ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

December 9, 2022

I am pleased to invite you to the next in the series of IPRA Thought Leadership webinars. The webinar Science based reputation management: insight, influence and persuasion will be presented by Ashwani Singla, founding managing partner at Astrum, India on Thursday 9 December 2021 at 12.00 GMT/UCT (unadjusted).

What is the webinar content?

The webinar will explore science-based reputation management considering aspects of insight, influence and persuasion. Drawing on examples from Asia we will consider the five aspects of reputation management which are:

• Discover and define the persuadables
• Discover and define the drivers of opinion
• Define and develop sources of influence and information
• Define and develop your Big Picture Story
• Deliver your communication by being holistic yet focused.

The webinar will be followed by an interactive Q&A session.

How to join

Register here at Airmeet.

A reminder will be sent 1 hour before the event.

Background to IPRA

IPRA, he International Public Relations Association, is the leading global network for public relations professionals. Membership is individual not corporate. It aims to further the development of open communication and the ethical practice of public relations. IPRA fulfils this aim through networking opportunities, its code of conduct and intellectual leadership of the profession. IPRA is the organiser of the annual Golden World Awards for excellence – PR's global awards scheme. With 60 years of experience, IPRA, recognised by the United Nations, is now present throughout the world wherever public relations are practised. IPRA welcomes all those within the profession who share its aim and who wish to be part of the IPRA worldwide fellowship. For more information please visit: www.ipra.org

Background to the Golden World Awards for Excellence.

The annual IPRA Golden World Awards (GWA) initiative, established in 1990, recognizes excellence in public relations practice worldwide in a variety of categories. Recipients of the award take particular pride in the recognition granted to their entry as meeting international standards of excellence in public relations. An overall IPRA Grand Prix for Excellence is presented each year to the entry judged as representing the highest standards that year. While there are many national and regional PR awards, there is only one truly global scheme: the GWA.

May 26, 2022

Paris, France

Deadline for Abstracts: January 21, 2022

The preconference will be held on-site in Paris the day before the main conference. The preconference explores convergent and divergent perspectives on digital disconnection across disciplines, media, and national borders and invites participants to a dialogue concerning the challenges and promises of digital disconnection research.

Time and place: May 26, 2022 9:30 AM–5:00 PM, Paris, France

The preconference is part of the International Communication Association Annual Conference, Paris, France. 

OBJECTIVES

The conference has three main objectives:

• Expand scholarly discussions: how is digital disconnection understood and conceptualized within various contexts and across different levels of analysis? In what ways are conceptual underpinnings and understandings of the causes and implications of digital disconnection connected?
• Promote collaborative and comparative scholarship: What are the similarities and differences of approaches to digital disconnection across country, discipline, and media?
• Networking and career development: What are the emerging perspectives on digital disconnection provided by young scholars? How can new contributions deepen understandings of digital disconnection or expand existing knowledge?

The preconference is sponsored by the following ICA divisions: Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group; Mobile Communication Interest Group.

Deadline for Abstracts: January 21, 2022

The call for abstracts can be found here: https://www.icahdq.org/mpage/CFPDisconnection

ORGANIZERS

• Trine Syvertsen, Professor, University of Oslo.
• Anne Kaun, Professor, Södertörn University.
• Ana Jorge, Associate Professor, Lusófona University.
• Stine Lomborg, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen.
• Mariek Vanden Abeele, Associate Professor, Ghent University (Belgium)
• Mehri Agai, PhD Candidate, University of Bergen.
• Kari Spjeldnæs, PhD Candidate Kristiania University College.

Organizer: digitox

Syracuse University

Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications invites applications for either an Associate or Full Professor position with tenure or an advanced tenure-track Assistant Professor to begin August 22, 2022. Review of applications will begin December 1, 2021 and continue until the position is filled.

The School is seeking applicants in the areas of media psychology and extended reality (virtual, augmented, and mixed reality). This recruitment is part of an ambitious Invest Syracuse Cluster Hire Initiative in the broad area of Virtual and Immersive Interactions. As an integral part of this investment, Syracuse University will recruit multiple candidates for faculty positions across departments for this cluster. Faculty hired into these positions will build on our existing strengths in the focus area and will participate in an organized research cluster that spans multiple departments in the Newhouse School, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, the School of Education, the School of Architecture, and other units across Syracuse University. Further information on the campus-wide hiring initiative can be found at https://www.syracuse.edu/academics/research/cluster-hires/.

The successful candidate will demonstrate their ability to bring national visibility to the school through academic scholarship with potential to gain extramural funds. Top candidates will have a well-defined and ambitious research agenda. The ability to secure grant funding is essential. Candidates will also need to indicate ability and aptitude for teaching through prior university teaching experience. They will have a track record of collegial collaboration and be expected to advise doctoral dissertations and master’s theses. A Ph.D. is required.

In addition to completing an online application at https://www.sujobopps.com/postings/89086, applicants should submit a cover letter of interest which includes three important areas:

1. Research Activity – The Newhouse School values both scholarly research and creative activity. However, we look for colleagues to make substantial collegial contributions in sponsored research, thus the successful applicant must demonstrate a sustained scholarly agenda with potential to gain extramural funds. Please describe how your experience will help you contribute to the University and School’s commitment to research and creative initiatives.

2. Teaching – The Newhouse School prides itself on the high quality of education it provides. We are especially interested in applicants with the ability to contribute to doctoral study. Please describe your teaching interests and philosophy of how students best learn.

3. Diversity and Inclusion – Please describe how your past experience has prepared you to contribute to the School’s and the University’s strategic commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in higher education.

In addition to the cover letter, applications should include :

• a curriculum vitae, and
• list of four academic or professional references with contact name, title, address, and email/phone information. The search committee will only contact listed references for applicants who are finalists for the position.

April 28-29, 2022

Roskilde University, Denmark

Deadline: November 15, 2021

Confirmed keynote speakers: Nancy Fraser (New School, New York)

Noortje Marres (U. Warwick), Zizi Papacharissi (U. Illinois-Chicago), and Stefania Milan (U. Amsterdam).

The notion of ‘publics’ or ‘the public’ is as well-known as it is elusive of exact definition. In everyday vocabulary, it is most often used in reference to a collection of people – for example, the listening or protesting public – and carries normative ideals of the importance of the public in democratic society. Within academia, the concept itself and the process of the formation of publics have been and continue to be highly theorised across disciplines and in the wake of societal changes, leaving a multitude of different conceptualisations behind.

The conference invites for abstracts (500 words) addressing the following or related questions:

• How are mediated publics forming and transforming in current media environments?
• How are publics imagined, constructed, cultivated and segmented by legacy media, alternative media and datafied civic practices in the digital age?
• How are processes of datafication and platformization affecting the formation of publics and the development of counter- publics?
• How does media in its many forms sustain and contribute to public connection?
• How do processes of digitalisation and datafication transform audience practices in various mediated publics?
• How do these processes impact and bring about new forms of civic engagement and political participation, from connective action to dark participation to data activism?
• What do these transformations look like across countries and continents, media systems, media organizations, platforms, beats, and/or different audiences, movements and publics?
• How can we understand the current transformations and the role of the different media as cultivating publics in a historic perspective?
• How can we methodologically investigate publics in transformation?
• How can we – given these current developments – theorize concepts of publics and citizens’ mediated practices in its different forms?

The conference will consist in a mix of keynote lectures and panels, and a number of thematic sessions. There will also be a digital track. The registration fee is 100 Euros (50 Euros for postgraduate students), which includes lunch, tea and coffee breaks as well as a pre-conference reception on April 27th and the conference dinner to be held on April 28th. Travel to Roskilde/Copenhagen and accommodation is not included.

Read more about the conference here: https://events.ruc.dk/publicsconference2022/

We kindly invite you to participate in the 4th edition of the Young Media and Communication Scholars Mentoring Program of the Polish Communication Association. The Mentoring Program is addressed to Ph.D. and MA students who want to develop their research competencies under the guidance of an experienced mentor, being a PCA member. In the 4th edition of the Mentoring Program, the recruitment is in Polish and English.

The deadline for applications is 10 December 2021. Application form and detailed information are available here: https://www.ptks.pl/en/programs/pca-mentoring-program

We are looking forward to your applications!

If you have any additional questions, do not hesitate to contact the program coordinator, Roksana M. Zdunek: mentoring.fmmik@gmail.com

Moment

Deadline: March 1, 2022

Whatever we call image today has for sure a different definition than that of its previous definitions suggested in a number of study areas such as history of art, aesthetics, critical theory, media, and cultural studies. As a matter of fact, W.J.T. Mitchell presents us a quite broad perspective with his categorical distinctions about what we should understand by graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal images, and how we should connect the images in our minds with words and pictures. Moreover, with his conceptualization “pictorial turn”, Mitchell states that visual studies in this era have a different and special status in comparison to the past. Today, we live in a culture pretty much formed by a universe of images that goes far beyond the paintings of Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century.

In light of the technological developments of the last four decades, visual culture comes into prominence more than before. It is an interdisciplinary study area that considers both traditional images and new technological appearances of images. As is very well known, the 1980s were the years of a paradigmatic change in social sciences and art studies in terms of methodology and perspective. In the same way, also the history of art has undergone a paradigmatic change. Accordingly, unlike the art historians of the Renaissance, the art historians such as Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall argued that representations did not originate solely from a one-way relationship between the artist and the art. The common ground of both of these art historians was that productions of art were the consequences of the cultural features of their time. They argued that the Renaissance periods in the Netherlands and in Italy were stylistically and contextually sui generis experiences due to the cultural periods they were passing through. In view of this approach, pursuing the social life of images turned out to be more attractive than the images themselves. In other words, rather than centering the image as artwork and focusing on the production processes, how the images are looked at and perceived is questioned.

We can definitely claim that the suggestions of Alpers and Baxandall are still relevant in this century. However, the greatest difference is that the image they focused on is still the object of the history of art. Whereas today we know by experience that our knowledge of seeing is not only limited to the universe of visual arts like the Dutch bourgeois of the 17th century. Then, we have been long ahead of the limited universe of images constituting the visual culture of the Dutch bourgeoisie, which is mostly comprised of oil paintings.

Here we talk particularly about a visual life world that originated along with the modernization period, proceeded by means of the voyeuristic/scopic regime in the 19th and 20th century, and reached its peak in the era of converging communication and media technologies that juxtapose different images ranging from ultrasound to the images taken by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

As Nicholas Mirzoeff points out, the period we live in has changed the spatio-temporal conditions where visual culture dwells, and transformed the production, distribution, and consumption practices of image making. According to him, the specificity of the field we call visual culture today should be elaborated even further. In the visual culture of the 1990s images were positioned within some specific spatio-temporal settings such as movie theatres, museums, galleries or even the living rooms of homes through television. Whereas today, images are limitless and everywhere. To put it explicitly, today there are more than 50 billion images shared only on Instagram, and 5 billion videos watched in 3.25 billion hours on YouTube. Comparing this visual flow to the golden age of the Netherlands between the years 1640-1659 in which almost 1.4 million paintings were produced, it is possible to claim that today the image has not only risen in quantity but also become highly varied, and has become an inseparable part of our personal and collective lives. In line with all these, we can also say that images alone constitute a visual culture that, alongside new media opportunities, rearranges our relationship to images. Not only do we go toward the images, but the images also come to us. Not only do we look at them, but they also look at us. As average people, we go beyond being only the consumers of images and become producers as well. Moreover, digital technologies have considerably destabilized the defining characters of the image. The issues of image authenticity and uniqueness, as well as ownership and copyright processes in digital media, are becoming increasingly complicated. Along with them, also the theoretical discussions regarding these issues flourish.

In the same line, the questions regarding the power of ‘the gaze’ are constantly being reformulated as well. For instance, feminist and postcolonial approaches attempt to decode the asymmetry in the relationship between the ones that look and others that are being looked at. In coherence with this critical intervention, there are also certain approaches that read the current regime of the image with a critical point of view and

call us to see the Eurocentric ‘gaze’ buried in images by exemplifying the fugitive colours and figures of the Eastern painting. They provide a never-ending discussion around visual culture and ideology with a new context and perspective.

With this call for papers, we want to question the visual culture that completely inhabits and surrounds our lives. Below you can find the suggested topics for the Visual Culture issue. However, you may submit your papers on other topics provided that they are included within the theme of the issue.

• Defining Visual Culture
• Visual Culture and Ideology
• Visual Culture and Gender
• Visual Culture and Photography
• Visual Culture and Cinema
• Visual Culture and Art
• Journalism and Photography
• Television Narratives and Popular Culture
• Visual Culture and Video Games
• States of the Image
• Photography and Digitalization
• Digital Culture and Imagery
• Social Media and Visual Contents
• Relationship between Representation and the Other
• Discipline, Surveillance and Panopticon
• Western and Eastern Images
• Visual Culture and the Body
• Visual Sociology
• Visual Anthropology
• Visual Culture and (Post-Neo) Colonialism
• Visual Culture and Memory
• Technology and New Images
• Relationship between the Image and Emotion
• Imagery and Methodology
• From Iconography to Iconology
• Media Archaeology and Images

You can submit your papers until March 1st, 2022:

SUBMISSIONS | AUTHOR GUIDELINES

Unfortunately, we do not accept papers out of the theme.

Theme Editors:

Gülsüm Depeli Sevinç & Tolga Hepdinçler

Comunicar

Deadline: December 30, 2021

We are pleased to announce that the journal 'Comunicar' (JCR-Scopus Q1) specialized in media education, is currently receiving manuscripts for the Call for Papers n. 72 about, 'The disinformation society: The impact of fake news on the public sphere' until 30 December. This issue is coordinated by Dr. Guillermo López-García (University of Valencia), Dr. Gianpietro Mazzoleni (University of Milan), and Dr. Eva Campos-Domínguez (University of Valladolid), which contributes to the analysis of erroneous, biased or false messages in terms of misinformation, disinformation, fake news and news stories that have changed social communication.

We also remind you that the journal accepts manuscripts in each of its issues with miscellaneous topics related to the scope of the journal. We invite you to read carefully the guidelines for authors and to submit your study through www.comunicarjournal.com.

Giovanna Mascheroni, Andra Siibak

What are the consequences of growing up in a datafied world in which social interaction is increasingly dependent on digital media and everyday life is shaped by algorithmic predictions? How is datafication being normalized in children’s everyday life? What are the technologies, contexts and relations that enhance children’s datafication? What are the meanings of data practices for parents, teachers, and children themselves? These are some of the questions that Mascheroni and Siibak address in Datafied childhoods: Data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives.

When the data-driven business model emerged twenty years ago, we could not have imagined how pervasive data extraction would have become in the context of everyday life, including the “institutional triangle” of children’s lives (the home, the school and the playground). Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the datafication of everyday life and our reliance on data-relations. Yet, we still know little about the nature, meanings and consequences of the data practices in which children, and the adults around them, engage. This book tries to fill in this gap in two ways. First, drawing on the authors’ knowledge of children and media studies and their own research on children’s, families’ and teachers’ interactions with multiple technologies (IoT and IoToys, artificial intelligence, algorithms, robots) in different contexts (home, school and play), it promotes a non-media-centric and child-centered approach. Second, in so doing it encourages further scholarly inquiry into the everyday as the analytical entry point to understand how datafication is transforming parenting, education, childhood and thereby the children.

Purchase here: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1140627

November 11, 2021

I am pleased to invite you to the next in the series of IPRA Thought Leadership webinars. The webinar Cyber security: insights and implications for public relations by Volker Pulskamp, senior vice president and partner, FleishmanHillard, Germany on Thursday 11 November 2021 at 12.00 GMT/UCT (unadjusted).

What is the webinar content?

In this webinar we will hear all about implications for cyber security and how they relate to public relations. The webinar will reference case studies on cyber security crises.

The webinar will be followed by an interactive Q&A session.

How to join

Register here at Airmeet.

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 Volker Pulskamp

Volker Pulskamp is a senior vice president and partner at FleishmanHillard and serves as head of corporate communications and crisis lead in Germany/EMEA. As member of the Global and EMEA Crisis Lead team, the ARC certified crisis counsellor has more than 24 years of PR, reputation management and crisis communications expertise, including crisis prevention, trainings and simulations. He has significant experience in issues and crisis management for leading companies across a range of sectors, often being key contact and spokesperson. As crisis and media trainer, Volker has trained more than 300 people in personal or team trainings during his career.

Contact

International Public Relations Association Secretariat

United Kingdom

secgen@ipra.orgTelephone +44 1634 818308

December 10, 2021

Online conference

Deadline: December 5, 2021

It is with great pleasure that we announce and invite you to participate in the final conference of the SMaRT-EU project.

The conference will take place on December 10th, in online format, and will bring together researchers, practitioners and end-users to present and discuss the results of the project. The conference will also feature a number of speakers who will address topics related to new horizons and challenges for resilience towards misinformation and social media.

Save the date: 10 December 2021, from 9.30am (CEST)

The full programme is available at http://smart-toolkit.eu/smart-eu-conference/

If you wish to attend, we ask you to confirm by the 5th of December, to the email socialmediaresilience@gmail.com so that we can give more details such as the link to access the conference.