*CFP* "THE AESTHETICS OF CREATIVE ACTIVISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM

As both a field of study and form of practice, creative activism seeks to understand how artistic forms can serve the ends of activist interventions.

 

To date, most emphasis has been on the activism component, drawing on theories of social movement formation, participatory action, and community organising. While there has been passing mention of aesthetics (relying heavily upon Rancière) the ‘creative’ term in creative activism remains woefully undertheorized. There are some scholars who have asked important questions about affect and effect, but overall, creative activism is ripe for deeper research into and theorisation of its aesthetic forms. Key questions include how creative activism differs from other activism, what makes it creative, and how (whether) the artistic components function effectively to achieve or enhance social change.

The Editors welcome submissions on any philosophically informed exploration of artistic forms as activist interventions, including, but not limited to:

• Ethics and morality in and of artistic activism

*CFP* "THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE: A CREATIVE AND CRITICAL SURVIVAL GUIDE", BOOK PROJECT

The Climate Catastrophe: A Creative and Critical Survival Guide is a book project that builds on the ethos of the three (to date) eco_media symposia, in proposing an interdisciplinary response to the various catastrophes – human and nonhuman – currently threatening the planet. The editors of The Climate Catastrophe are posting an open call for chapter proposals. Chapters should address the current climate situation in various ways: some pieces will be critical/theoretical/empirical in nature, where others will recount and describe creative approaches through art, filmmaking, sound design, and photography.

With the circulation of vaccines around the world, we thought we were shifting to a new phase of life after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Delta variant of the virus threatens populations worldwide, plunging millions back into lockdown. The core questions for this publication will thus be: how might we maintain focus on environmental issues, on the ever-present existential threat that predated the chaos of 2020? How has the pandemic changed – and how does it continue to change – our approach to or understanding of our world and our place in it? What creative, theoretical, empirical or philosophical approaches might best help us move forward in innovative and responsible ways?

Topics could include — but are not limited to:

*CFP* "EDUCACIÓN PARA EL FUTURO: PROSPECTIVA PARA LA SOSTENIBILIDAD Y LA JUSTICIA SOCIAL", NÚMERO 73, COMUNICAR: REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE COMUNICACIÓN Y EDUCACIÓN

En un contexto de incertidumbre, los Estudios sobre el Futuro (futures studies) se han extendido a diferentes áreas, caracterizándose por su transversalidad, que abarca, entre otros campos, la comunicación y la educación. Los medios de comunicación junto con la educación tienen una gran influencia en la construcción de las imágenes del futuro de la ciudadanía. La Educación para el Futuro como línea de investigación surge en el Reino Unido y en otros países de tradición anglosajona a fin de analizar el lenguaje, los relatos o las imágenes negativas sobre el futuro presentes en los diferentes medios, que demuestran una gran influencia en nuestra participación democrática y en nuestra actitud hacia el cambio social. Con este monográfico, se contribuye al análisis y discusión de los aspectos teóricos y prácticos relacionados con los Estudios sobre el Futuro y la Educación para el Futuro, y su incidencia en todo tipo de aspectos de la educomunicación.

 

Descriptores

*CFP* "TEACHING (WITH) POPULAR MUSIC", SPECIAL ISSUE, TEACHING MEDIA QUARTERLY

Teaching Media Quarterly is happy to share the latest call for lesson plan submissions on “Teaching (with) Popular Music" with you and please share widely!

“We both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance.” This is what Ray B. Browne was told upon being rejected from a journal in the first issue of Popular Music and Society fifty years ago. This prejudice still exists in the academy and has been perpetuated in the curriculums across a number of disciplines. However, with plenty of academic monographs and a good amount of dedicated peer-reviewed journals today, popular music is now a prolific field for critical and interdisciplinary inquiries. 

Popular music scholarship explores musical (sub)cultures, music in visual and digital media, music as propaganda, music as activism, and more. Thus, music is a ripe avenue through which media scholars contend with issues of power, identity, nationalism, environmentalism, (de)coloniality, globalization, and social justice. For media instructors, then, teaching a critical perspective on popular music can address many of the multisensory and transdisciplinary dimensions of media literacy.

*CFP* "SCIENCE FICTION: ACTIVISM AND RESISTANCE", VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Science Fiction: Activism and Resistance

Virtual Conference

9-11 September 2021

London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC)

 

In an age when Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Decolonise the Curriculum, Refugees Welcome, and movements for global solidarity with oppressed populations have become part of mainstream discourse, it is vital to re-examine the relationship between activism, resistance and the mass imagination vis-a-vis science fiction. As a genre dedicated to imagining alternatives, science fiction is an inherently radical space which allows for diverse explorations of dissent. It is, also, a space that has been rightfully critiqued for its historic inequities favouring white cishet men (as recently addressed by Jeanette Ng during the 2019 Hugo Awards among others). There needs to be reckoning with how precarious bodies engage in activism and resistance in the context of their material realities and restrictions. Therefore, we must deny universalising a single experience as “radical enough” and instead acknowledge how communities in the margins – queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, BIPOC, immigrants and refugees, religious minorities, indigenous populations, casualised workers, the homeless and unemployed – have specific ways of subverting and undermining the system, as well as specific stakes and reasons to do so. It is imperative to not only revisit how science fiction has been a space for activism and resistance, but also resist and challenge the genre’s shortcomings.

*CFP* "DISRUPTING AND RESETTLING THE LOCAL IN DIGITAL NEWS SPACES", SPECIAL ISSUE, DIGITAL JOURNALISM JOURNAL

We are inviting proposals to an exciting special issue on digital local news and journalism. Please consider to submit and/or forward to interested parties. Deadline for extended abstracts is June 30, 2021.

This special issue of Digital Journalism invites scholars to explore theoretically, conceptually and empirically the 'place', power and challenges of the local in digital news spaces. Both single-country and comparative research are welcome, as well as both theoretical and empirical manuscripts. The latter may involve quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods approaches. The issue particularly welcomes cross-national comparative analyses and non-Western perspectives.

Possible topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to:

• How do journalists, audiences, policymakers and others define and shape understandings of the 'local' in digital spaces.
• What are the changing ways in which journalism reproduces, represents or builds notions of locality and location in digital space?

*CFP* "ALGORITHMIC ANTAGONISMS: RESISTANCE, RECONFIGURATION, AND RENAISSANCE FOR COMPUTACIONAL LIFE", SPECIAL ISSUE, MEDIA INTERNATIONAL AUSTRALIA JOURNAL

In August 2020, the UK government’s black-boxed algorithm for deciding students’ grades made headlines. It had allegedly lowered the results of 40% of students, most of which from lower-income schools, thus crushing many students’ hopes for entering prestigious universities. Students went out to the streets and protested, memorably chanting “Fuck the algorithm!”. This recent case is just one of many that highlight a clear need for critical and empirical attention on algorithms and the work that they do, given their increasing importance in shaping social and economic life. There has been important work through critical studies that catalogue the multifaceted domination of algorithmic life and points of liberatory design out of it (Eubanks 2018, Costanza-Chock 2020), while recognising epistemological cleavages between powers of critique and scientific practice (Moats and Seaver 2019) in the seemingly impenetrable nature of “black boxed” algorithmic life (Pasquale 2015). Much critical scholarship tied to algorithms focuses on the ills of algorithms, or the ways in which a normativity can be developed around an ethical, equitable or fair expression of computation via design (see ACM FAccT). Other responses include consideration of critical practices that advance data science in ways that identify and create social and organizational arrangements necessary for a more ethical data science (Neff et al. 2017) or move towards data justice (Dencik et al. 2019, Taylor 2017, Johnson 2014) to offer equity as design goals. Yet Critical Data Practices are also taking an antagonistic turn, focussing on ways to actively employ algorithms for everyday, social, and political agency, influence, or resistance.

*CFP* "VISIONS OF CHANGE: COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE", ICA VIRTUAL PRE-CONFERENCE 2021

ICA Virtual Pre-Conference 2021

‘Visions of Change: Communication for Social and Environmental Justice’

Pre-Conference date: 27 May 2021

 

Division/Interest Group Affiliation: Visual Communication Studies Division, Environmental Communication Division, and the Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group.

A key challenge for representing environmental crises such as climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and toxic pollution is contextualizing the crises through a diversity of accounts and time scales. Candis Callison (2020, 2017, 2014) stresses how accountability and justice are impossible without recognition of the particular harms perpetuated by long-standing political, economic, and cultural systems of oppression. The ongoing violence of imperial capitalism are consistently removed from view through cultural processes of erasure whereby ecological crises are “decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time” (Nixon, 2011: 11). 

*CFP* "BUILDING BRIDGES/ DISMANTLING RACISM FOR THE COMMON GOOD", INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP & VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Building Bridges/Dismantling Racism for the Common Good

International Workshop - Virtual Conference

June 9th-11st, 2021. 

The workshop-conference will examine the characteristics of systemic racism and its impact on everyday life by exploring the interrelated themes of diversity, alienation (anomie), whiteness, and community. Presentations developed around these themes will establish critical frameworks for understanding how race and racial ideologies persist in shaping social and cultural institutions, which mediate interconnectedness and/or social isolation between individuals and social groups, and how these factors foster or hinder community-building. 

 

Towards this end, perceptions of identity and community will be examined by (i) presenting concepts and theories that are core to cultural diversity including the basis of stereotypes, prejudice, stigma, discrimination, and privilege, (ii) investigating the links between practices of exclusion and the structuring of societies, and (iii) exploring the psychosocial factors that contribute to alienation (anomie) and social isolation. 

*CFP* "SOCIAL JUSTICE AND ONLINE ACTIVISM", 2ND CHESAPEAKE DIGITAL HUMANITIES CONSORTIUM VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

The Chesapeake Digital Humanities Consortium (CDHC) invites submissions for its second annual conference: Social Justice and Online Activism. This year’s conference will be held virtually on Zoom in two half-day sessions on February 25th and 26th. There will be no conference registration fee.

We encourage participation from the broader digital humanities communities, including undergraduate and graduate students, college and university faculty, independent scholars, community members, librarians, archivists, and technologists. Within the larger theme of Social Justice and Online Activism, we encourage submissions within the following areas:

• COVID-19 
• Race and Racial Inequities 
• Social Media and Mobilization 
• Automating Inequality (cf. Automating Inequality; e.g. flaws of fraud detection, decision-support software vis-a-vis inequality) 
• Algorithmic Bias (cf. Algorithms of Oppression) 
• Bias in AI and Machine Learning 
• Digital Archives Power (cf. Archives Power) 
• Cybertypes (cf. Nakamura's Cybertypes) 
• Crowdsourcing DH projects  
• Hashtag activism 
• Inclusive DH pedagogy 
• DH for social good

*CFP* "SHAPING MEMORIES IN CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES", Nº 4 (2020), FUNES JOURNAL

One of the main issues characterizing the current debate on social sciences (with a proliferation of Memory Studies especially since the 1980s in the Anglo-Saxon and European area) concern the role of memory not only related to its theoretical definition, but also referring to its possible use as an interpretative tool in the empirical analysis of social and cultural processes.

The studies on the social origin of memory have developed in different fields, from the sociology of Halbwachs, Assmann, Cohen, Lavabre, Zerubavel, Jedlowski, Namer, Jelin, to other philosophical and historical perspectives authors such as Nora, Ricoeur, Ost, Le Goff, Jenkins, Arendt, Benjamin, Kracauer... All these strands have contributed to a systematization of memory by placing it in a multidisciplinary field.

To remember we need others. This is because our memories, including the most intimate and personal ones, only acquire meaning when they are shared with an emotional and social community that will contribute to their elaboration. The memories of individuals are not, therefore, able to construct, in retrospect, social frames of reference, but are the tools used by the collective memory to recompose an image of the past that is incessantly modified and re-described orienting the future.

*CFP* "POETIC JUSTICE: NARRATING PERSONHOOD, SOLIDARITY, AND CITIZENSHIP", CFVP VIRTUAL VIDEO SYMPOSIUM

Poetic Justice: Narrating Personhood, Solidarity, and Citizenship

CFVP Virtual Video Symposium

Utrecht University

This one-day digital symposium brings together international colleagues for an interdisciplinary conversation on the use of narratives to make claims about (or foreclose the possibility of) social justice in both formal and informal political situations, for example in art, memoir, social media, protest movements, and legal documents.  As such, the event unpacks the vital role of storytelling within contemporary political struggles, including, for example, in films about restorative justice, in newspaper representations of the Dutch farmers’ strike, and ethnography regarding labor organization in the digital media industry.  Only by better understanding how stories shape who is included and excluded from social institutions may we thoughtfully narrate a more open and inclusive society, since policy and politics begin with an act of imagination.  Please feel free to interpret the theme liberally.

*CFP* "BUILDING BRIDGES: INTERNATIONALIZING COMMUNICATION THEORY, PRACTICE, AND EDUCATION", COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION OF EURASIAN RESEARCHERS (CAER) CONFERENCE

Building Bridges: Internationalizing Communication Theory, Practice, and Education

Communication Association of Eurasian Researchers (CAER)

Klaipeda, LT

LCC International University

June 27-29, 2020

The Communication Association of Eurasian Researchers (CAER) welcomes submissions that focus on various aspects of communication in, with and about Eastern and Central Europe. This conference will serve as an opportunity to truly “internationalize” the field of communication, providing opportunities for transnational “bridge building”. This will have a plentitude of positive potentialities naturally percolate, producing new global connections, creativity, and commonalities in a world beset with division, delimitation, and difference. 

Internationalization, as outlined by the National Communication Association and the American Association of State Universities and Colleges accomplishes the goals of making global citizens of our students, linking international academic communities, enhancing national and international security, and enlivening and expanding faculty research and scholarship.

*CFP* “REAPPRAISING LOCAL AND COMMUNITY MEDIA”, MECCSA LOCAL AND COMMUNITY MEDIA NETWORK, COVENTRY UNIVERSITY

Reappraising Local and Community Media 
MeCCSA Local and Community Media Network
November 1, 2019

Coventry University

Abstracts are invited for a one-day symposium examining the current landscape for local and community media. The event is the first organised by the MeCCSA Local and Community Media Network and aims to bring together scholars and practitioners together to reappraise the sector as it undergoes rapid change and disruption. 

Keynote sessions will be delivered by Professor Bridgette Wessels from Glasgow University, researcher in the REGPRESS project, which is based in Sweden and which is examining the role of regional and local press, and Matthew Barraclough, head of BBC Local News Partnerships.

*CFP* “FRAMING THE PENAL COLONY”, NATIONAL JUSTICE MUSEUM, UK

Framing the penal colony

22-23 November 2019

National Justice Museum, UK

Whether presented as a tabula rasa onto which all the hopes, desires, pathologies and detritus of Empire might be projected, as a brilliant story of nation-state building via a hearty mix of backbreaking labour and genocide, or as an abandoned scarred landscape of failed utopian dreams, the penal colony is a space as much imagined as real. 

This conference will explore historical and contemporary representations of the penal colony as philosophical concept, political project and geographical imaginary. While direct challenges to existing historiographies are anticipated, the intention is to consider the role of visual culture, maps, photography, cinema, graphic novels/comics, museums in 'framing' the penal colony alongside literature, philosophy, politics. If the penal colony is generally considered to belong to the past, its legacy remains in the form of the prison islands and convict labour camps still operative across the globe. What can historical and contemporary representations of the penal colony tell us about its continuing legacy and what opportunities do such representations offer for thinking critically and creatively about our own ‘carceral’ present?

*CFP* "INFRASTRUCTURES AND INEQUALITIES: MEDIA INDUSTRIES, DIGITAL CULTURES AND POLITICS", ECREA CONFERENCE

 “Infrastructures and Inequalities: Media industries, digital cultures and politics”

ECREA Mid-Year Section Conference

21-22 October 2019

University of Helsinki, Finland

In a turn to ‘infrastructuralism’ (Peters 2015), media and communication scholars are increasingly attentive to the materialities and politics of the technological, organisational and cultural infrastructures that underpin media today. Platforms, data centres, software, but also new forms of organising cultural production and labour, shape the politics of digital cultures and transform the media industries. Digital and media infrastructures have become elemental to everyday life. They are significant in reproducing existing social and cultural inequalities, as well as creating new power struggles. As digital/media infrastructures unfold in everyday life, they bring challenges across multiple domains, from the foundations of social justice to the industrial structures underpinning our everyday interactions with media and communication systems. This conference aims to address the politics and inequalities that emerge, as technological and media industries adopt, dismantle and transform infrastructures to channel and process communication flows. Media infrastructures (broadly) operate under different and uneven conditions that configure media labour, media production, and the politics of communication and access (Starosielski and Parks 2015). This conference seeks to examine digital/media infrastructures and inequalities from an inter- and multi-disciplinary perspective, inviting papers to interrogate the significance of the ‘infrastructural turn’ in media and communication studies to our understanding of media industries, democracy and digital cultures.

*CFP* “SPORT COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE”, SPECIAL ISSUE, COMMUNICATION & SPORT

Communication & Sport is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for a Special Issue on “Sport Communication and Social Justice.”  Now in its seventh year, Communication & Sport is a cutting-edge, peer-reviewed bimonthly journal that publishes research to foster international scholarly understanding of the nexus of communication and sport.

Communication & Sport 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 2.395 and is ranked 14/83 (Q1) in the Communication and 17/50 in Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism categories, ranking above many longstanding legacy journals in both Communication/Media and Sport Studies. 

*CFP* “POWER, JURISDICTION AND SURVEILLANCE”, SPECIAL ISSUE OF INTERNET POLICY REVIEW

The rise of digital technology has major implications for how states and corporations wield coercive regulatory power through the transnational administration of justice. Increases in data transmitted and stored by public and private actors across jurisdictions raise crucial questions about how individual rights and freedoms can be protected in an era of seemingly ubiquitous transnational surveillance. 

The expanded development and application of domestic and international law to address behaviour in digital spaces, includes existing law applied to online activities, and new law to cover a growing range of internet-specific conduct. A pertinent site of state and corporate power in the digital realm involves attempts to develop and enforce domestic laws, especially criminal laws, transnationally. These processes generally occur outside existing domestic legislative frameworks, and raises questions about how national sovereignty, extraterritoriality and state and corporate interests are expanding at the expense of individual rights and freedoms in digital societies.