*CFP* “REPRESENTING ACTIVISM IN POPULAR CULTURE" PANEL, EUROPEAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ECREA 2020 CONFERENCE

European Communication Research and Education Association Ecrea Conference  

Communication & Democracy section

2-5 de Octubre de 2020

University of Minho-Braga, Portugal

Delia Dumitrica is seeking contributions to a panel on the representation of contemporary activism (e.g. protests, boycotts, hashtag movements, etc.) in popular culture for the Communication & Democracy section at the European Communication Research and Education Association ECREA 2020 conference. 

Panel title: Representing activism in popular culture 

While the news coverage of activism – and particularly protest – is a rich research problematic, work on the symbolic construction of activism across cultural texts such as novels, films, documentaries, advertising, memes, songs, art installations, etc. is largely missing. Such cultural texts contribute to the shared political imaginary by informing public values and social identity, proposing shared cognitive maps for political sense-making, and discussing public norms (Curran, 2011).

Furthermore, by rhetorically constructing popular memory of and arguments about past activism, such texts have a long-term impact on our political imaginary (Borda, 2010; Edgerton, 2001; Griffin, 2003).

The panel is particularly - but not exclusively – interested in mapping the representation of contemporary forms of activism, from Occupy and the Arab Spring to hashtag movements such as MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Fridays for Future.  Contemporary activism’s creative use of digital mediation for self-representation and grassroots mobilization has itself commanded the attention of cultural producers as a herald of a revitalized polis (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2018).

The panel’s interest in the portrayal of activism in popular culture is driven by questions such as: What tactics and strategies of civic action are legitimized across these texts? What civic subject positions are constructed? To what extent do they participate in the constructing engagement as an individual gesture? How do they construct trust in democratic politics and in the political prowess of digital technologies?

If interested, send a 500 words abstract by December 19, 2019 to Delia Dumitrica at dumitrica@eshcc.eur.nl

References

Dumitrica, D., & Bakardjieva, M. (2018). The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers. Media, Culture & Society, 40(6): 817–837. 

Borda, J.L. (2010). Women Labor Activists in the Movies: Nine Depictions of Workplace Organizers,1954-2005. 

McFarland. Curran, J. (2011). Media and democracy. London: Routledge.

Edgerton, G. (2001). Television as historian: A different kind of history altogether.  In Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P. (Eds.). Television histories: Shaping collective memory in the media age (pp. 1-16). Lexington, University Press of Kentucky.

Griffin, C.J.G. (2003). Movement as memory: Significant form in eyes on the prize. Communication Studies, 54(2): 196-210.