Histories of Digital Journalism
A conference exploring the intersections of history, culture, digital technology and journalism
Budapest, Hungary: 24–25 June 2022
Although the shared past of digitization and journalism stretches back at least to a half-century, digital journalism history is a field still in formation. Building on the momentum of the recent ‘historical turn’ in digital media and internet studies, the aim of the conference is to bring together an interdisciplinary network of scholars to interrogate digital journalism histories and to start a global critical exchange on various approaches to and aspects of historicising digital journalism. As digital journalism has been re-configured by socio-historical contradictions of communication and complexities of its technological innovations, journalism scholarship should continuously strive for enhancing critical exchange to advance studies that intersect with numerous disciplines, theoretical approaches and methodological traditions. Emphasis of the conference is on the plurality of histories instead of one single digital journalism history, acknowledging diachronic as well as synchronic complexities of social relations, political contingencies, cultural traditions and power configurations between journalism and digitisation. Instead of enforcing one great master narrative, the conference aims to offer a space to embrace the co-existence of parallel, sometimes complementing, often conflicting historical investigations and narratives.
The past few years have seen a rapid increase in the number and variety of technologies embedded in and passing through home environments. Researchers increasingly recognize the distinct nature of the home as a site of research. The past four decades have seen a significant shift in the technology environment from the "media home" (Spigel, 2001) to the "smart home" (Woods, 2021). We have seen significant additions to the abundant digital ecology of the home, increasing the number of digital access-points and available services, and intensifying the data-circulation in connected homes. The home is a site of mundane, private, usually hidden but highly significant everyday practices (Pink et al. 2017). Yet it is also increasingly becoming a part of national healthcare infrastructures through the deployment of welfare technologies, and energy policy through smart meters. During the "global lockdown" caused by the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, technologies took a prominent role as the home transformed itself into a site in which activities such as learning, parenting, work, entertainment, and remote medical care intermingled.
The increasing complexity of the digital infrastructures and the experiences, spaces, visions of the home in a current era of connected homes and connected living poses particular challenges for conducting research in such an environment. This also calls for methodological innovations that shape how we see the home as a research site and how we engage with it.
We invite chapter proposals (300-500 words) for an edited volume of critical essays dealing with screenwriter Joseph Stefano and elements of horror in the 1960s television program The Outer Limits.
This edited collection, with articles from film scholars working in the fields of horror and science fiction, will examine not only Stefano’s post-Psycho accomplishments as a scriptwriter but also his importance as a producer, establishing his gothic vision as a consistent characteristic of the show. The Outer Limits, filmed in black and white, employs an expressionist cinematography uncharacteristic of other broadcasts at that time, emphasizing the gothic elements of the plots while suggesting a new category of horror noir and science fiction drama. The Outer Limits, as horror noir, employs visual elements and narrative conventions of the art-house foreign films and noir drama of the past to create an ambiance of horror while anticipating future challenges of a society confronting accelerated scientific and technological change.
Essays will be structured around Stefano’s ten filmed screenplays and two contributed story ideas, while each essay also may examine other episodes, as appropriate, to illustrate how Stefano’s horror noir themes, tropes, and characterizations pervade the entire series.
From state-sponsored propagandists using paid troll armies, to commercially motivated data analytics firms selling their toolkits to politicians, and platform workers producing memes for overseas clients, the global industry of disinformation production has only professionalized and diversified. This special issue for Social Media + Society aims to deepen understanding about the social identities, work arrangements, and political and commercial motivations of an emerging class of digital disinformation workers. We are interested in critical and interdisciplinary research that examines the political economy, specifically the digital and creative industries that propel and produce disinformation. The special issue’s focus on business models and disinformation worker identities in global context aims to expand on disinformation studies’ analysis of “fake news” and hate speech as content that require better policing or fact-checking. It also aims to expand platform studies’ research agenda and consider the range of digital professionals and entrepreneurs who buy and sell engagement on social media–with pernicious political consequences especially in contexts where dissenting voices are suppressed.
Thus, we solicit submissions that discuss the diverse worker hierarchies and conditions, outsourced gig arrangements, money politics, and/or regulatory loopholes in the promotional industries that enable the strategic production of disinformation. We are interested in interdisciplinary and ethnographic research that engages with the deep stories of workers in “dark PR” firms (Silverman, Lytyvenko & Kung 2020; Verwey & Muir 2019), data analytics firms (Briant 2021), Latin American and Indonesian Instagram click farms (Lindquist 2021), and “propaganda secretary” offices (Hassan & Hitchen 2019). We are also interested in normative discussions about complicity and collusion in digital industries as well as scholarly self-reflection about the challenges of doing engaged research about disinformation (Ong 2020).
This special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies proposes to work on Black Queer expression in audiovisual musics cutting across histories of the avant-garde, popular audiovisuality, and frameworks both transnational and critically transhistorical. The goal of the issue is to set up the framework for a survey of Black and Queer musicality in audiovisual media so as to suggest “non-contemporaneous” dialogues between and across historical registers and media platforms, so that the critical expressive power of non-conforming persons of color become a given rather than an alibi, an absence, or a projection.
From early sound cinema to the present, queer or gender non-conforming black artists have voiced a complex series of claims, propositions, demands, and desires, from the introduction of sound to the cinematic screen to the introduction of social media video in networked digital cultures. Black feminist and queer scholarship has often engaged with the meanings and powers expressed in these works, or in musical artists indebted to them or referencing them, from Angela Davis’ reading of transformations of historical memory in Smith’s St. Louis Blues (Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms), to Lindon Barrett’s study of Billie Holiday (Blackness and Value), to Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of errancy in relation to woman-identified women singers in the early years of recording (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments), and Daphne Brooks’ recent reading of black women’s use of arrangement, sonic curation, and blackness as technology (Liner Notes for the Revolution) in articulating a politics of being and becoming.
We are seeking contributions for a thematic section of Studies in Communication Sciences (SComS) exploring changes in communication of higher education institutions. SComS is a peer-reviewed journal of communication and media research with platinum open-access (no article processing charges).
Higher education institutions (HEIs) are pivotal organizations in modern societies (Schäfer & Fähnrich, 2020). In past decades, the higher education sector has expanded considerably in many countries, with rapid increases in research output, growing student enrollment, and newly founded colleges and universities. New public management reforms and a growing need for societal legitimation have led many HEIs to prioritize communication, i.e., to establish communication offices, pursue branding, marketing, and reputation management, and to professionalize their communication efforts on traditional channels, websites, and social media (Davies & Horst, 2016; Elken, Stensaker, & Dedze, 2018; Marcinkowski, Kohring, Fürst, & Friedrichsmeier, 2014; Raupp & Osterheider, 2019; Schwetje, Hauser, Böschen, & Leßmöllmann, 2020; Vogler & Schäfer, 2020). This has resulted in competition for public visibility, involving researchers, HEI leadership, and professional communicators at central levels, research centers, and departments (Crettaz von Roten & Entradas, 2018; Entradas et al., 2020; Friedrichsmeier & Fürst, 2012; Koivumäki & Wilkinson, 2020; McKinnon, Black, Bobillier, Hood, & Parker, 2019; Rödder, 2020; Watermeyer & Lewis, 2018).
Created two years ago, the Group on Ethics and the Digital in Information-Communication research (GENIC) is now an accredited working group of the French national scientific association for information and communication science (Société Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication - SFSIC). The group promotes work on questions of ethics affecting all information-communication processes, in a context marked by the growing presence of digital technologies, through the analysis of phenomena, practices, social interactions. Indeed, all fields of research are touched by ethical questions (we refer the reader to the volume Dynamics of Information-Communication Research edited by the Conference of French Research Centers in Information-communication Sciences), take for instance the research fields related to the media, to legal, communicational, or organizational issues, or the role and the place of technologies in methods of research and scientific publication, in particular through the design of algorithms and data processing.
Beyond analyzing research practice, work in information-communication ethics should also take into account the logics of actors and their productions embedded in discursive, socio-economic, cultural, political and regulatory realities of digital and communication practices. Faced with a generalization of social controversies, whether related to the health crisis, the environmental crisis, public health issues, etc. it appears essential today that information-communication researchers participate in public debates around ethics and prepare those on the questions to come.
It has become increasingly clear that fandoms and participatory culture are sites of controversy, conflict and even complicity, complicating earlier assessments that sought to celebrate creativity, collegiality, and community. As we continue to make sense of the consequences of web 2.0, the study of fans – the affective bonds, identities, and productive cultures of a highly mediated and networked society – is vital in understanding our current moment, whether expressed in debates about “cancel culture” or ongoing “culture wars”. Fans have had to rethink and reassess their relationships to fan objects, consider their role in reproducing global systems of inequality, and reflect on the meaning of participation in an era that is marked by both moral ambivalence and political earnestness.
Implicitly and explicitly, fannish practices are involved in a variety of key social, political, and cultural issues across the globe. They can be seen in politics, ranging from QAnon’s role in the storming of the US Capitol building, conspiracy theories relating to the covid pandemic, and the continued expansion of the global reactionary and populist right, from Britain to India to Brazil. They can be seen in new cultural terrains produced by networked movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, #OscarsSoWhite, and the accompanying activism and responses as fans come to terms with the crimes, misdemeanors, and disagreements of former faves, like Xiao Zhan, Joss Whedon, or JK Rowling. They are expressed in the strategies and tactics of inter- and intra-fandom conflicts, whether Meghan Markle and the Royal Family or some Chinese fan responses to BTS talking about the Korean war. And, pressingly, fan tourism, collector culture, and the energy use of digital culture all contribute to the ongoing climate crisis.
This book seeks to showcase current academic debates and multiple disciplinary perspectives on adversiting. The contributions in this book will help create a comprehensive overview of academic discourse on contemporary advertiting. Perspectives on the ethics of advertising, the challenges to measuring advertising’s impact, and the importance of professional creativity are particularly encouraged.
Proposed chapters might address whether advertising is purely manipulative, whether it encourages over consumption, whether it creates monopolies, or whether it serves primarily to make the rich even richer. Chapters might also argue that advertising encourages and rewards creativity, enriches people’s connections to their possessions and experiences, fills needs rather than creating them, provides society with good models for emulation, or offers genuinely aesthetic experiences. These are just some possibilities—we are seeking a range of opinions, approaches, and perspectives.
The book proposal will be submitted to the Palgrave Macmillan series “Palgrave Debates in Business and Management,” (series editor Anders Örtenblad) which looks for edited collections “taking stock of controversial and complicated topics within business and management” in refreshing and creative ways.
In the year 2020, humanity suddenly faced a serious challenge that threatened its existence. It turned out that the modern world is not yet ready for serious biological challenges. Many people had to reconsider their views on their existence, their ways of survival, and a lot of other things. Many countries have moved to an isolated existence, closing themselves off from others. In some places, foreigners found themselves in a terrible position of pariahs, being perceived as a biological threat. And since this menace has not gone away, and since in addition to the biological danger it has created many psychological and cultural dysfunctions in society, our journal Corpus Mundi has decided to refer to an old problem rooted in the fear of the unknown – the problem of zombies.
That’s why the e-journal Corpus Mundi is planning to publish a special issue in 2021, tentatively titled “I Recognize my Honey by the Walk”.
This issue will be devoted to a whole range of very different problems related to the concepts we conventionally denote as “zombies”.
Adoption, Kinship, Culture: Engaging the Past, Imagining the Future
ASAC 2021 Eighth Biennial Virtual Conference
Gatherings for Q&A on Zoom: Oct. 15, 10am-7pm EST
Adoption, Kinship, Culture: Engaging the Past, Imagining the Future, hosted by The Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC), considers crossing boundaries, changing discourses, and new kinship formations to imagine the futures of adoption. This conference investigates what adoption, foster care, kinship, and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) might look like in the coming decades. What discourses, representations, practices, policies, and laws will change and which will stay the same, and why? Who and what will lead the way? As we speculate about the futures of adoption, we cannot ignore the innumerable pasts and the complexities of our present moment. Thus, we also ask, how has the past informed, anticipated, or rejected the future? What will be the effects of the past on our future kinships?
8th edition of the Conference on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Social Media Corpora
Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Thursday 28 – Friday 29 October 2021
Messengers from the Stars: Episode VI
Online Conference
School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon
November 25-26, 2021
Science Fiction and Fantasy are lasting fields of inquiring into today’s world. They have become privileged means to question issues of aesthetic, ethical, political, social, economic, environmental and historical nature with high impact on contemporary societies. They have promoted hot-button issues and rich critical debates in literature as well as in cinema, TV, and videogames among other media.
The University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES) invites you to take part in the 6th International Conference Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy to be held at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, on November 25-26, 2021. This year Episode VI will focus on the theme “Nature and Overnature in SF and Fantasy Discourses”.
Discourse and Discord in CSR initiatives Conference
Université Paris-Nanterre, France,
26 November 2021
Striking the right balance between the moral(istic) discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the one hand, and how this same discourse translates into concrete CSR initiatives on the other, remains a conundrum that many organizations grapple with. Informed by specific discursive practices (mission statements, websites, press releases, etc.), “CSR discourse” has recently become a discursive category in its own right, which reflects the development of contemporary society and how companies adapt and are perceived by it.
How a company acts within and interacts with society has evolved from one generation to the next. Often cited as the father of CSR, Howard Bowen highlights the debate between “social responsibilities and laissez-faire” stating: “social institutions and organisations which are desirable in one environment or in one stage of man’s development may be utterly inappropriate in another”.
Modern interpretations of classic stories are nothing new and each age creates its own monsters that it will automatically equate with like versions from the past—see the evolving versions on screen of Mr. Hyde and the Wolf Man for example.
In recent texts though, this placement of strikingly contemporary versions of monsters in historical texts has been used in ways that suggest more than just a simple act of “updating” is going on and that they are more purposely commenting on both our times and uses of the past and how that might impact on current political debates around nationalism, ethnic and sexual identity, and ideological and religious extremism.
Areas of interest within this can include more recent visions of classic monsters transposed back into historical settings. This can include narratives around mythological figures (Clash/Wrath of the Titans and 300), modern versions of vampires, werewolves, witches, devils and traditional folkloric characters placed in historical narratives (Van Helsing, Extraordinary Gentlemen, Outlander, Salem, Supernatural, Lucifer), or new creations such as zombies, aliens, and robots placed in periods in which they never existed (Dr Who, Kingdom, Stargate, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies).
Qualitative Health Communication (QHC), is a new, no-fee, open access online journal dedicated to publishing articles employing qualitative methods to investigate, improve and innovate health communication.
We are calling for submissions to QHC’s second issue (to be published in July 2022) and subsequent issues via the journal's website. Detailed instructions for authors can also be found on the website. This is a general call for submission not tied to a special issue topic. All submissions within scope of QHC are welcome. Submission from researchers at any stage of their career is encouraged. All submissions will be peer-reviewed: initial screening in-house followed by external peer-review. There are no article submission or processing fees. Accepted articles will be available online free of charge.
The first issue of Qualitative Health Communication (QHC) will be published in January 2022 featuring contributions by renowned health communication researchers. Topics include COVID-19 communication, communication in antenatal group consultations, paediatric palliative care, surgeon-patient consultations, communication in patient information leaflets and forensic assessment reports and co-construction of experiential knowledge.
According to the AV Club, “over six seasons and 186 episodes (and counting), [Adventure Time has] blossomed into one of the most distinctive cartoons currently on the air.” With young male hero, Finn, and his dog, Jake, whose shapeshifting body gets them out of trouble and a colorful world of adorable characters and creatures, the stories appeal to children of all ages. Additionally, the political undertones make it very attractive to scholars and fans.
This CFP requests papers applying theoretical concepts to different issues that have risen in the show:
MAB20: DIY & More-Than-Human Media Architecture Workshop
held in conjunction with the Media Architecture Biennale 2020 in 2021
June 28 -July 2, 2021
In recent years, research in the fields of media architecture and urban informatics have made calls to move beyond the human-centred city and towards a “more equitable multispecies city” (Van Dooren et al. 2012). Working towards future more-than-human cities, the design of hybrid digital-physical urban spaces - with an ethos of inclusivity and diversity - will require methods, tools, approaches, platforms, etc. to engage different communities, environments, and all kinds of nonhuman entities and creatures. This workshop poses the following question: While considering different characteristics (such as gender, race, class, abilities, creed, digital skills, habitat, bio-systems), how can citizens engage in creating DIY and More-than-Human Media Architecture to actively shape their spaces and foster imaginaries of more-than-human urban futurity, all while being kinder towards our stressed and fragile urban ecology?
