IAMCR pre-conference event
"online speed-dating session (live) for postgraduates and PhD students working on media development"
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.
This special issue aims at strengthening critical perspectives in Global Media Studies as well as international communication in order to expand and challenge the hegemonic canon of media studies. These include marginalized positions such as post- and neocolonial, intersectional and queer perspectives. Such perspectives can draw attention to blind spots in communication studies, question global norms and standards, and productively use ambiguities in analyses of media and communication processes. In this way, critical approaches to media and communication can engage with current complexities of media societies and offer important perspectives with regards to global dynamics, caused by the rapid changes and dynamics in our global communication infrastructures and reveal their production of and inscription in socio-economic, cultural, and political power relations. This includes the analysis of international regulatory systems and dynamics of global communication infrastructures, especially with regard to their changes through digital media.
Epistemological and methodological reflections will also be considered in this special issue: with a global perspective, the researchers' own privileges and positioning as well as processes of inclusion and exclusion in existing knowledge production can be analysed. Furthermore, the description and analysis of socio-technological systems require inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to describe and assess current developments and understand reproductions of sexist, racist and classist power relations. The global pandemic does not only pinpoint our dependence on digital infrastructures but also sheds light on increasing inequalities.
The Pandemic and the Future of Capitalism: On the Political Economy of our Societies and Economies
September 12-19, 2021
Online Conference
Given the continuation of the COVID pandemic, this year’s IIPPE Annual Conference will be online. As we will not all be in one place we will have an issue of time zones. To address this issue and simultaneously to reduce the number of panels at any one time, we plan to have two sessions of parallel panels per day for 8 days, plus an opening and closing plenary. We will have our usual pre-conference workshop the day before the conference begins; that is, on Saturday September 11.
IIPPE calls for general submissions for the Conference, and particularly welcomes those on its core theme on the pandemic and the state and future of capitalism. Proposals for presentations will as always be considered on all aspects of political economy. New participants committed to political economy, interdisciplinarity, history of political and economic thought, critique of mainstream politics and economics, and/or their application to policy analysis and activism are especially encouraged to submit an abstract.
Cultural Science Journal is an Open Access (free for authors to publish) journal that was started by Professor John Hartley and colleagues in 2008 at the Queensland University of Technology. Most recently it has been published by Ubiquity Press and Curtin University’s Centre for Culture and Technology. After 13 years of activity the editorship of the journal is handed over this year to professors Indrek Ibrus and Maximilian Schich, both of Tallinn University. The journal will be published by Tallinn University's Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab and it is currently being transferred to Sciendo platform.
Cultural Science Journal continues to be a multidisciplinary journal publishing original work on change and dynamics in culture, media and communications. It investigates structures, interactions, and processes of cultural systems at all levels of analysis and scales of application.
The Journal takes advantage of advances in cultural analytics, cultural data science, and cultural semiotics. It encourages active dialogue with evolutionary and institutional economics, biosemiotics, complexity science, network analysis, research in and cultural history and cultural evolution, specifying the ‘uses of culture’ from personal meanings to planetary platforms and systems of meaning.
Between its broader sense of intent and that of making a drawing or plan, design appears to be expanding in both meaning and its application. Design is well understood when related to our material culture, where the medium often bears the imprint of the designer/s. Design has moved relatively seamlessly from the physical into the digital world. It makes sense that someone designs the applications that we use and that digital content, just as much as a poster, requires design. Design activities are rarely inseparable from a market economy, but the language of design has infiltrated business more broadly. Design processes are used in seemingly novel ways across business and governments seeking to improve their digital and real-world services. New usage related to users, perhaps unknowingly, replicates the interests of designers in the 1960s who sought a more equitable solutions to social problems experienced in the physical world. What loosely unites these disparate design disciplines diachronically and today is a shared sense that design improves the world we live in. But even with the best intentions, design does not inevitably lead to a better world. Our desire for stuff, and the social status this might bring, has helped to elevate designers into celebrities, but also heightened distinctions between the copy and the original. Design, either analogue or digital, has unintended consequences. These include, among other examples, the environmental degradation that emerges from design consumption through to the carbon footprint of the digital world.
"Lobbying for (in)action: Climate Emergence, Interest Groups and Denial"
26th & 27th of May, 2021
Organized by Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Despite the climate crisis emergency, humans are still not acting with the urgency events demand. Climate inaction – i.e., the absence of effective reaction to mitigate or stop contributing to global warming – is a recurrent, historical and very present reality. We are nowhere near fulfilling the Paris agreement. By some measures, Paris could be judged as a failure: emissions actually rose in 2019 compared to when the agreement was signed in 2015. And although the worldwide pandemic in 2020 produced a relevant fall in carbon output due to coronavirus lockdowns, the data also revealed an uncomfortable truth: even when transport and commerce are dramatically reduced, the majority of emissions remain intact. Far greater systemic change is needed.
The rapid spread of the SARs-COV 2, or novel coronavirus, the causative agent of COVID-19, from the City of Wuhan in China in late 2019, has wrought a lot of anxiety and economic downturn in the world. Political tempers have flared up with the West, led by the US, accusing China of deliberately releasing the virus into the world or covering it up until the infection reached pandemic levels. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been accused of being complicit in China's 'hiding' of the coronavirus.
This West versus East (China) 'conflict' has led to a lack of international agreements on a common approach to eliminating the virus. Russia, China, the US, Germany, France, Australia, and the UK are all working on their candidate vaccines. When Russia announced its Sputnik 5 vaccine release, the West was skeptical, but China and other sympathizers of Russia either overtly or silently managed the news. Then, by December 2020, Pfizer and Moderna had announced they had an effective vaccine. January 11, 2021, Pfizer announced it can quickly develop vaccines for future Covid-19 variants, fueling suspicions that a world order ordained by the Rockefeller Foundation, per its website, put in place in 2010 an assimilated plan to reduce the world population, annihilate the African population, and strain the global economy. However, media reports show that a densely populated Africa has so far recorded less than 50,000 deaths, whereas, as USA Today reports, health experts had forecasted that African health care systems would be overwhelmed as cases of COVID-19 escalated, and deaths exceeded 300,000 to nearly 3 million.
The Political Economy Section of the IAMCR has a dedicated, open source
section journal, The Political Economy of Communication.
We are encouraging IAMCR members, especially those in the Political Economy section, to contribute to the forthcoming issues of the journal.
Issue 9.1 (expected mid-2021) will be focusing on political economy of communication's topics and themes related to the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., the way political and economic factors have shaped communication systems, media coverage, public policy responses and more during the pandemic).
We welcome both full articles and commentary pieces on this by January 31 2021.
Author guidelines are here.
