*CFP* "DIGITAL FUTURES: A HUMAN CENTRED DIGITIZATION AND COMMUNICATION", VIRTUAL CONFERECE AND CONNECTIST ISTAMBUL UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SCIENCES (ISSUE 62)

Digital Futures: A Human Centred Digitization and Communication

Virtual Conference and 

Connectist Istanbul University Journal of Communication Sciences, Issue 62

January 6-7, 2022

 

This call for papers is for publication of a special issue of Connectist. It is combined with a call for submissions to a virtual conference on the same theme, which may precede publication.

Participants in the virtual conference on Digital Futures: A Human Centred Digitization and Communication will benefit from feedback and an opportunity to refine or develop work, prior to submission to the associated journal.  Also, it will be a great opportunity to network with other researchers from different parts of the world to open a discussion on various emerging topics, compare practices in different communities, and develop research networks.

*CFP* "COUNTER-MEDIATIZATION, DIGITAL DISCONNECTION AND OTHER REVERSE TRENDS IN MEDIA USE", TOWARDS DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIATIZATION RESEARCH V WORKSHOP

Towards development of mediatization research V

Counter-mediatization, digital disconnection and other reverse trends in media use

10.12.2021

Institute of Social Communication and Media Studies

Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland

in partnership with Academia Europaea Wroclaw Knowledge Hub

 

Continuing our research meetings focused on specific issues of mediatisation chaired by eminent experts (Göran Bolin (2017), Johan Fornäs (2018), Andreas Hepp (2019), Mark Deuze (2020)), this year the workshop will take place online on 10 December 2021 and it will be led by Professor André Jansson, director of the Geomedia Research Group at the Karlstad University, Sweden.

*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* "PANDEMEDIA. HOW COVID-19 HAS AFFECTED THE ROLE OF MEDIA IN SOCIETY", SPECIAL ISSUE, MEDIEKULTUR JOURNAL

Fundamentally, media technologies facilitate communication between two parties or more across vast distances - synchronously and asynchronously. During the Covid-19 pandemic era, these properties have proven important towards organizing mass testing as well as providing news, updates, and information. In addition to this, the many facets of digital communication in the modern workplace have become even more important. Aside from the many practical aspects where media technologies have proven valuable or necessary, social lives have been mediated as well through familiar social media platforms, message apps, and video conference software. 

 

Moreover, the Covid-19 era has highlighted debates over misinformation, conspiracy theories, fringe online cultures, and the role of surveillance technologies in society. None of these practices represent entirely new forms of media use, but due to the pandemic they have become necessary and apparent in new ways. In summation, this special issue will be open to a wide range of topics within the scope of media culture through the prism of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Suggested topics:

*CFP* "CINCUENTA AÑOS EN LA FORMACIÓN DE COMUNICADORES EN IBEROAMÉRICA", NÚMERO 37 (2022-1), REVISTA CONTRATEXTO

Después de cincuenta años de experiencia universitaria en la formación de comunicadores en Iberoamérica, podemos esbozar ideas y reflexiones críticas para entender los cambios por los que hemos pasado, hacer un balance de logros y limitaciones, así como proyectarnos en un tiempo de profunda incertidumbre a causa de la crisis sanitaria que enfrentamos desde el 2020. En el 2022, además, la Facultad de Comunicación de la Universidad de Lima cumplirá cincuenta años y tenemos ante nosotros la posibilidad de mirarnos y extender nuestro balance sobre lo ocurrido entre las instituciones universitarias con las cuales hemos crecido y cooperado a lo largo de estas décadas. Pero, además, podemos examinar el ejercicio de los profesionales formados en las aulas universitarias en Iberoamérica.

La vida académica en nuestras facultades y programas de comunicación aporta ofreciendo profesionales, así como conocimiento y creatividad que le permite intervenir en el destino colectivo de nuestras sociedades, de forma autónoma, con un espíritu vivo y una ética que resguarde las múltiples miradas y el aporte en la formación de ciudadanos para el ejercicio de la vida pública. No se trata solamente de realizar un examen histórico de los estudios universitarios, necesario para contextualizar el tema, sino de profundizar y evaluar las diferentes dimensiones referidas a los docentes y los alumnos, los modelos de enseñanza, la investigación y la transferencia, así como los vínculos con la comunidad científica, el mercado laboral y los aportes a la sociedad.

*CFP* "DISTRIBUTION IN THE STREAMING ERA", SPECIAL ISSUE, VELVET LIGHT TRAP JOURNAL

Over the past decade, the media ecology has been dramatically shifting with the advent of online “overthe-top” streaming services, the streaming wars that followed, and the platformization of the web. As the distance between big tech companies and legacy media players rapidly dwindles, rippling effects can be felt across industries, audience practices, regulatory frameworks, and more. Simultaneously, the rise of streaming services also continues to provoke further theorizations on topics that have concerned media scholars for decades regarding the asymmetrical dynamics of power and influence as it relates to globalization processes, representation, identity, politics, cultural and national mediations, and economic development.

For this issue, we welcome submissions that examine the impact that streaming services have had on the contemporary media environment. Topic areas can include, but are not limited to the shifting industrial practices, labor, audience behaviors and engagement, algorithms, content moderation, formal changes in the text, marketing, transnational/global flows, and regulation. Further, while streaming services may often prioritize rhetorics of disruption and innovation in their marketing parlance, there are also historical continuities that are equally important to emphasize. In what ways have streaming services transformed the way we understand film and television? What kinds of cultural issues continue to persist in spite of these disruptions? In what ways are disparate industries now converging/diverging and how can we understand these changes and analyze them effectively?

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, 8TH NEW ZEALAND DISCOURSE CONFERENCE AND COOMUNICATION RESEARCH AND PRACTICE JOURNAL (SPECIAL ISSUE)

8th New Zealand Discourse Conference (NZDC8)

University of Canterbury, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand and virtually via Zoom

10-11 December 2021

 

The New Zealand Discourse Conference is a biennial event which brings together scholars working in a range of fields who study some form of discourse or use discourse analysis to understand other phenomena. The conference welcomes contributions that consider discourse and interaction in a variety of contexts, including interpersonal talk, institutional settings, organisational communication, mediated communication, as well as policy, political and cultural lenses on discourse. The conference welcomes diversity in theoretical and analytical approaches. 

Suggested areas of interest include:

• Political discourse 
• Communication in bicultural and multicultural contexts 

*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* "I RECOGNIZE MY HONEY BY THE WALK", SPECIAL ISSUE, CORPUS MUNDI E-JOURNAL

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”.

*CFP* "WHAT'S NEXT FOR MEDIA DEVELOPMENT?", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF APPLIED JOURNALISM AND MEDIA STUDIES

Media development – a field of practice and international cooperation encompassing policy advocacy, training and capacity building for journalists, the formation of professional associations, and the reform of public service media, among other activities – seems both timely and anachronistic. 

What is becoming of media development – and how can it be reconceptualized – amid fundamental changes to the political economy of the media sector and the shifting of geo-political powers that have been foundational to the global media sphere in the eight decades since the end of WWII? And how can we make these interventions more effective by better linking them to context, building participatory engagement with local actors, and taking more gender-transformative approaches?

Contributions to this special issue are invited that offer re-evaluations and potential alternatives to normative views of media development and that explore strategies and pathways to media development that contend with contemporary challenges in the sector.

*CFP* "OLD MEDIA PERSISTENCE", ECREA VIRTUAL POSTCONFERENCE

Old Media Persistence

An ECREA virtual postconference co-organized by three ECREA Thematic Sections:

Communication History, Radio & Sound section, Television Studies

 

Media and communication studies today especially focus on questions surrounding how digital media and digitization have changed and revolutionized previous media ecologies. Funding opportunities, PhD dissertations, journals and books on digitization and the relevance of digital media are overwhelming. This joint ECREA post conference, organized by the Communication History, Radio & Sound, and Television Studies Sections, invites colleagues to focus on and discuss claims that studying old media is imperative and still fully relevant to understand our contemporary media landscapes. In several media sectors, traditional media, such as television and radio, printing, analog photography and music, are still the most profitable businesses. The integration of old and new media seems to be more effective than disruptive models, and the so-called “old media” are still used and appreciated by media audiences worldwide. This post conference invites empirical and theoretical contributions from different angles. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

*CFP* "OPTING OUT OF PANDEMIC DIGITALITIES: DIGITAL DISENGAGEMENT AND COVID-19", EDITED COLLECTION

Emerging from the concept of “digital disengagement” – a framework developed by the editors to examine digital media from the point of disconnection, refusal, and opting out – this book brings into interdisciplinary dialogue two critical key areas of concern in the context of COVID-19. The first one is what we call “pandemic digitalities” – the rapid and extensive increase, reliance and shifts in meaning of digital technologies in the age of COVID-19 and post-COVID futurities across various spheres in science, technology and society: from public health, to education, to politics, to everyday life. The second concerns the politics of refusal, the right and even the viability to opt out of digital technologies, networks, tracing surveillance, and databases.

At this unique moment in time, both have global spread and significance: the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every society globally; so do digital technologies and networked communication. Crucially, “global” should not be mistaken for “universal” – while both the virus and digital technologies are spread around the world, their adoption, use and impact are profoundly different both across, and within different countries, societies and communities. Within the growing field of Disconnection Studies, research on opting out and digital refusal has focused almost exclusively on “the West”/“global North”. To this date, no literature addresses in great depth the implications, consequences and (im)possibilities of opt out in the quickly changing digital landscape and lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a rapid and sudden digitisation in times of crisis.

*CFP* "MEDIATIZATION, NEW FORMS OF MILITANCY AND DIGITALIZATION", 5TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COMSYMBOL

5th International Conference ComSymbol

Mediatization, New Forms of Militancy and Digitalization

Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3, Centre Universitaire du Guesclin

November 11-12, 2021, Béziers, France

 

The 5th edition of the International Conference ComSymbol remains associated to the questioning of complex symbolic socio-communicational constructions that participate in social, societal, economic, political, cultural news by focusing, this time, both on the relations of dominance of the logics of the media over the other logics of the society and on the transformations of the communicative construction of reality under the impact of digitalization concerning the contemporary militant movements engaged in the “communicational arms race” (Neveu, 2015) marked by the redeployment of collective action on the Internet and the presence of pluralistic media systems (mass media, emerging media, Internet, Artificial Intelligence-AI, etc.).

*CFP* "MULTI-PLATFORM AND CONNECTING COMMUNITIES: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES FOR MINORITY LANGUAGE MEDIA", CONFERENCE

Multi-platform and Connecting Communities: Contemporary Challenges for Minority Language Media

14-15 October 2021

Europa Universität Flensburg (Germany)

 

The guiding idea behind the second biennial conference on minority language media is to bring together academics and professionals from this field, as well as facilitating intensive exchange of research and practical experiences. This event aims to build upon the expertise of the International Association of Minority Language Media Research (IAMLMR) established in Edinburgh in 2019.

The upcoming conference will be held at the Europa Universität Flensburg, 10 years on from when the institution co-hosted the 13th International Conference on Minority Languages in 2011. Moreover, the core organisational partners at the European Centre for Minority Issues and the University of the Basque Country bring an expanded pan-European focus alongside the regional dimension. Indeed, the Danish-German borderlands provide a unique setting for debates concerning minority language media: it features multiple national minorities (with and without a kin-state), several languages, and long-established minority language media institutions cooperating across borders. 

*CFP* "THE ALLURE OF OBSOLESCENCE", INAUGURAL ISSUE, ARTIFACT & APPARATUS: JOURNAL OF MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY

We are excited to announce the launch of and call for papers for a new peer-reviewed, open-access online journal, Artifact & Apparatus: Journal of Media Archaeology. We invite scholars, curators, and practitioners from art history, film and media studies, library and information science, science and technology studies, and related fields to contribute articles on the history, theory, aesthetics, and practice of media objects, broadly conceived. From digital information networks to early electrical communications tools; from closed-circuit video surveillance systems to mechanical typewriters; and from pre-cinematic optical toys to virtual reality artworks, we invite contributors to reconsider the material objects that record, store, transmit, and reproduce texts, images, sounds, and information.

Why "artifact and apparatus"? We want to harness these words' multiple meanings to encourage a revision of media history grounded in its material artifacts and technological apparatuses—both physical and virtual objects (lantern slides, video files, wax cylinders, newsprint) and the traces of their mediation and marks of their materiality (signal loss, bit-rot, deterioration, decomposition), as well as the instruments, machines, devices, and equipment (computers, cameras, cables, projectors) and their functions and dispositifs.

*CFP* "CRISIS COMMUNICATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE", 8TH INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION DAYS

8th International Communication Days

Crisis Communication in the Digital Age

26-27-28 May 2021 via zoom

 

International Communication Days is organized by Üsküdar University Faculty of Communication annually with a different theme each year. The main title of this year’s international symposium is “Crisis Communication in the Digital Age”. The symposium will be held on 26-27-28 May 2021 via zoom / webinar with the participation of renowned keynote speakers at the national and at the international level. Simultaneous Turkish-English interpretation will be provided during the keynote speeches.

Our world has been struggling with an unprecedented global pandemic for the past year. The rapid spread of the pandemic all over the world suddenly confronted all humanity with a serious crisis situation in all dimensions of life. While the importance of communication is deeply felt in the management of the crisis that brought life to a standstill, we are also witnessing how digital communication technologies are effectively included in the process. 

*CFP* "PARTICIPATION IN TRANSITION: RETHINKING PARTICIPATORY CULTURE", SPECIAL ISSUE, BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed physical interaction among people, but it also continues to shape our relations with media and technology. Mediated and distant interaction and communication became the norm. This led to struggles for some individuals, groups, institutions, practices and services, while others blossomed and thrived. Is participatory culture, as we know it, changing as a result of the challenges of 2020?

Building on the 2020 volume of Baltic Screen Media Review, which explored the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to media industries, we now call for papers on participation in the context of the pandemic and related crises.

While the pandemic has posed an incredible challenge in terms of media production, it has concurrently pushed innovation, resulting in a reinvigorated relationship between media and the audiences. Media was the window to the world for locked-down people, and via media and communication technologies people were informed, entertained and able to interact with one another. Yet, the incredible volume of data created from people’s media participation has enhanced rather than diminished the disproportionate power of already powerful platforms and corporations held over access, participation, public speech and cultural discourse.

*CFP* "RADICAL FILM AT THE DAWN OF A NEW SOCIETY", BOOK CHAPTER

You are invited to make a contribution to a new book arising from the Radical Film Network Meeting Berlin (RFNMB). Under the working title “Radical Film at the Dawn of a New Society”, the book aims to critically interrogate how various actors working at the intersection of radical film, art and digital culture are engaging with issues of our present time shaped by changes and disruptions of seismic proportions. The events of the year 2020 have fundamentally transformed public life almost beyond recognition. It remains to be seen if these transformations are here to stay or just a passing phase. These events and many of the transformations they have given rise to have fostered a surge of anxiety, feelings of powerlessness and a dark vision of the future.

However, if we take a second look at the current situation, we can also see a newly developed focus on the importance of community, of solidarity and on maintaining sociality, all of which hold the promise of a new society. And while anxiety is often said to embody paralyzing features, one could argue that anxiety — a basic human emotion like joy, lust and anger — is a strong motive for collective human action because nobody wants to stay alone in the dark.

*CFP* "THE BREAKTHROUGH OF DIGITAL HEALTH: COMMUNICATION AS THE CATALYST OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF CARE", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE CATALAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION & CULTURAL STUDIES

Healthcare systems have gone through an ongoing transformation over the last decade, particularly in terms of digitization (Lupton, 2018). Multiple concepts like digitized health, e-Health, telemedicine, online health services, virtual hospital or infomedicine show both theoretical and practical diversity and advancements towards the transformation of care. At the individual level, for example, digital health has changed the way patients access health-related information (e.g. by using social media), transforming the nature of care these individuals receive from their health professionals (Lovari, 2017; Thackeray et al., 2012). 

From a media perspective, digitization has also modified the delivery and organization of care through the promotion of apps and other resources for the self-management of health (WHO, 2019). In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic can in many ways be considered a transforming moment for digital health, as governments and organizations from across the globe are rapidly utilising information and communication technologies towards reducing the spread of the virus. Despite the potential of these processes of digitization, the increasing use of health technologies is also generating debates around the concepts of privacy, surveillance or governance.