ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Special issue of Digital Journalism

Deadline: April 30, 2019

Editor-in-chief: Oscar Westlund

Guest Editors: Bruce Mutsvairo, Saba Bebawi, Peter Fray (University of Technology Sydney)

The year 2020 will mark the 10th anniversary of the ‘Arab Spring,’ a term normally associated with major citizen uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East, sparked by the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Street demonstrations and popular protests spread to other countries including Bahrain, Egypt, Libya and several others. Since 2010, sporadic, copycat, online-driven movements have also emerged in much of the developing world (Wei, 2016) with citizens taking a leading role in gathering and producing news while demanding a greater voice in determining their social and political destinies, raising hopes of greater political inclusion and freedom, including press freedom. How has the advent of technologically-inspired ‘Arab Spring’ protests combined to railroad changes not just in contemporary digital journalism but also in 21st century digital activism across the Global South? In what ways do activists and journalists in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America relate to each other in terms of techniques, tactics and ethics in their fields? In marking the 10th anniversary of the ‘Arab Spring,’ we also ask whether the “revolutions” have inspired fundamental changes in the ways in which journalists and activists operate, questioning whether they face operational obstacles and if so, counterquestioning whether freedom of speech has regressed to pre-revolution conditions?

The ‘Arab Spring’s perceived influence as a political point of departure for activists throughout the developing world has triggered increasing global debates with some doubting the assumed contributory role of social media and citizen journalism towards democratization (Loader and Mercea, 2012). In fact, repeated calls for rethinking journalism have gathered pace in the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’ (Peters and Broesma, 2012, 2016). As citizen accounts were broadcast unedited on global news channels such as Al Jazeera English, many predicted the possible transformation of journalism while others speculated on how news organisations would intergrate social media content into mainstream news material. In what ways then has the ‘Arab Spring’ transformed digital journalism practices in non-Western societies in general? What evidence is there to show in the wake of the ubiquitous protests that journalism and equally activism have dynamised and evolved? What contributory role has diverse computer networking technologies in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring,’ made to the contemporary conceptualisation and theorisation of both digital journalism and digital activism? Also, in what ways can the widespread practice of digital journalism be traced and credited to the ‘Arab Spring?’

With citizens ‘empowered’ to report and disseminate information (Bosch, 2017), what has deterred activists in other regions of the world from repeating the ‘successes’ recorded in the Middle East? Better still, how closely related has journalism become to activism in the aftermath of the mass protests? Ten years on, with citizen media equally flourishing across the ‘developing’ world, questions are being asked not only about the ability of technologypowered media instruments to provoke social and political revolutions but also how social media, which in 2000 was praised as a democratizing platform in the Middle East, has not helped remove tyranny in many parts of the world. Limited or no access to web and mobile platforms has also stalled potential transition to the much hyped technological evolution in the poorer regions of the world leaving many struggling to understand the real essence and potential of digital technologies.

Seeking empirical accounts that examine the democratising potential of digital journalism within non-Western societies, this special edition seeks to reconceptialise digital journalism and digital activism 10 years after the ‘Arab Spring’ in order to examine how it facilitated changes, if any, in both fields. What is its legacy insofar as activists and journalists are concerned? We also seek to interrogate the impediments and restrictions on journalism as an agent of change questioning whether and in what ways the ‘Arab Spring’ advanced political and social openness in the aforementioned regions. For this thematic issue, all submissions investigating the changing relationship between digital activism and journalism are welcome, including those not particularly making reference to the Arab Spring. These include but not limited to papers addressing questions such as:

• What new forms of digital activism continue to emerge and how do these relate to, impact or affect digital journalism? 
• How do contemporary digital journalism and digital activism compare to traditional forms of journalism and activism? 
• How did the ‘Arab Spring’ transform contemporary activism and journalism? 
• How did the ‘Arab Spring’ facilitate changes in the transformative relationship between digital activism and digital journalism? 
• In what ways did the ‘Arab Spring’ advance discussions and conversations on the “death of journalism” while promoting talk of “revolutionalising political protests?”

Information about submission

Proposals should include the following: an abstract of 500-750 words (not including references) as well as background information on the author(s), including an abbreviated bio that describes previous and current research that relates to the special issue theme.

Please submit your proposal as one file (PDF) with your names clearly stated in the file name and the first page. Send your proposal to the e-mail address bruce.mutsvairo@uts.edu.au and saba.bebawi@uts.edu.au by the date stated in timeline below.

Authors of accepted proposals are expected to develop and submit their original article, for full blind review, in accordance with the journal's peer-review procedure, by the deadline stated. Articles should be between 6 500 and 7 000 words in length. Guidelines for manuscripts can be found here.

Timeline

Abstract submission deadline: 30 April 2019
Notification on submitted abstracts: 30 May 2019
Article submission deadline: 30 November 2019

ECREA Radio Research Conference 2019

September 19-21, 2019

University of Siena (Italy)

Deadline EXTENDED: January 30, 2019

In the age of platformization of culture (Nieborg & Poell 2018) every media is being turned into a digital platform and every audience is being datafied and commodified. What is the role of radio within this new media ecosystem? Tim Wu (2011) showed how radio broadcasting too was eventually colonized by the ethos of profit, but along its history the radio medium has been able to partially escape its commodification and it has carved out a social role as a public service media and as a community/civic media, more open to audience interaction and participation than television and print media used to be.

In a media ecosystem increasingly shaped by algorithms, radio is the only medium that still has a relevant analogue component, especially in non-western areas of the world. The relevance of analogue broadcasting is not only a residual practice but could be also framed as a space of freedom, a practice of resistance to the process of platformization.

“Radio as a social media” is the theme of the 2019 ECREA Radio conference. What does it mean to be a “social media” in the era of digital “social media”?

Our proposal is that radio, in order to be “social”, needs to be “convivial”, in the sense proposed by Ivan Illich in its work “Tools for Conviviality” (1973), which also inspired the first hackers and makers of home computer’s history. Conviviality is a concept that was introduced by Ivan Illich (1973). He imagined a world where people had an open relationship with the material world surrounding them, including the technologies they used: ‘I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment’ (1973, p. 11). Conviviality is about being vigorously engaged in relationships, conscious of values and meanings. For Illich, a convivial technology was a tool that people could manipulate, transform, adapt and control. Convivial tools are ‘those which gave each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision’ (1973, p. 21). Conviviality according to Illich revolves around the idea of free and equal access to empowering tools. Conviviality, as David Gauntlett noted, “is therefore about having the power to shape one’s own world. Illich makes it clear that individuals must retain this power – society must not seek to drain it from them” (2011, p. 168).

Is it still possible a social/convivial use of radio in the age of proprietary algorithms-driven journalism and music consumption?

Keynote speakers:

Nico Carpentier, Uppsala University (Sweden) in conversation with Caroline Mitchell, Sunderland University, UK - CMFE Keynote

Elena Razlogova, Concordia University (Canada);

Christina Dunbar Hester, University of Southern California’s Annenberg

School for Communication and Journalism (USA),

David Hendy, University of Sussex (UK)

Enrico Menduni, Università Roma Tre (Italy)

David Fernandez Quijada, Media Intelligence Service, EBU

This conference aims at gathering together all the scholars that are currently exploring, from different and/or interdisciplinary perspectives, the complex entanglement between radio/audio/digital media and society.

The conference will try to situate radio studies within the broader contemporary media ecosystem and aims at starting a dialogue with and accepting contributions from Internet Studies, Platform studies, Social Media studies, critical political economy of the media, Media History, digital media management, Cultural Studies, production studies, ethnography, sound studies, social sciences.

ECREA Radio Research 2019 is not only a conference, it wants to be also a festival. A festival for the community of scholars with an interest in radio.

DEADLINE for abstract submissions: January 15, 2019 (18:00 hours Greenwich Mean Time)

How to submit:

http://www.congressi.unisi.it/ecrea2019/submission/

The Scientific Committee of the conference will select the proposals that could deal with the following topics:

Radio AS a social media

• Community/civic/free/pirate/alternative/radical/DIY not for profit radio
• radio and conviviality (Illich)
• radio audiences, empowerment, participation
• radio and the diaspora
• radio and migration
• Migration, identity, radio
• Copyright, copyleft and radio creation

Radio AND social media

• Doing radio in the age of social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
• WhatsApp, Snapchat…)
• Datafication of listening
• radio and music streaming platforms
• radio curation vs. algorithmic curation
• music radio programming vs. music platforms programming
• radio, music platforms and the listener’s agency
• networked listeners
• Access, Interaction, Participation (Carpentier)
• social media for radio: between exploitation and participation
• radio as an app
• “haptically-mediated” radio listening

Radio AS public media

• Who care for…Public service radio?
• Public service radio and innovation
• radio and cultural diversity
• Radio and the public sphere(s)
• Radio (retro)Futurism
• radio innovation and multi-platform delivery
• radio-vision
• radio and Artificial Intelligence
• Smart speakers and audio/radio listening
• Transnational radio
• Analog stories
• Podcasting
• the second age of podcasting: a new digital mass media
• repurposing radio content on new platforms distribution technologies
• hybrid radio/hybrid future
• DAB, streaming or LTE broadcasting?
• Streaming kill the digital (DAB) star
• What’s the frequency, Kenneth (frequencies and transmission studies)

Radio as a Research field

• Political economy of the radio
  
• Radio and gender studies
  
• Radio genres
  
• Radio art
  
• Politics of listening
  
• Poetics of listening
  
• Philosophy of listening
  
• History of listening
  
• Audio vs. Radio
  
• Radio audiences and commodification
  
• Production practices/studies
  
• Reception/Production ethnographies
  
• Digital ethnography
  
• Digital Methods
  
• Network analysis
  
• Radio history
  
• Radio journalism
  
• Radio and the music industry
  
• Ownership, regulation and governance of radio
  

Special issue of "The Radio Journal"

We invite delegates of the conference to submit their full papers no later than October 30, 2019 to be selected for a special issue of The Radio Journal, edited by the ECREA Radio Research board, to be published in the second issue of 2020.

Scientific Committee

Tiziano Bonini, University of Siena, Italy

Marta Perrotta, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy

Enrico Menduni, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy

Magdalena Oliveira, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal

Grazyna Stachyra, Lublin University, Poland

Belén Monclus, Autonoma University, Barcelona, Spain

Conference website: http://www.congressi.unisi.it/ecrea2019/

Timeline

Paper and Panel Submission Deadline: January 30, 2019

Final decisions on accepted papers and panels: March 10, 2019

Early registration deadline: May 31, 2019

Late registration deadline: July 15, 2019

Full paper submissions for The Radio Journal Special Issue: October 30, 2019

International Communication Association 2019 Pre-conference

May 24, 2019

Washington D.C. (USA)

Deadline: February 7, 2019

As part of an ongoing movement to decenter white masculinity as the normative core of scholarly inquiry, the recent article, “#CommunicationSoWhite” by Chakravartty et al. (2018) in the Journal of Communication examined racial disparities within citational practices to make a broader intervention on ways current Communication scholarship reproduces institutional racism and sexism. The underrepresentation of scholars of color within the field in regards to citations, editorial positions, and publications and ongoing exclusion of nonwhite, feminist, queer, post-colonial, and Indigenous voices is a persistent and systemic problem in the production of disciplinary knowledge. ICA President Paula Gardner echoed similar sentiments in her 2018 presidential address, calling for steps for inclusion and diversity within the International Communication Association as well as the larger field.

This pre-conference aims to highlight, consider, and intervene in these issues. We seek submissions that address areas such as:

• The marginalization of communication scholarship in which race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other axes of exclusion are central
  
• Communication scholarship in the context of the global rise of white supremacy and right-wing ethno-nationalism movements;
  
• Communication scholarship from postcolonial and decolonial perspectives;
  
• Who tends to be hired and who serves as leaders/gatekeepers in the field;
  
• The politics of citation and publication;
  
• How #CommunicationSoWhite can function as an intervention within communication studies organizations, departments, and scholarship.
  

We anticipate many submissions will center on the U.S. and other Western contexts; we also hope the pre-conference will provide a discussion that spans both global North and South, and we encourage participation by submitters from outside North America and the U.K.

Please submit either an EXTENDED ABSTRACT or a PANEL PROPOSAL.

Extended abstracts should be 1,500-3,000 words, including notes and references. We encourage different types of submissions including position papers, case studies, and more conventional research papers that tackle any issue relating to the preconference themes.

Panel proposals should include a minimum of four participants. We will accept panels following a traditional format where presenters each speak for 10-15 minutes before a Q-and-A period. We also encourage panel proposals that do not follow such a format; e.g. consider high-density panels, which have six or more participants who each speak for 6 minutes or less, or panels where panelists circulate their papers to each other ahead of time to generate a more engaged discussion during the presentation session. Provide a 400-word rationale describing the panel overall, a 200-word abstract for each participant’s contribution, and a list of participants’ names, affiliations, and contact information.

Travel grants

Depending on funding availability, we may have the ability to offer one or two modest travel grants (maximum $400). If you are a graduate student and/or a scholar resident in a non-Tier A country (see https://www.icahdq.org/page/tiers for a list), please note this status in your submission and indicate that you would like to be considered for a travel grant.

Exclusions

Submissions should not consist primarily of previously published or in-press scholarship.

Deadline

Please submit by Thursday, February 7, 2019, 16:00 UTC, by emailing BOTH Eve Ng at nge@ohio.edu and Khadijah Costley White at klw147@comminfo.rutgers.edu

Attendance by non-presenters: Those who are not presenting are also welcome to register for attendance. (Registration information to come shortly.)

If you have questions, please contact both of the following pre-conference organizers:

Eve Ng: nge@ohio.edu

Khadijah Costley White: klw147@comminfo.rutgers.edu

Date and location

The pre-conference will take place on Friday, May 24, 2019, in Washington D.C., USA, at a venue close to the ICA conference hotel. Exact location will be announced when it is finalized. The pre-conference will end in time for participants to attend the opening plenary in the evening at the Washington Hilton.

14th Conference of the European Sociological Association

August 20-23, 2019

Manchester (UK)

Abstract submission deadline: February 1, 2019

Abstract submission: https://www.europeansociology.org/conftool/abstract-submission

Major changes in the global relations and internal character of societies have posed major questions about how such changes are communicated and understood. Globalisation, fiscal and economic crisis, rapidly rising inequality, changing work conditions, large scale migration, and major changes in forms of political mobilisation and popular support are all taking place in a period when we are coming to terms, both politically and analytically, with the ramifications of the expansion of digital communications and of the large corporations who dominate their organisation. This all poses major questions for us as analysts of these processes, whether at local, European, or global level.

RN18 calls for contributions that may help to shape critical media sociology in the 21st century in its task of addressing the problems outlined above. These might deal with some of the following example topics:

General:

• RN18_a - Sociology of Communications and Media Research (Open Session)
  
• RN18_b - Critical media sociology, theoretical issues
  
• RN18_c - Political economy approaches to communications
  
• RN18_d - Critical media sociology and critical theory
  

More specific areas:

• RN18_e - Labour and employment in 'digital capitalism'
  
• RN18_ f - Race, ethnicity and racism
  
• RN18_g - Nationalism, identity, 'euroscepticism'
  
• RN18_h - Patriarchy and gender
  
• RN18_i - Political communication and the rise of 'populism'
  
• RN18_ j - Communications and the cultural 'commons'
  
• RN18_k - Big data, AI
  
• RN18_l - Journalism in the age of digital communication
  
• RN18_m - Digital activism, the progressive potential of 'new media'
  

The organisers stress that these topics are listed to illustrate the invited areas of research and discussion, but are neither prescriptive nor exhaustive. We welcome contributions reflecting work in progress, empirical work, and work yet to receive public presentation.

Notes for authors

Please do not send us a full copy of your paper (neither before nor after the conference). Abstracts sent by email cannot be accepted. Each participant can submit and present one paper as first author. The submitting author will be considered the presenting author. All submitting/presenting authors can be second author of one more paper. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed and selected for presentation by the Research Network.

Semi-plenary

RN18 also organises, together with RN6 - Critical Political Economy, a semi-plenary at the ESA 2019 Conference in Manchester. The semi-plenary will cover topics around digital labour and capitalism, and the two confirmed speakers are Ursula Huws (University of Hertfordshire) and Phoebe Moore (University of Leicester).

Further information of this semi-plenary can be found here: https://www.europeansociology.org/about-esa-2019/programme/semi-plenaries

May 24, 2019

Institute on Disability and Public Policy at American University, Washington (USA)

Deadline: January 21, 2019

Sponsoring divisions: Sports Communication, and Activism, Communication and Social Justice

Organisers: Dr Dan Jackson, Dr Emma Pullen, Prof Michael Silk (Bournemouth University) and Dr Filippo Trevisan (American University, Washington)

Keynote speaker: Prof Marie Hardin (Penn State)

Media sport is a highly celebrated constituent of popular culture that often intersects with shifting political, economic, technological and cultural conditions. This context creates tensions regarding issues of power and justice, particularly where media representations are framed around normative or ‘accepted’ production values, entrenched practices or financial imperatives by dominant organisations that can contribute to the symbolic stereotyping of marginalised groups.

At the same time, leading athletes from traditionally marginalized groups have been able to seize on their visibility to highlight issues of inequality and discrimination through innovative and highly symbolic forms of protest, from Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Black Power Salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest in 2016. In recent years, these iconic moments have sparked a flurry of debate on social media, where communities have coalesced around hashtags such as #takingaknee and the U.S. women soccer team’s high profile “Equal Play. Equal Pay” campaign. While legacy media organizations continue to play an important role in how these debates are framed, they have also become a catalyst for contributions from a range of actors including politicians, grassroots groups, and global brands interested in sponsorship deals.

The rapidly evolving sport media industry and the changing face of mediated sport production therefore continues to raise original critical questions in new emerging contexts.

This one-day preconference pays attention to issues of sport, representation, power and social justice. The preconference is sponsored by the ICA Interest Groups for Sports Communication, and Activism, Communication and Social Justice, but we welcome submissions that span the disciplinary interests of ICA and beyond. Crossing disciplinary boundaries – the theme of the 2019 ICA conference – is encouraged in proposed papers.

We welcome theoretical and empirical inquiries that examine the following areas and other relevant topics:

• The conditions that impinge on production, and the place and thoughts of cultural producers in articulating and dis-articulating fields of representation
  
• The emergence, resistance and contestation of new sport cultures via mainstream and alternative sport media platforms
  
• The framing, marketing and production of dominant cultural narratives in the context of a neoliberalised enterprise sport media culture
  
• The dynamics of public opinion and audience meaning-making with respect to sport, politics and social justice
  
• The negotiation of identity politics in sport media representation, in particular, issues of (in)visibility (and resistance) of marginalised, non-normative groups who remain mostly under-represented in mainstream sport media (e.g. gender, race, disability, sexuality)
  
• The use of sporting platforms as a vehicle for social justice campaigns by athletes, grassroots groups, and other actors
  
• The role of nationalism, representations of the ‘national normative body’ and ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983) through sport media
  

Outputs from the preconference: We are in discussion with relevant journals for a special issue on the conference topic. If successful, submissions for the conference will be considered and full papers invited in September 2019.

Submission procedure

Please send proposals for 15 minute paper presentations through this google form no later than 21 January 2019. Abstracts are limited to 4000 characters including spaces (approx. 500 words).

Contributors will be selected by peer review, and will be notified of the outcome of their proposal by 1 February 2019. Authors are expected to attend the preconference and present in person.

All participants – whether speaking or not – must register and pay fees. Registration costs (including coffee breaks and lunch buffet) will be approximately 50 USD for presenters and non-presenters. We will also have discounted rates for graduate students. To register, participants need to go to www.icahdq.org and register online as part of their main ICA conference registration, or as a stand-alone registration. As spaces are limited, priority will be given to those accepted for presentation.

Key dates:

• 21 January 2019. Deadline for paper submission.
  
• 1 February 2019. Paper proposers notified of decision by conference committee.
  
• 1 April 2019. Deadline for preconference registration.
  
• 24 May 2019. Preconference starts in Washington DC.
  

June 3-5, 2019

The University of Nottingham (UK)

Deadline: January 31, 2019

Radicalism’ is a concept with a diverse range of applications and ‘radical film’ can be used to describe a wide range of cultural practices. For most of those involved in the Radical Film Network, ‘Radicalism’ refers first and foremost to a political affiliation with the Left and the various traditions that underpin it: from anarchism and socialism to radical environmentalism and struggles for racial, sexual and gender equality. But, radicalism is about aesthetics as much as politics; it is about interrogating the nature of film language, experimenting with the medium and developing new approaches to audio-visual communication.

In keeping with the spirit in which the Radical Film Network (RFN) was founded, this conference aims to bring together the political and aesthetic avant-gardes, with a particular focus on the transnational nature of contemporary radical film cultures. By looking at how radical films are produced, circulated and engaged with in different parts of the world, the conference aims to shed light on the transnational nature of film cultures and the intersecting relationship between political struggle and aesthetic innovation. Bringing together filmmakers and researchers, the conference hopes to create new and consolidate existing connections and networks, facilitate transnational and cross-cultural dialogues, and forge global solidarity among radical filmmakers around the world.

We particularly welcome filmmakers and researchers from the Global South, and contributions engaging with themes in the Global South from individuals and communities both inside and outside of academia. To this end, we may be able to offer a limited number of travel subsidies to participants from underprivileged backgrounds and the Global South. Please get in touch with the conference organisers to check eligibility once more details are announced in the spring of 2019.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Radical aesthetics and politics;
  
• Political filmmaking and ethical issues;
  
• Class and radical films;
  
• Forms of radical film activism and political agitation;
  
• Programming, distribution and exhibition;
  
• Radical film festivals and audiences;
  
• Radical film history across national borders;
  
• (Self)-Representation, identity and privacy in radical film cultures;
  
• Collaborative and participatory practices in radical film cultures;
  
• Partnerships between radical filmmakers and institutions;
  
• Issues of inclusion/exclusion in radical film cultures;
  
• Radical film cultures, memory, the archive and preservation;
  
• Creativity and innovation in radical film cultures;
  
• Radical films and the proliferation of digital technologies;
  
• Radical film cultures in the Global South;
  
• Radical film cultures and future direction(s)
  

Interested participates are invited to submit proposals for one of the following forms:

• 20-minute presentation
  
• 1.5-hour panel (with 3-4 panellists)
  
• 1-1.5-hour workshop on any aspect of radical film cultures
  

Proposals to a maximum of 300 words (presentation) or two-pages (panel or workshop) should be sent to:

Trfc2019conference@gmail.com

Deadline for call for papers: 31 January 2019

Please address any enquiries to the above address. Details of the complete programme will be announced in due course.

See more on website

July 7-11, 2019

Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)

Deadline: February 8, 2019 (23.59 UTC)

The Popular Culture Working Group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) invites submissions of abstracts for papers and panel proposals for the 2019 IAMCR conference “Communication, Technology, and Human Dignity: Disputed Rights, Contested Truths”

IAMCR conferences address a wide diversity of topics defined by our 32 thematic sections and working groups. We also propose a single central theme to be explored throughout the conference with the aim of generating and exploring multiple perspectives. This is accomplished through plenary and special sessions, and in some of the sessions of the sections and working groups. The central theme for 2019 focuses on communication, technology, and human dignity.

The year 2018 saw the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At its heart was the premise that everyone had the right to live in dignity. In the intervening years, with the successive growth of television, the explosion of digital media, and the emergence of artificial intelligence, communication systems have become ever more central to organizing every aspect of daily life, prompting renewed attention to questions around their role in both supporting and subverting the exercise of rights and the achievement of universal dignity.

The right to voice and visibility, to have one’s experiences and ideas fairly represented in the heartlands of public culture is now established as a basic human right alongside rights of access to the comprehensive information and analysis that supports individual expression and social participation on a basis of equality, dignity and mutual respect.

Under current conditions these fundamental communication-related rights are under increasing pressure and threat. Control over the organisation of innovations in communication and their applications has increasing passed from governments to corporations. Concern with the public interest and the common good has been increasing displaced by business models designed to maximise revenues. These models are bolstering appeals to consumption while weakening the social contract of citizenship, providing new and largely unregulated platforms for the dissemination of rumour, misinformation and ‘fake’ news, ushering in the era of so called ‘post truth’ and reinforcing social and political polarization

These developments are taking place against a backdrop of rapidly widening inequalities of income and wealth both within countries and between different areas of the world. One visible manifestation of these changes is the escalating volume of migrations driven by political and environmental as well as economic pressures. The resulting expansion in the numbers of refugees and displaced persons poses new challenges for the rights of minorities and for guarantees of personal freedom and full access to citizens’ rights.

With Communication, Technology and Human Dignity as the principal themes, the 2019 Madrid Congress aims to generate a cross-disciplinary debate that brings differing but interacting perspectives to bear on the urgent issues raised by present developments. This objective will be the primary focus of the plenary sessions and special sessions and as in previous years we encourage sections and the working groups to pay particular attention to the core themes in organizing their programs, while not precluding presentations based on recent research and theorizing in other areas covered by their remits.

The objective should not simply be to present new evidence and theorizing on key issues, but to reflect on the situation today in order to suggest how present developments may unfold in future and to engage with the challenges they present for research, policy and action.

At IAMCR Madrid 2019, we aim to analyse the impact of the latest advances in communication technology on society, culture and human rights, giving special importance to the quality and authenticity of sources and messages in view of increased mechanization and artificial intelligence. The context of these problems is how the advance of technology affects the quality of human life, how communication technology affects the objectivity of facts, and how the geopolitical and socioeconomic contexts are affected by the most recent changes in the structure and modes adopted by communication processes.

Present tendencies and scenarios pose urgent questions for individual and social rights. How can communication continue to facilitate human connection, understanding and mutual respect in the face of the ever-increasing technological nature of the media and geopolitical turbulence? How can we define and reflect on our personal and social identities at a time when the emerging technologies and other factors call into question the established notion of “belonging to a nation”?

We are faced then with clear challenges in respect of the quality of communication, the quality of life and human dignity.

We encourage participants to address these issues both from the viewpoint of the predominant communication systems and from those which are arising from the use of the new technologies – artificial intelligence, the growth of automation and robotics, Big Data and the Internet of Things. We also welcome analyses which re-evaluate and take a fresh look at human dignity in respect of geopolitics, the present-day socio-economic context, religion, transparency, accessibility and discrimination, and the re-composition of power, in the overall context of the implications of technology and communication in an interconnected world.

Topics addressing the central theme

The Popular Culture Working Group acknowledges the dynamic character of social, political and cultural changes in relation to communication and in specific to popular culture. It is often in popular culture that the first challenges to the establishment and status quo become visible. We therefore invite abstracts and proposals that explore the following themes:

• Technology and/in popular culture

• Popular representations of resistance

• Gender, race, class and sexuality and identity narratives

• Big data and popular culture

• Popular Culture and the religious imaginaries

• Liminal celebrity, exoticism and identity

• Ethical imaginations in popular culture

• Creating the truth in/by popular imaginaries

• Identity, aesthetics and the popular

• Surveillance and consumer culture

• Datafication, agency and identity

• Commodification of human rights

• Popular representations of human rights crises

• Populism, sustainability and social media

Proposals not mentioned above but relevant to the broad topic area will also be considered.

Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts must be submitted from 3 December 2018 through 8 February 2019. We welcome both individual abstracts and panel presentations.

The Popular Culture Working group will also welcome abstracts for video presentations, as part of an experiment to allow for remote participation. If you wish to submit an abstract for a video presentation, please carefully read the Joint Call for Video Presentations and follow the procedure explained there.

We ask you to kindly submit proposals in good time at the abstract submission site: https://iamcr-ocs.org.

Deadlines and important dates

The deadline to submit abstracts is 8 February 2019, at 23.59 UTC.

• 3 December 2018 - Abstract submission system opens at https://iamcr-ocs.org

• 8 February 2019 - Deadline to submit abstracts

• 28 March 2019 - Abstract decisions announced by sections and working groups

• 7 April 2019 - Deadline to apply for travel grants and awards

• 11 April 2019 - Deadline to confirm participation

• 7 May 2019 - Draft conference programme schedule released

• 14 May 2019 - Last day for Early bird registration

• 7 June 2019 - Deadline for full paper (or video) submission

• 17 June 2019 - Last day for changes to be made in the print version of the programme

• 7-11 July 2019 - IAMCR Conference

Languages

This Working Group accepts abstract submissions and presentations in English only.

Guidelines for abstracts

Abstracts should be between 300 and 500 words. All abstracts must be submitted through the IAMCR Open Conference System. Abstracts sent by email will not be accepted.

It is expected that each person will submit only one (1) abstract. However, under no circumstances should there be more than two (2) abstracts bearing the name of the same author, either individually or as part of any group of authors. Please note also that the same abstract or another version with minor variations in title or content must not be submitted to more than one Section or Working Group. Such submissions will be deemed to be in breach of the conference guidelines and will be rejected by the OCS system, by the relevant Head or by the Conference Programme Reviewer. Authors submitting them risk being removed entirely from the conference programme.

For further information, please consult the IAMCR Madrid 2019 web page or contact the Local Organizing Committee by email: madrid2019@iamcr.org

Evaluation Criteria

Submitted abstracts will generally be evaluated on the basis of:

1. Theoretical contribution

2. Methods

3. Quality of writing

4. Literature review

5. Relevance of the proposal to the work of the Section or Working Group

6. Originality and/or significance

Contact

Tonny Krijnen , co-chair of the Popular Culture Working Group: krijnen@eshcc.eur.nl

Website

St. Petersburg (Russia)

April 16-18, 2019

Deadline extended: January 22, 2019

The 7th International conference 'Comparative Media Studies in Today's World' (CMSTW'2019) is dedicated to analysing world's communication and journalism in comparative perspective. The theme for 2019 is 'Communities. Audiences. Publics', which is to bring together a wide range of scholars in social sciences, communication science, computational disciplines, and humanities.

Since 2013, the conference has gathered experts in comparative media research, including Paolo Mancini, Larry Gross, Silvio Waisbord, Katrin Voltmer, Nico Carpentier, Susanne Fengler, Elena Vartanova, Thomas Hanitzsch, Daya Thussu, Zizi Papacharissi, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and many others.

The conference is an integral part of 'Media in Modern World' Annual Forum which will be held by St. Petersburg State University for the 58th time in 2019. Thus, interested audience is ensured, and you may wish to take part in the Plenary Session (with simultaneous translation into English) and all sorts of discussions at the Annual Forum on April 18-19.

A wide variety of publishing opportunities, including Scopus Q1 journals, is offered at the conference.

Deadline: January 22, 2019 (Full paper, short paper, and extended abstract submission)

Deadline: January 22, 2019 (Panel and workshop proposals)

February 15, 2019: Camera-ready papers upload

More information here

Digital Journalism

Deadline: April 30, 2019

Digital platforms and mobile technologies are diversifying the ways in which audiences are exposed to and engage with news, ranging from news avoidance to active news sharing (Newman et al., 2018; Park et al., 2018). Among different types of news engagement, the act of ‘sharing’ encourages the culture of social endorsement where audiences signal to others and are influenced by their social networks in encountering news. This creates a social news environment where audiences are inadvertently exposed to news that may not match their political beliefs or interests (Anspach, 2017). On social media, audiences are oftentimes incidentally exposed to different perspectives and views (Fletcher & Nielsen, 2017; Lu & Lee, 2018; Weeks et al., 2017). Yet, whether they will engage with the news they encounter incidentally is a different matter; news audiences may or may not choose to consume or engage with the news that they have discovered. Exposure to diverse information from counter-attitudinal sources does not automatically lead to the consumption of such information (Anspach, 2017).

In the context of news sharing, there exist two closely linked dimensions. First is the technological affordances offered by digital platforms (Feraj & Azad, 2012; Evans, Pearce, Vitak, & Treem, 2017). Technological affordances can influence news consumers’ levels of news exposure, consumption and engagement. As yet, relatively little is known about the extent to which and how different technological affordances lead to different types and levels of news engagement. This is further complicated by the fact that audience behavior is an outcome of a contextual and multi-faceted relationship between the technology and the user (Evans et al., 2017). The second dimension is the human factors that come into play in the uptake, reception, and sharing of news. Consistent with the theory of selective exposure, how news consumers consume and interact with news are also dependent on their political beliefs (Shin & Thorson, 2017; Stroud et al., 2017). The phenomenon of selective exposure can lead to a decrease in opportunities for news consumers to consume and engage with diverse news and information (Messing & Westwood, 2012; Stroud, 2008, 2010).

On digital platforms, there is a third, moderating factor—social endorsements—that bridges technological affordances and human factors. Social endorsements serve as a heuristic cue that signals news audiences as to which news deserves their attention (Anspach, 2017; Messing & Westwood, 2012). This is a key trend in the digital platform environment among news audiences who interact with others through news sharing.

To date, the link between affordances of digital platforms and news audiences’ selective exposure remains largely unknown as the interplay between technological affordances associated with news engagement and human factors remains understudied. To further develop this area, this special issue of Digital Journalism invites scholars to investigate the interplay between the structural and human factors that influence news consumers’ exposure to and engagement with news. Among different types of digital news engagement, this special issue focuses on news sharing behaviors that epitomize how news consumers interact with technological affordances offered by digital platforms. We welcome quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Different types and levels of news engagement;
  
• News avoidance
  
• Passive versus active sharers of news
  
• Public versus private news sharing on social media and messaging apps
  
• How different tones of news stories influence news sharing
  
• Personalized news and its impact on news engagement
  
• Technological affordances of digital platforms and their linkage to sharing of news
  
• Proprietary and non-proprietary news platforms and sharing of news
  
• Socio-demographic and cultural factors that influence news sharing
  
• Social endorsements and news sharing
  
• The interplay between selective exposure and social endorsements
  

Information about Submissions

Proposals should include the following: an abstract of 500-750 words (not including references) as well as background information on the author(s), including an abbreviated bio that describes previous and current research that relates to the special issue theme. Please submit your proposal as one file (PDF) with your names clearly stated in the file name and the first page. Send your proposal to the e-mail address engagingnewsaudiences@gmail.com and sora.park@canberra.edu.au by the date stated in timeline below. Authors of accepted proposals are expected to develop and submit their original article, for full blind review, in accordance with the journal's peer-review procedure, by the deadline stated. Article submissions should target 7,000 words in length. Guidelines for manuscripts can be found here.

Timeline:

Abstract submission deadline: 30 April 2019

Notification on submitted abstracts: 30 May 2019

Article submission deadline: 30 November 2019

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Deadline: February 1, 2019

Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture, supported by the ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership for Wales (Wales DTP), invites applications for funded PhD study.

These particular studentships, known as ‘collaborative studentships’, involve liaison with a non-academic organisation, often at many key stages of the research programme. They will commence in October 2019. The following collaborative studentships are available for the “Journalism and Democracy” pathway:

• Journalism, Data Literacy and Democratic Futures (Dr Joanna Redden): MORE HERE
  
• ”End of Life Decisions in the News: Medical Ethics, Law and Democracy” (Professor Jenny Kitzinger): MORE HERE
  

The School of Journalism, Media and Culture is a world leading centre for media teaching and research and offer a wide range of courses at various levels.

The School combines a long standing record of excellence in teaching and training with an outstanding research portfolio routinely winning awards from a range of bodies. This reputation was recently recognised in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), which ranked the School 2nd for the quality of its journalism, media and communications research when compared with 66 other institutions in the UK. 89% of the School’s research was classed as ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ by REF, with both the School’s research environment and the impact of its research receiving the top possible score of 100%. Our staff regularly contribute expert opinion and commentary about research and topical news events to the local, national and international media and through the School blog JOMEC@Cardiff University.

Both the University and the ESRC Wales DTP value diversity and equality at all levels and we encourage applications from all sections of the community.

We welcome applications for both full and part-time study, and studentships are available as either ‘1+3’ (ie one full time year of research training Masters followed by three years of full-time Doctoral study, or the part-time equivalent), or ‘+3’ (ie three years of full-time doctoral study or its part-time equivalent), depending on the needs of the applicant.

• Application deadline: 1 February 2019
  
• Start date: 1 October 2019
  
• Duration: 1+3 years or 3 years or the part time equivalent
  
• Funding body: ESRC
  
• Level of study: Postgraduate research
  
• Award type: PhD studentship
  

Contact: Dr Cynthia Carter (Reader), cartercl@cardiff.ac.uk, +44 (0)29 2087 6172

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