*CFP* "EPISTEMIC CONTESTATIONS IN THE HYBRID MEDIA ENVIRONMENT", SPECIAL ISSUE, POPULAR COMMUNICATION: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND CULTURE

The aim of this special issue is to explore how a multiplicity of competing epistemologies interact and compete in the “post-Truth” marketplace of ideas in online popular communication. We invite contributions to a special issue on the intersections of popular communication, disinformation, and misinformation. We are especially interested in how popular communication can challenge and even upend traditional and inherited belief systems and knowledge regimes in religion, politics, fandom, and other institutions.

As traditional ideologies and other thought regimes collapse and new ones arise, recent scholarship has examined the contributions of digitalization and datafication of popular communication that contest older communitarian worldviews (e.g. Fuller, 2020). The internet has augmented collective understandings of the world but also undermined a broader sense of belonging, while enabling a new scope of contestation over “epistemic capital” (Robertson, 2016, 2021). In popular communication, especially, the social construction of meaning and worldviews is more manipulable than ever through disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.

*CFP* "THE MIGRANT ARCHIVE: STUDIES ON MIGRATION THROUGH FILM ARCHIVES", ISSUE Nº 34, REVISTA L'ATALANTE

Historically, cinema has been associated with migration phenomena since its earliest days, when it became the first form of audiovisual entertainment to transcend boundaries and language barriers and be established as an essentially mobile medium, in terms of both production (from the first Lumière camera operators to the large waves of immigrants working in Hollywood, for example) and consumption (with large numbers of displaced peoples and exiles being among the first regular film-goers around the world, as a form of socialisation through a public event) (Allen, Gomery, 1995). In general, apart from some attention to specific cases (e.g. the massive emigration of German directors and cinematographers to Hollywood during the interwar period), it would not be until the 1990s that film studies would begin focusing on phenomena of human mobility as an essential component for understanding the history of cinema. Research in this area would be associated specifically with multiculturalism and post-colonialism, with particular importance given to studies centred on exile, diaspora and migrant experiences (Shohat, Stam, 1994, 2003; Naficy, 1999, 2001). It was no coincidence that studies like these should begin to appear around the same time as the rise to prominence of work by professional filmmakers creating filmic discourses related to their experience as migrants (or that of their families) in countries with consolidated film industries like the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States. Collectively these filmmakers have developed a set of concepts that are fundamental to the idea of “cinema of mobility” as a political movement, both in terms of access to representations of migrants and at the level of the potential development of alternative modes of production and distribution that can destabilise the hegemony of Hollywood and the big media corporations (Iordanova, Martin-Jones, Vidal, 2010).

*CFP* "EL ARCHIVO MIGRANTE: ESTUDIOS SOBRE MIGRACIÓN A TRAVÉS DE LOS ARCHIVOS CINEMATOGRÁFICOS", NÚMERO 34, REVISTA L'ATALANTE

En términos históricos, el cine ha estado relacionado con los fenómenos migratorios desde sus inicios, constituyéndose en la primera forma de entretenimiento audiovisual que trascendió barreras fronterizas e idiomáticas y se erigió en un medio de comunicación fundamentalmente móvil, tanto en términos de producción (desde los primeros operadores Lumière a las amplias capas de emigrantes trabajando en la industria de Hollywood, por ejemplo) como de consumo (con grandes conjuntos de desplazados y exiliados entre los asiduos a las primeras proyecciones cinematográficas en todo el mundo como forma de socialización por la vía del evento público) (Allen, Gomery, 1995). En general, y más allá de la atención a casos puntuales (la emigración masiva de directores y técnicos alemanes a Hollywood en el periodo de entreguerras, por ejemplo), no será hasta los años noventa del siglo pasado cuando los estudios fílmicos hagan hincapié en los fenómenos de la movilidad humana como algo fundamental para entender la historia del cine. En concreto, se trata de trabajos asociados al multiculturalismo y al postcolonialismo, en los que cobran singular relevancia los enfoques centrados en las experiencias exílicas, diaspóricas y migrantes (Shohat, Stam, 1994, 2003; Naficy, 1999, 2001). Estas investigaciones coinciden en el tiempo, no por casualidad, con el ascenso a la primera línea del cine profesional de sujetos que generan discursos fílmicos a partir de su condición migrante (o la de sus familias) en países con cinematografías tan consolidadas como Gran Bretaña, Francia, Alemania y Estados Unidos.  Siembran, entre unos y otros, una serie de conceptos fundamentales para pensar el cine de movilidad con un claro componente político, tanto en términos del acceso a las representaciones de los migrantes, como a nivel del potencial desarrollo de unos modos de producción y circulación alternativos que desestabilicen la hegemonía mediática de Hollywood y los grandes grupos de comunicación (Iordanova, Martin-Jones,Vidal, 2010).

*CFP* "SPORT AND MEDIATIZATION: SPORTS EVENTS AND CULTURES ACROSS THE WORLD", SPECIAL ISSUE, COMMUNICATION & SPORT

Communication & Sport is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for a Special Issue “Sport and Mediatization: Sports Events and Cultures Across the World”. Now in its ninth year, Communication & Sport (C&S) is a cutting-edge, peer-reviewed bimonthly journal that fosters international scholarly understanding of the nexus of communication and sport. C&S publishes research and critical analysis from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to advance understanding of communication phenomena in the varied contexts through which sport touches individuals, society, and culture. In 2018, Communication & Sport was the winner of the prestigious PROSE Award as the Best New Journal in the Social Sciences. Communication & Sport has a current Clarivate Analytics two-year impact factor of 1.292 and is ranked 64/92 (2020) in the Communication and 46/56 in Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism categories, ranking above many longstanding legacy journals in both Communication/Media and Sport Studies.

Detailed information about Communication & Sport.

 

About the Special Issue

*CFP* "EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE CULTURE OF SURVEILLANCE", NORDICOM ANTHOLOGY

Today, personal data is gathered through the welfare state and healthcare providers; societal infrastructure (electricity, water, demographics, voter statistics, etc.); and voluntarily sharing of our data through use of smartphones, wearables, social media, streaming services, games, and more. Data is gathered, coordinated, and analysed to gain insights into our everyday lives; thus, members of contemporary digitalised societies live in what David Lyon refers to in his book of the same name, The Culture of Surveillance (2018).

With ubiquitous surveillance the “new normal”, Nordicom and external editors invite contributions for an anthology focusing on the cultural, mundane, and everyday-life aspect of online surveillance – in Lyon’s words, “the participation and engagement of surveilled and surveilling subjects” (2018: 6).

Studies addressing the Nordic countries and their contexts and perspectives will be of particular interest, but studies focusing other countries may also be considered (not least if they are of a theoretical, philosophical, or universal character – an example could be online surveillance from a human rights perspective). A central question to be explored is how online surveillance is perceived and handled by citizens in the Nordic countries – whether it is through acceptance, adaptation, and resistance. Among others, the following are questions to be posed:

*CFP* "MINORS AND USER-CREATED CONTENT ON VIDEO PLATFORMS", SPECIAL ISSUE, MEDITERRANEAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION

The phenomenon of underage influencers on video platforms is experimenting an unrelenting growth in the consumption, activity and presence of brands in relation to audiovisual content and on the potential for influence and social transformation of some of this content. All of this contributes to increase the complexity and associated problems as it is a phenomenon that is only partially regulated in current legislation. There are new and emerging research challenges in relation to the audiences involved: minors who created content, parents or legal guardians, YouTube (YT) Professionals, followers, teachers, scholars and researchers and the society at large.

Being an influencer is one of the top 10 most desired professions by Spanish minors (Adecco, 2018). Immersed in a culture of participation (Jenkins, 2006; Aparici & Osuna, 2013), YT offers a space where audiovisual content can be hosted and that allows users to interact with it through searching, sharing and commenting on such contents around which they build online communities. Minor creators express their identities through videos that reflect their perspectives on life and in turn exert influence upon their community of followers (Tur-Viñes, Nuñez- Gómez and González-Río, 2018). This social system is based around audiovisual content with several implications for government regulation, self-regulation, advertising, communication and education.

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, 8TH EDITION OF THE CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION (CMC) AND SOCIAL MEDIA CORPORA

8th edition of the Conference on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Social Media Corpora

 Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Thursday 28 – Friday 29 October 2021 

 

CMC2021 is the 8th edition of an annual conference series dedicated to the development, analysis, and processing of corpora of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media for research in the humanities. The conference brings together language-centred research on CMC and social media in linguistics, communication sciences, media studies, and social sciences with research questions from the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language and text technology, and machine learning. Because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the conference will take place in hybrid form: you can choose to attend online or in person.

*CFP* "SOCIAL NETWORKS TRACK", IEEE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE

IEEE Global Communications Conference

7-11 December 2021

Madrid, Spain

Selected Areas in Communication Symposium: Social Networks Track

 

Scope and motivation

Recently, social network research has advanced rapidly with the prevalence of online social applications and mobile social communications systems. Moreover, the ongoing pandemic via contact social networks has caused tremendous human life and economic loss around the world, and infodemic is one of the major social impacts that make people difficult to discriminate trustworthy sources, from false and manipulative information sources. 

*CFP* "AUTOMATION AND DATA-DRIVEN JOURNALISM BEYOND THE WESTERN WORLD: ACTORS, PRACTICES, AND SOCIOPOLITICAL IMPACT", ONLINE CONFERENCE OF THE SUSTAINABLE JOURNALISM FOR THE ALGORITHMIC FUTURE PROJECT

Sustainable journalism for the algorithmic future conference

Automation and data-driven journalism beyond the Western world: actors, practices, and socio-political impact

May 5th-6th, 2021

 

The research project ‘Sustainable journalism for the algorithmic future’ in partnership with the Aleksanteri Institute and Swedish School of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki invite the submission of papers to be presented at the online conference ‘Automation and data-driven journalism beyond the Western world: actors, practices, and socio-political impact’.

Algorithmic systems and other data-driven practices exert increasing influence over today’s societies, reshaping how social and economic systems function (Gillespie 2014). Algorithms are society’s new “power brokers,” dictating the stories that we pay attention to, the activities we participate in, and the people we connect with (Kitchin 2017). The news media is among those industries where artificial intelligence and algorithms are making strides and reordering the playing field as their use diversifies and expands.

*CFP* "MEDIA POLICIES IN SOUTH ASIA: STATE OF THE FIELD", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF DIGITAL MEDIA & POLICY

The diverse and rapidly expanding media systems of the South Asian region accentuate its vast cultural diversity and various stages of democracy. The interaction between these structures presents interesting examples of how they impact the corresponding national media policies. It becomes pertinent to understand how these policies are influenced by the hyper-nationalistic and protectionist rhetoric currently sweeping different parts of the world, further exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. At the same time, the rapidly growing presence and consequent influence of global digital media networks further confound this relationship, as they are greatly interested in the expansion of media infrastructure in the region to tap into the potential of new markets. Additionally, the changing geopolitics of the region with an increasing presence of the Chinese state and private investments in all sectors including digital media, present a new stakeholder in the media policies of the region.

We identify South Asia not just as a geographic region, but one with cultural and socio-economic continuities. Thus, we also focus on the pressures and pulls of the countries on each other. While initiatives like the People’s South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) are useful in delineating the region as a separate block, various issues have repeatedly highlighted the limits of these strategic regional markers. This was witnessed in the Rohingya refugee crisis of Myanmar, which is officially not a part of SAARC, but one that inevitably involves both India and Bangladesh. The Indian media’s hyper-nationalist response to this crisis reflected the heightening protectionist rhetoric that has become commonplace, while also seeing an increasing amount of foreign investments flowing into its media sectors. 

*CFP* "MAPEANDO LA DATAFICACIÓN: IMAGINARIOS, INTERFACES, E INFRAESTRUCTURAS DE LA SOCIEDAD DATIFICADA", VOL. 16, Nº 2, REVISTA INMEDIACIONES DE LA COMUNICACIÓN

Esta convocatoria de InMediaciones de la Comunicación se fija en los imaginarios, las interfaces y las infraestructuras que emergen junto al entramado del proceso de dataficación o de mediatización de los datos.

En los últimos años, los estudios de comunicación han entrado con mayor profundidad en el escenario del uso de métodos digitales que permiten el análisis de grandes cantidades de datos generados por las practicas comunicativas. Esta entrada no ha sido solo metodológica, sino que también abarca áreas investigativas o profesionales específicas: la comunicación política, el periodismo de datos, la visualización de datos, entre otras. Pero la temática tiene un alcance todavía mayor: la dataficación es un problema interdisciplinar que admite y requiere la participación complementaria de varios campos del saber.

Este volumen de InMediaciones de la Comunicación quiere abrir un espacio de reflexión sobre los fenómenos y las problemáticas que atraviesan la datificación con el propósito de pensar críticamente lo que algunos investigadores han definido como una nueva forma de mediatización que incluye la bidireccionalidad de la recogida y el análisis de datos. En este contexto, las plataformas de redes sociales, los sistemas de recomendación, pero también los aportes teóricos sobre las nuevas epistemologías del Big Data, se encuentran con los debates actuales sobre la sostenibilidad ecológica de las nuevas infraestructuras.

*CFP* "RESILIENCE, EXPERTISE, HOPE", POLITICAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL 2021 CONFERENCE

Political Studies Association Annual International 2021 Conference

Resilience, Expertise, Hope

29th-31st March, 2021

Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland

 

The Covid-19 pandemic will have a lasting impact on all aspects of our lives and the societies in which we live, providing new challenges, but also opportunities, in terms of how we think about and study socio-economic organisation, democratic institutions and international governance, as well as the fundamental questions of justice and equality that provide the normative underpinnings to social scientific research. The 2021 PSA Conference seeks contributions that address these multifarious challenges and opportunities in the context of three overarching themes: Resilience, Expertise and Hope.

 

Resilience, Expertise and Hope will be crucial ingredients in our ability to adapt and respond in the wake of fundamental disruption. They will also prove invaluable in informing and shaping diverse and evolving research agendas in political science to make sense of and understand the global economy, global ecosystems and the climate, public health, international security, and many other interrelated issue areas that combine to generate the most pressing challenges of our age. 

*CFP* "CHALLENGES OF JOURNALISM IN 21ST CENTURY: AUTOMATED JOURNALISM AND AI JOURNALISM", INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AND JOURNALISM CONFERENCE

Challenges of Journalism in 21st Century: Automated Journalism and AI Journalism

24th September, 2020

Faculty of Social Scciences, Charles University, Praga

Keynote speaker
Professor Charlie Beckett (LSE Media and Communications, POLIS)

During the last decade we were witnessing the rise of automated journalism and application of artificial intelligence tools in the newsrooms. From simple use of templates to highly sophisticated automated content production, omnipresent algorithms, news on social networks, fake news production and its detection became our everyday media practice. AI has slowly but unstoppably entered the media landscape. The rise of AI brought wide scale of problems and questions. Organizers call for proposal addressing, but not limited, to following themes.

*CFP* "CONTENTIOUS DATA: THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT SOCIETY IN THE AGE OF DATAFICATION", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES JOURNAL

Datafication is changing the conditions under which contemporary social movements operate, opening up new terrains of contention. As a result, grassroots initiatives in the realm of data activism, data justice, algorithmic accountability and/or resistance to mass surveillance mushrooms in liberal and authoritarian regimes alike. These initiatives vary by scale, organizational forms, tactics, political visions and technological imaginaries. They may take data “as repertoires”, whereby data and data-based tactics are mobilized as constituents of innovative tactics, or “as stakes”, that is to say issues or objects of political struggle in their own right. However, they share an emphasis on the contentious politics of data. 

While many instances of the contentious politics of data have come under the spotlight of specialists of digital politics and culture, social movement scholars are only starting to investigate the consequences of datafication on organized collective action. Yet datafication represents a paradigm change able to radically transform “social movement society”, urging social movements scholars to reflect on how it intersects with known social movement dynamics.

*CFP* "MIGRANT BELONGINGS. DIGITAL PRACTICES AND THE EVERYDAY", CONFERENCE

Migrant Belongings. Digital Practices and the Everyday

4-6 November 2020

Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.

This international conference focuses on the connection between the media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also subjects individual as well as groups to increased datafied migration management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression.

*CFP* "SEEING THROUGH MACHINES: VISUAL METHODS FOR DIGITAL RESEARCH", A SYMPOSIUM BY THE DIGITAL SOCIETY NETWORK

Seeing through Machines: Visual Methods for Digital Research Symposium

17-19 de Junio de 2020

University of Sheffield, UK

Keynote speakers

Prof. Sabine Niederer, (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences)

Dr. Tim Highfield (University of Sheffield).

The last decade has been transformational in the use, prominence and importance of images on digital platforms and the web. Image-centric social networks such as Pinterest and Instagram have become culturally influential, Twitter and Facebook have fully integrated images into user timelines, and Google Images is estimated to receive 1 billion page views per day. Iconic photos, scientific charts and memes are now shared at an unprecedented speed and scale, impacting upon public debates about migration, climate change, politics and more. The importance of the digital image in representing, witnessing and interpreting the world around us is unquestionable. Yet, visual methods for digital research remain challenging. Recent years have seen emerging approaches such as visual vernaculars, Instagrammatics, and cross-platform analysis, while the machine-learning field of computer vision presents opportunities for large-scale analysis but also challenges in understanding how images are being categorised and circulated online.

*CFP* "POWER, EMOTION, AND DISINFORMATION", 3RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Power, Emotion, and Disinformation

University of Beira Interior, May 7-8

Labcom - Comunicação e Artes is going to promote the 3rd International Conference "Pathologies and Dysfunctions of Democracy in the Media Context" on the 7th and 8th of May at the University of Beira Interior Covilhã, Portugal. The 3rd editions of this conference will be focused on “Power, Emotion, and Disinformation".

Like the 1st Conference, centered on in pathological and dysfunctional processes of the democratic process, and the 2nd Conference, centered on the dystopian portraits of some of these phenomena, the 3rdconference will observe media phenomena that impact participation at the most different levels of citizenship. The selected papers may be published in a book and/or in a scientific journal that will be announced briefly

*CFP* "PERSPECTIVAS LATINOAMERICANAS SOBRE LA DATIFICACIÓN Y LA INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL", NÚMERO ESPECIAL, REVISTA PALABRA CLAVE

Las diversas contribuciones de la escuela latinoamericana de comunicación a la comprensión y la teorización de las culturas mediáticas, las prácticas comunicativas y los medios digitales, han comenzado a reconocerse desde hace poco en los estudios anglófonos. En una serie de publicaciones temáticas (Enghel y Becerra, 2018; Harlow, 2017; Pertierra y Salazar, 2019; Sierra y Gravante, 2018; Stephansen y Treré, 2019) se han presentado los aportes originales de los estudios de comunicación latinoamericanos a la investigación mundial de los medios, los cuales han actualizado, refinado y expandido la comprensión global contemporánea de la investigación cultural y de los medios en la región. De esta manera, se ha logrado conectar esta parte importante de la historia con líneas de investigación de reciente desarrollo.

No obstante, nuestro panorama de los medios está cambiando con rapidez, debido, entre otras cosas, al implacable despliegue de los sistemas de datos, el desarrollo de la inteligencia artificial, la propagación de la automatización y la difusión del internet de las cosas. Estos desarrollos vienen acompañados de esperanzas (p. ej., su potencial para la democratización de la sociedad y para la toma de «mejores» decisiones con respecto a los recursos comunes), así como de temores (p. ej., la extralimitación de los poderes estatales y la intrusión de la industria en la vida privada de las personas). Si bien los estudios académicos están tratando de dar sentido a estos cambios rápidos con base en un conjunto diverso de herramientas conceptuales desde las disciplinas de los estudios de medios (p. ej., Couldry y Mejias, 2019; van Dijck, Poell y de Waal, 2018), los estudios de vigilancia y seguridad (p. ej., Amoore y Piotukh, 2016; Lyon, 2018), la informática crítica (p. ej., Dourish, 2016; Mustafa, 2016), entre otros, el potencial de los estudios latinoamericanos de comunicación aún no se ha explorado por completo para vislumbrar estos cambios claves en nuestro ecosistema de información.

*CFP* "MEDIA PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF ALGORITHMS", ANNUAL WORKSHOP

Annual Workshop of the Working Group Media Philosophy of the German Society of Media Studies – Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM)

Charles University Prague, May 14–15, 2020

Media Philosophy and Theological Aesthetics of Algorithms

A sublime yet rumbles. What was once conceived as providence, theodicy, and angel is, today, called Big Data, AI, and algorithm. A radical theological legacy of reception haunts the development of algorithmic computation and machine-learning. Entanglements between god, faith, and the coding of contingency is tacitly embedded within the algorithmization and datafication of contemporary lifeworlds; how can such a relation be described from a media philosophical perspective?

Firstly, one can turn to the history of philosophy with Leibniz who incorporated combinatorics and calculus into theodicy; Pascal`s insistence on “the machine” of faith calculation, Hume’s critique of providential miracles anticipating probabilistic and inductive logic, or Thomas Bayes’ Calvinist understanding of ‘chance’ as he formulates the base probability ‘algorithm’ (employed by the Google ‘search’-engine and the digital data-mining of cloud computing, to this day, referred to as Bayes` theorem).

*CFP* "DATAFICATION OF MEDIA (AND) AUDIENCES", SPECIAL ISSUE, MEDIEKULTUR JOURNAL

Academic knowledge built over the last five decades on media audiences may be called into question by algorithmic recommendations, machine learning, platform design and new metrics that describe, anticipate and shape the audience’s every move. 

While we hold that audiences are selective in their choice of content (Katz et al., 1974), form communities of interpretation (Fish, 1980) and are freely giving their attention to public issues (Warner, 2002), it would appear that they are now increasingly being selected, calculated, interpreted and anticipated by media on the basis of a wide range of data provided more or less willingly and consciously. 

This datafication of media (and) audiences – i.e. the quantification of audience mediated experiences – is not to be understood simply as a new form of knowledge, but also as a new era in the commodification of audiences, challenging our understanding of audiences as an agentic and autonomous subjects.