audience Research gives a sense of what audience-led cross-media research can achieve. This concise, accessible book gives students, early-career researchers and creative professionals the tools to do useful and inspiring audience research, whether for a paper, a proposal or a market survey.

We invite you to participate in a brief survey in the field of AI alignment. Through responses to 39 questions, we will record the sentiment of humans towards the futuristic concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI). On the other hand, we also examine the artificial intelligence itself (ChatGPT and other language models). Please first complete the survey and then forward it to anyone who might be interested, which includes online groups, mailing lists, etc. 

Link to the survey: https://forms.gle/npGBJf72ECwpSHV78 

Thank you! 

The research team from the AI Institute of Serbia, the Digital Society Lab, the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the University of Kragujevac and the Faculty of Media and Communications.

Media & Jornalismo, Vol. 24 N.º 45 (2024)

Deadline: March 15, 2024

Editors: 

• Maria José Brites - Universidade Lusófona, CICANT; maria.jose.brites@ulusofona.pt
  
• Teresa Sofia Castro - Universidade Lusófona, CICANT; teresa.sofia.castro@ulusofona.pt
  
• Paloma Contreras-Pulido - Universidade Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR); paloma.contreras@unir.net
  

Topics:

• Children, youth, and news
  
• Children, youth, and contexts of digital citizenship
  

Subtopics:

• Algorithms and datafication
  
• Audiences and news
  
• Socialisation, families, and peer influence
  
• News literacies
  
• Information disorders
  
• News resistance and avoidance
  
• Theoretical reflection and future perspectives of the field
  
• Methodological discussions
  
• Participatory media
  
• Decolonization of the field
  
• Glocal news contexts
  
• Glocal digital citizenship contexts
  

In this special issue, we aim to capture theoretical and empirical reflections that shed light on how, why, and where young people follow, understand and express what is currently happening in the world in the context of digital citizenship and information disorders (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic and recent wars accelerated a torrent of fake news and other information disorders (Galan et al., 2019, Frau-Meigs et al, 2017), in which social media platforms revealed underlying ambivalences. This is why it is so pressing to consider diverse approaches in the investigation that identifies what, how and where young people from diverse contexts and geographies propose their views and expressions of what is happening in the world. By anticipating normative and/or decolonised definitions of news, we aim to apprehend research that assesses themes related with youth voices and views of the world, their (dis)connection with news and contexts of digital citizenship.

The research continually points to a shift from the traditional journalism environments to new opportunities for consumption and production (Clark and Marchi, 2017), fostering participative processes. By proposing the concept of “connective journalism”, Clark and Marchi (2017) highlight the need for sharing, having a self-view of the news stories, and considering making their stories. They also note a disruption between young audiences' needs and news outlets.

What are the social environments where these processes are grounded? Even if the peer group influence has an impact, family, and in particular parents, are at the centre of the socialisation process for seeking news and different views of the world (Brites et al., 2017; Edgerly et al, 2018a; Lemish, 2007; Silveira, 2019), including contexts for operating digital devices (Edgerly et al, 2018a). Self-socialization is found in other studies regarding youth information consumption: incidental and leisure (Boczkowski et al, 2018) and news avoidance and resistance (Brites e Ponte, 2018; Edgerly et al, 2018b).

These sociocultural environments pose additional challenges to news brands and the production of stories that fit young people’s interests and expectations. It is thus imperative to reflect on these timely issues, namely considering how young people regard and deal with algorithms (Swart, 2021), algorithmic literacy, and what are the implications for information selection and consumption processes in their everyday lives, and even to observe how in some cases this content is used for participatory, prosocial and citizen purposes, shaping initiatives that promote social change.

This special issue [under the project Youth, News and Digital Citizenship - YouNDigital (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021); https://youndigital.com] invites articles that theoretically and/or empirically tackle these and other dimensions, considering youth layers in terms of social, educational, gender, and cultural diversity, which demands to be studied and analysed within their relationship with digital media, news, platforms, and digital citizenship.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for submitting articles: March 15, 2024

Review process: March-June 2024

Editors' decision: July 2024

Expected publication date: October 2024

January 15, 2024

Webinar

Registration deadline: 13 January, 2024

Are you an MA/ PhD research student or Early Career Scholar in Communication & Media Studies?

Looking to participate in the upcoming IAMCR 2024 Annual Conference? (iamcr.org/christchurch2024/cfp)

Submitting/ reviewing for an international conference for the 1st time?

Please join us for the IAMCR Webinar Taming the butterflies: How to write good abstracts & constructively review for Early Career Scholars! (iamcr.org/webinars/tamingthebutterflies)

This webinar will:

1. familiarise the audience with IAMCR, Media Education Research (MER) & Emerging Scholars Network (ESN) Sections,

2. identify resources available to support people submitting to & reviewing for the IAMCR conference for the 1st time, &

3. discuss the nature of good abstracts & reviews to set expectations for the upcoming conference.

Speakers: Steph Hill, University of Leicester & Devina Sarwatay, City, University of London.

Co-sponsored by: IAMCR MER & ESN.

Date: 15 January, 2024.

Time: 2 pm UTC.

IAMCR members register: iamcr.org/webinars/register-taming-butterflies

Non-members: Email register4iamcrwebinar@gmail.com with subject "Taming the butterflies" to be added to the attendees list.

Join IAMCR: iamcr.org/join/individual

September 30 -October 2, 2024

FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

Deadline (EXTENDED): February 18, 2024

Hosted by the DFG-research training group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Differentiated Contemporary Cultures” at 

Keynotes: N. Katherine Hayles and Adrian Daub

At this moment of our present time, processes of digitalization are leading to a profound transformation of social environments. Digitalization impacts the economic, cultural, and historic conditions of the lives we live and the ways we socially interact, communicate, and self-reflect. The turn towards the digital informs cultural structures and practices, it shapes forms of knowledge production and dissemination, and it alters the very fabric of the public sphere. An increasing pluralization and differentiation of public spaces of communication raises renewed questions over the loss of an imagined consensus as well as new potentialities for processes of cultural production, their changing social, political, and cultural functions, and their ethical implications.

Literature, in its extended sense of textuality, cultural production, and history of material practices, is deeply entangled in the structural shift towards digitality. As circumstances of production and reception change, a general reinterpretation of literature as such, its role and functionality, its possibilities or potential “death” ensues. At the same time, literature itself engages in reflections on the opportunities, challenges, and potential risks of the profound shift towards digitality, as digital media forge new literary forms, conventions, and aesthetic practices. Engaging with social change on the level of content, form, and models of engagement, literature actively positions itself and intervenes in the collective imagination and the shaping of processes of exchange between public spheres and new, digital frontiers.

The Research Training Group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Differentiated Cultures,” funded by the German Research Foundation, investigates the interconnections between various literatures and various publics in multilayered and heterogenous subnational and cross-national social environments since the mid-20th century.

The international conference aims at investigating the diverse interrelations of literature, the public, and the digital through concrete case studies and readings that elucidate the medial constitution, processes of communication, social conditions, and various functions of literary phenomena. 

Papers we solicit could address but need not be limited to the following research fields:

• strategies for generating attention in the literary marketplace (economies of reaction, scandalization, forms of polarization and populism, aspects of cancel culture)

• public conditions of literary production and reception (digital spaces, platforms, and their specific forms of communication)

• mechanisms that regulate access, exclusion and canonization, form community, inform political participation, or lead towards practices of opting out 

• literary materialities (algorithms and communication, AI and human creativity; altered technologies of publication, altered practices of reading, digitality and materiality) and their function for the adoption of literary aesthetics, shifting forms and genres, and the self-reflexivity of literature on its own affordances

• literary knowledge production (fiction and non-fiction engaging with the future of the digital, posthumanism, the utopian/ dystopian imaginary)

• literary ethics and politics (negotiations of the public sphere as a place of deliberative politics; as a set of platforms providing air time under specific conditions of inclusion and exclusion)

Please submit abstracts (300 words) and short bios by February 18, 2024. (Extended deadline!)

Organized by Sabine Friedrich, Svenja Hagenhoff, Karin Hoepker

Contact: E-mail us at grk2806-conf2024@fau.de

https://www.literaturundoeffentlichkeit.phil.fau.de/international-conference-digitality-and-the-public-sphere-literature-mediality-practice/