*CFP* "THE GLOBAL PROMOTION AND MEDIATION OF THE UN'S SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS", CONFERENCE

Following April's MDC/LCPR Jakarta conference on the UNSDGs, please find a CFP for the Media Discourse Centre's follow-up event, The Global Promotion and Mediation of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, Monday 16th September 2019

Organisers: Stuart Price and Ben Harbisher

Submission email for all contributors: mdcevent@dmu.ac.uk

Eventbrite registration link

Essential Details

The Media Discourse Centre, in collaboration with the International Journal of Media Discourse and the London School of Public Relations (Jakarta), is pleased to announce the second stage of its Call for Papers [keynotes to be announced]. This phase of the event will consist of a full-day MDC conference on the UNSDGs, paying particular attention to the rhetorical composition and discursive framework of the Goals, the response of governments and public authorities, and the empirical evidence produced by the Jakarta/Bali case studies.

CFP - The Global Promotion and Mediation of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals

On 1 January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development came into force. The UN describes its Sustainable Development Goals as 'a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future'. Consisting of 17 inter-connected fields of activity, the UNSDGs are framed as a moral intervention, and couched in the language of development. It is this perspective - an apparently progressive commitment to justice combined with adherence to the expansion of the economy - that has encountered both support and some criticism from academic commentators. While Kopnina believed that the UNSDGs will lead to 'a greater spread of unsustainable production and consumption' (2015), the sheer scale of the UN's ambitions prompted Biermann et al (2017) to note that '[the Goals] collective success will depend on a number of institutional factors such as the extent to which states ... translate the global ambitions into national contexts'.

The SDGs address a number of 'stakeholders'- ranging from multinationals to Governments; NGO’s and of course are regarded as objectives that should apply to all citizens of the world. Over the next fifteen years, the UN intends to mobilise efforts to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities and tackle climate change, while ensuring that 'no one is left behind'. Three years into this programme, the conference examines the progress made in the fight to end poverty, to promote health, to develop sustainable smart cities, to prevent further climate change, to facilitate economic growth, to protect the oceans, and to end world hunger.

Conference themes include:

• how the objectives above are communicated or promoted within 'developed' and especially 'developing' nations 
• the extent to which these goals being encouraged, measured, enacted or resisted 
• the local, autonomous, grassroots initiatives that may embrace or go beyond the framework set by the UN 
• the social, political, cultural and economic barriers to the successful attainment of the UNSDGs 
• the application of discourse/multi-modal approaches to the textual material produced within a material/symbolic environment 
• the representation of those groups identified as vulnerable and in need of support 
• the ways in which the rights of women, notions of gendered identity, descriptions of class location, and ideas about race/ethnicity are articulated (or not) within the UNSDGs 
• the use by state and corporate authority of discourses that attempt to reproduce the symbolic references employed by the UN 
• who, within the various DAC territories and within 'developed' nations, are presented as the main proponents, actors, or opponents of the UNSDGs 
• the relationship between the UNSDGs and the concept and practice of globalisation 
• the role of policing, surveillance, regimes of border-control, and other barriers and impediments to collective social action 
• the relationship between the Goals and the activity of social movements
• how 'existential' and other threats are constituted through the language and images used in the SDGs 
• the media ecology/context of the call and the responses it creates 
• case studies covering the successes or failures of the initiatives

250 Word Abstract and Bio are required by 1st July 2019 - send to mdcevent@dmu.ac.uk: authors will be notified by the 15th July, and successful contributors will be asked to submit full papers by 30th August.