ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

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

Application deadline: 8 April 2022

Email: dmrc@qut.edu.au

More information here

13-14 May 2022

Virtual Conference

Deadline: March 15, 2022

Call for Contributions / Interdisciplinary PhD Communication Conference (IPCC 2022)

Organized by PhD in Communication Program at İstanbul Bilgi University

We are inviting paper abstracts and proposals for panels and round tables that revolve around, but not limited to, the following areas:

Transitions in Research and Learning Methods:

• Quasi long-distance research
• Digital ethnography
• Pedagogies

Transitions in Labor and Leisure:

• Changing landscapes and norms of labor
• Dating, and online dating norms
• Producing and storytelling, streaming and gatekeeping
• Data as labor

Transitions in Space:

• Transition of home, office, school, room, breakout room
• Social relations and the digital as a transformative space
• Queer spaces

Transitions in Sharing:

• Facts and fake news, the norm of sharing, humor and transgression
• Arguing, quarreling and reconciling in online spaces
• Representation
• Datafication

Transitions of the Self:

• Reconsidering experience and embodiment, also in research conduct
• Transition of the self as a researcher/ positionality
• On/off self and identity

Transitions in Politics:

• Platformization of politics
• Resistance and activism
• Resilience and vulnerability

Transitions and dichotomies can often conceptually define the process of communication and communication technologies and the pertinent ways through which we labor, resist and do research: online vs. offline, analog vs. digital, human vs. robot, public vs. private, political upheavals, neoliberalization of academia, transposing methodologies and scholarly learning methods. It is not always explicit however if we experience or perceive these dichotomies and transitions as either the locations of departure or arrival. As in the parable offered by David Foster Wallace, it is hard to live in the fish tank and also be able to describe the water we are in. There is always a degree of uncertainty while taking on the transitions as such, while questioning the effects and the relevance of the alleged departure point or while offering a conceptual understanding of the transitions we personally and as a community go through.

How should we think about the changing landscape of communication, laboring and social relations? And what might be the ethical implications? How should we reflect on being on-off-on-off-online? What is the relationship, if there is, between the analog and digital ways of social conduct and research? How to think about vulnerability and resilience in relation to digital/analog spaces divide? What are the changing norms of sharing and transmitting meaning? What does it mean to be ‘in communication’? Can it be a singular activity? What are the effects of such transitions on learning and research methods? And overall, should we consider transition as a matter of transfer, adaptation, co-existence, contradiction, transformation or synthesis?

We think it is also meritful to consider the transition and a certain degree of uncertainty involved here not as a drawback to be overcome but as a guiding challenge while taking on the issues that will be covered at the conference.

We invite PhD students or candidates as well as early-career researchers with PhDs earned in the last 5 years, who are interested in taking a step back or forward to re-think about the implications of the transitions within their field of interest, to submit their proposal and join the discussion.

In line with the mission of the PhD in Communication Program of Istanbul Bilgi University, IPCC priorities collaboration, dialogue and solidarity. Thus, the conference promotes a platform for the co-creation of knowledge, facilitated by the paper presentations, roundtable and free-form discussion sessions and workshops.

How can you apply?

We accept individual submission of a paper proposal, panel and round table proposal. Kindly send your submissions to ipcc@bilgi.edu.tr with an extended abstract of 500-750 words and a bio of 100 words by Monday, March 15, 2022.

Individual submission of a paper proposal should include an extended abstract of 500-750 words and a short bio of 100 words.

Panels with 3-4 paper presentations should consist of the panel title with a 500-750 words rationale followed by 150 words abstract of each paper presentations and short bios of the participants. Discussants can also be identified with a short bio.

A roundtable session provides an opportunity for participants to get together and explore issues related to the theme of the conference in an informal yet structured setting. If you are interested in hosting a round table, you can submit a topic or possible questions along with a 400-500 words rationale and a 100 words short bio of the facilitator(s).

Submissions will be notified via email by April, 15th.

For more information, please visit ipcc.bilgi.edu.tr

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

ECREA webinar

Wednesday 9 March 2022, 14:00 – 16:00 CET (Brussels time)

Link to the event: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88205256966

Speakers:

• Precious Chatterje-Doody (The Open University)
• Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University)
• Elisabeth Schimpfoessl (Aston University)
• Joanna Szostek (University of Glasgow)

Moderated by ECREA President, John Downey (Loughborough University)

Precious Chatterje-Doody

Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the Open University. She taught previously at the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham, and worked for two years as a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project Reframing Russia for the Global Mediasphere: from Cold War to 'Information War'?

Her research interests centre on questions of communication, perception and security, with a particular focus on Russia. Her work engages with the role of historical memory and identity in international relations; soft power, political communication and global media (particularly Russia's international broadcaster, RT); and critical approaches to security, including emotions and war.

Tanya Lokot

Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications, Dublin City University. She researches threats to digital rights, networked authoritarianism, internet freedom, and internet governance in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), an in-depth study of protest and digital media in Ukraine and Russia.

Tanya has worked as a journalist, non-profit consultant, and media trainer in Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, and speaks fluent English, Russian, and Ukrainian. From 2014 to 2016 she was contributing editor for the RuNet Echo project at Global Voices. Previously, she was Assistant Professor and Head of New Media Sequence at Mohyla School of Journalism (NaUKMA, Kyiv, Ukraine). Tanya received her PhD from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Among other things, she chairs the ECREA Media, Cities and Space Section.

Elisabeth Schimpfoessl

Elisabeth Schimpfoessl is a senior lecturer at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Aston University Birmingham. In recent years she has focused on two research topics. First is research into the sociology of elites, power and social inequality, and, second, comparative research into media and journalism in post-communist Europe.

Her book Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie (Oxford University Press 2018) looks at the top 0.1 percent in Putin's Russia. In a follow-up project, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, Elisabeth compared the practices of British and Russian philanthropists. The second strand of her research deals with post-communist journalism, which she carries out together with Ilya Yablokov from the University of Leeds. This research started in Russia and then expanded to Eastern Europe.

Joanna Szostek

Joanna Szostek is a lecturer in Political Communication at the University of Glasgow.

Her research interests centre on the role of mass media in relations between states, particularly in the post-Soviet region. Before moving to Glasgow she completed a three-year research project to investigate and explain the reception of competing political narratives among audiences in Ukraine. The project was funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship from the European Commission. It included an 18-month secondment to Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and a five-month secondment to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Results from that project are published in leading international journals, including Perspectives on Politics and The International Journal of Press/Politics.

From 2019 Joanna works on a new research project investigating why levels of engagement with local, national and foreign/transnational media vary within and across ‘peripheral’ regions of Ukraine. The project, which is funded by the British Academy, is intended to shed light on how media use among ‘peripheral’ audiences can undermine and/or benefit state security, broadly defined. She holds a doctorate in Politics from the University of Oxford. Her professional experience includes several years at the BBC and many years of living and working in Russia and Ukraine. She is currently an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Dear John (if I may),

Thank you so much for reaching out and your support. It really helps me keep going and warms my heart. These last days have been terrible. I was caught up in a war during my fieldwork, became refugee who left behind his library and some of the materials, my Ukrainian home, Russian tanks rolled past our ancestral home near Chernihiv that I may never see again, and I am now facing a realistic opportunity to take up weapons under duress to defend my life.

I am grateful for the attention and the great and vocal statement by ECREA. This is exactly what we need at this moment. If you want to help, please continue spreading info regarding the plight of Ukrainian media scholars, in the ECREA network as well as in public statements. You may use my own story as an example of the brutal and lawless Russian attack on peaceful researchers and intellectuals. You can also highlight other personal stories. My friend and a leading Ukrainian media scholar Dariya Orlova has just barely survived the night with her 9-year old son caught up in the midst of fierce fighting near Bucha west of Kyiv. I can put you in touch with you. The director of Ukrainian Media and Communication Studies Institute Diana Dutsyk became a refugee. Etc etc. Dozens of journalists volunteered to fight for their homes.

Another thing we would be extremely grateful at this moment when missiles are raining on our heads is a statement in condemnation of the academic relativism and bothsidism that was silencing our voices as we urged to take Russian propaganda seriously. What is happening is the result of this relativism that put many Western governments to sleep regarding the actual Russian intentions.

Warm regards from the relative safety of Khmelnytsky,

Roman

São Paulo State University

Field of knowledge: Communications

FAPESP process: 2021/07344-3

Project title: Pandemic Communication in Times of Populism Building Resilient Media and Ensuring Effective Pandemic Communication in Divided Societies

Working area: Communication

Number of places: 1

Start: 2022-05-01

Principal investigator: Danilo Rothberg

Deadline for submissions: 2022-03-25

Publishing date: 2022-02-18

E-mail for proposal submission: danilo.rothberg@unesp.br

Summary

The post-doctoral fellowship will last for 20 months and includes the participation in a broad comprehensive study of health crisis communication in the context of populist politics and political polarization, which will generate knowledge that will serve as a basis for mitigation strategies adopted by media organizations to be used in future public health crises. The study will bring significant advances in knowledge in two areas of social sciences and humanities: First, it will contribute to health communication research, and specifically to the understanding of the role of communication during public health emergencies. Second, it will make an important contribution to research on populist communication and political polarization.

The postdoc is expected to contribute to a line of research that will examine key features of media coverage of the pandemic in four countries, their implications for the quality of public deliberation, and links to polarization.

In addition to the modality requirements, knowledge in quantitative and qualitative content analysis, health communication and political communication, fluency in Portuguese (to conduct qualitative content analysis and in-depth interviews) and English (for working meetings with the project), and availability to carry out activities in the city of Bauru, São Paulo state, Brazil, during the term, are required. The doctoral degree must be in the areas of communication, social sciences, political science or similar.

This opportunity is open to candidates of any nationality. The selected candidate will receive a Post-Doctoral fellowship from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) in the amount of R$ 8,479.20 monthly and a research contingency fund, equivalent to 10% of the annual value of the fellowship which should be spent in items directly related to the research activity.

Read more: https://fapesp.br/oportunidades/comunicacao_pandemica_em_tempos_de_populismo:_construindo_uma_midia_resiliente_e_garantindo_uma_comunicacao_pandemica_eficaz_em_sociedades_divididas/4880/

El Profesional de la Información (Special issue, Scopus Q1, wos Q3)

Deadline: July 10, 2022

Issue: v. 32, n. 1

http://www.profesionaldelainformacion.com/notas/cfp-transparency/

About this issue

Information transparency refers to different spheres of political, communicative and social life. The diverse use of the term in the digital context has turned it into a talismanic word that promises to provide answers to a range of problems and improve processes within the public and private sector. More democracy, more freedom of information and more political efficiency are expected from transparency. Since Barack Obama's Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government in 2009, there has been a significant increase in research on transparency and open data worldwide (Matheus; Janssen, 2019), new access to information standards have been adopted and transparency-based initiatives have been launched, such as the Open Government Partnership (Cuccinello et al., 2017).

Transparency can be considered to have become an ideology (Han, 2015). In a postmodernist context, transparency is interpreted as an asset in Western society (Etzioni, 2018), which advocates transforming management and accountability into information and data. However, there are certain aspects of transparency that provide a glazed view of political action, where digital platforms and social networks increasingly resemble panopticons that deform public debate. In addition, the evolution of technology is generating new needs where transparency is again presented as a problem and as a solution. Theoretical and empirical studies are therefore needed to investigate the redefinition of the term and to propose critical approaches to the transparency society in the digital ecosystem.

In the political sphere, political parties have taken up the regenerative discourse of transparency in an attempt to regain the credibility and trust of citizens. This is deeply related to the crisis of legitimacy, representation and mediatization of the digital public sphere and its effects on democracy. Civil society has also implemented mechanisms to demand and review political and institutional transparency. Transparency has also been valued as an element of great interest for information professionals, due to its potential for data journalism, fact-checking or for the promotion of ethics in the information process (Karlsson; Clerwall, 2018).

Although its scope remains difficult to estimate, the culture of transparency assumes that data should be used by citizens or any other agent for whom it may be useful and should be available in portals and data repositories that are accessible, understandable, updated and reusable (Lourenço, 2015; King; Youngblood, 2016). It is pertinent, therefore, to explore who uses this data, with what objectives and scope.

This single-subject issue aims to delve into the theoretical and empirical discourses on information transparency, analyze the initiatives and practices that characterize it and discuss its limits and possibilities in the digital context.

Topics

Research papers of an analytical, theoretical, methodological, or review nature –preferably international in scope– are invited on the following topics and lines of research:

- The society of transparency, society of trust and society of control.

- Transparent political communication. Characteristics and strategies

- Critical studies on transparency

- Limits of transparency

- Transparency policies

- Case studies and comparative studies on international initiatives and good practices.

- Mechanisms for measuring and evaluating transparency

- Perspectives on transparency

- Political discourse on transparency

- Open data portal and data journalism

- Transparency and disinformation

- Fact-checking and transparency

- Transparency and political credibility

- Dissemination of the culture of transparency

- Transparency of platforms for political and public debate.

- Transparency as an instrument of media governance.

- Lobbying transparency

- Necessary transparency reforms

- What is transparency for and what is it used for?

- Pro-transparency activism and organizations

- Parliamentarism and Transparency

- Transfer of transparency between the public and private sectors.

Guest editors

Eva Campos-Domínguez, Professor of Journalism, University of Valladolid, Spain, eva.campos@uva.es

María Díez-Garrido, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Valladolid, Spain, maria.diez.garrido@uva.es

Timeline

July 10th, 2022 - Manuscript submission deadline (articles of up to 8,000 words)

January-February 2023 - Publication date

Manuscript submission

If you wish to submit an article, please read carefully the journal’s acceptance criteria and rules for authors:

http://www.profesionaldelainformacion.com/authors.html

And then send us your article through the OJS journal manager on:

https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/submissions

Important for authors

If you are not yet registered as an author, do so here:

https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/user/register

Evaluation

All articles published in EPI are double blind peer reviewed by 2 or more members of the international Scientific Committee of the journal, and other reviewers, always external to the Editorial Board. The journal undertakes to reply with the review results.

Editor: Berta García-Orosa

Provides fresh international perspectives on the study of new technology and political communication

Covers political communication in key areas, including parliaments, political parties, elections, and social movements

Explores the impact of known technical advances in previously understudied contexts

We are proud to inform you that a second book of the JCE TWG has just got out titled 'Rethinking digital native communicators training', and published by Thomsons Reuters Aranzadi in Spain.

This time it is the result of our last JCE TWG conference organised by the University of Barcelona in May 2021.

The book is edited by Santiago Tejedor and Cristina Pulido as organisers of that conference, whom we thank for their effort and collaboration with us.

The main challenges in digital communicators training are addressed by European university teachers.

This book presents the last reflections focused on teaching artificial intelligence applied in journalism, innovation on teaching experiences, and new emerging professional profiles.

On behalf of all of our members, we heartily congratulate the editors, and published authors.

We believe this new publication will be useful literature for all of us, and our colleagues dealing with the same topic worldwide.

September 30, 2022

Online conference (Zoom)

Deadline: July 1, 2022

Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) Faculty of Law and Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU)

Faculty of Law are pleased to announce a conference entitled "Audiovisual Media Regulation during the COVID-19 in Central and Eastern Europe", for which we invite applications for speakers.

Date: 30 September 2022 (Friday)

Application deadline: 1 July 2022 (Friday)

Approval deadline: 2 September 2022 (Friday)

Venue: Zoom

The international pandemic situation, which has been going on for two years now, impacts our daily lives. However, this natural phenomenon does not leave the world of media world untouched either. Moreover, in Central and Eastern Europe, these processes are often covert: as if governments are using the viral situation to achieve their unstated goals.

Freedom of expression as a fundamental human right can very quickly face severe restrictions in such cases, raising the problem of conflicting fundamental rights. In addition, legislation, the functioning of the media system and other media rights issues have been on the agenda in many Central and Eastern European countries. The exercise of exceptional powers has reached the region: extraordinary seems to become the norm.

The conference thus aims to bring together the historical and contemporary challenges of the press, the media and our mediatised world, i.e. to explore the issue from the perspectives of (legal) history and existing law, as well as social and political science, identifying the intersections where past experience can help to address the social and regulatory challenges of the present.

The main objective of the conference is to make the links visible to the broader audience between the pandemic situation and media legislation (negative and positive), its history, its social impact, its effects on the exercise of fundamental rights, and the experience, research findings and academic positions in Central and Eastern Europe on past and current regulatory issues. Therefore, the organisers of the conference will welcome contributions from the fields of law, political science, journalism, history and social science. The deadline for the application for the conference is 1 July 2022. Please, send a title with a short abstract (maximum 400 words) in English on the topic of the presentation to gosztonyi@ajk.elte.hu.

The conference will be held online via Zoom platform due to the current epidemiological situation. If there are enough applicants, a separate Master and PhD session will be organised. In adddition, the organizers will provide publication opportunities for manuscripts based on the best presentations. If there are enough applicants interested,

Russian-English translation will be provided.

Organizers:

• Dr Gergely Gosztonyi PhD, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), gosztonyi@ajk.elte.hu
• Dr Evgenia Kryukova PhD, Lomonosov Moscow State University, media.law.msu@mail.ru

October 14, 2022

PhD workshop (online)

Deadline: April 1, 2022

We invite PhD students to send us a proposal on the theme of Rethinking positionality in media and migration research, to be considered for an online workshop we are organising ahead of the ECREA 2022 9th European Communication Conference.

The workshop aims to provide support to doctoral students by connecting them with junior and senior researchers with experience in the field of media and migration research. Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss their works and receive detailed feedback as well as guidance.

We welcome theoretical and empirical proposals from PhD candidates at the beginning or in the middle of their research projects, focusing specifically on the following themes:

- Ethical challenges in media and migration research;

- The contribution of intersectional approaches, post-colonial and de-colonial perspectives, and the challenges they pose;

- Moving beyond Euro-centrism in media and migration studies;

- Alternative approaches to the study of diasporic communities and imaginaries;

- Re-addressing and re-thinking positionality and relationality in migration research.

Interested applicants should submit an abstract of 800 words outlining the topic of their PhD project, its objectives, theoretical and methodological approaches. They should also specify at what stage of their doctoral study they are, and what are the specific challenges they are encountering whilst doing their research. This is to allow for a more structured support during the workshop.

Please send your abstract via this link https://forms.gle/XFKU6iDVWJT4JAk38

The deadline for the online submission of abstracts is April 1st, 2022. The online workshop will take place on the 14th of October 2022 (all day). Speakers tbc.

For further questions please email ecreadmm@gmail.com