ECREA book series in European Communication Research and Education

Deadline: February 12, 2024

With this call, we invite authors to submit a short abstract for a book chapter in an edited volume with the working title Alternative media across European Media Systems. Conceptual cornerstones, methodological challenges, and systemic conditions. The selected abstracts will form part of an extended book proposal for the open access ECREA book series in European Communication Research and Education. The book aims to move beyond purely empirical single country case studies and abstracts with comparative, conceptual, and/or methodological contributions will be valued. Abstracts submitted must be based on original work not previously published. Please note: The extended book proposal is one among three candidates for the open access publication, and acceptance of an abstract is thus not a guarantee of publication.

Background and aim

Across European countries, the past decade’s dropping levels of media- and political trust and sweeping populist election victories have coincided with the rise of what have been labeled “alternative media”, “hyperpartisan news”, or “interlopers” to name a few. Broadly, these terms refer to and reflect a renewed scholarly interest in media actors that, in different ways and to different extents, challenge institutional news media. Accordingly, there has been a recent flux of studies exploring these actors’ content, sourcing practices, media criticism, users, and producers. While these studies have offered important empirical insights, this book aims to further advance this emerging research field conceptually and methodologically and develop systemic perspectives that are applicable across dissimilar national media- and political contexts to provide grounds for better linking and integrating future empirical studies. To this end, we call for contributions that address conceptual, methodological, and systemic challenges, organized in three subsections.

Part I: Conceptual cornerstones

An increasing number of different concepts are currently employed to study similar groups of media outlets. While the proposed book builds on the term “alternative media”, which is currently most widely established in the European context, other related terms include “political media”, “populist media”, “hyperpartisan news”, “parasitic news”, and “junk news”. This raises the pertinent question about whether or not we are studying the same thing. Moreover, the field has over recent years undergone a development from focusing mainly on progressive left-wing cases to focusing also on populist and/or right-wing cases. This raises a number of questions, such as whether our understanding of these media can and should be neutral or normative, how they reshape our understanding of established journalistic terms like balance, quality, and representation, whether and how to distinguish democratic from anti-democratic cases, bias from misinformation, and partisanship from extremity, and whether and how alternative media with different ideological leanings and goals can and should be studied within the same theoretical framework(s). This part of the book calls for contributions that address these or related conceptual questions and/or reflect on the different roles alternative media can play as actors of misinformation, interlopers on the journalistic field, correctives of mainstream media, voices of marginalized groups, parts of populist and anti-systemic movements etc., and how to conceptualize the role of these media from different democracy-theoretical perspectives.

Part II: Methodological challenges

Alternative media research can be a controversial field to navigate and engaging with this object of study raises methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas that should not be, but are currently, left to the Q&A sessions at conference panels. The book calls for contributions that shed light on and discuss these issues. As examples, how do you recruit research participants among users and producers of media characterized by sometimes hostile relations to established research? How do you balance building trust with participants and maintaining a critical perspective on the phenomenon under study? Does research on alternative media risk marginalizing or mainstreaming specific points of view and should this be a concern? And how can and do scholars deal with (the risk of) public backlashes to their research? For this section, the book also calls for contributions that reflect on challenges and potentials relating to different methods that can be used for studying alternative media. These can include but are not limited to network analysis; content analysis (qualitative, quantitative, manual or automated, topic modeling etc.); and user and producer studies (interviews, surveys, tracking, data donation, diaries, etc.).

Part III: Systemic conditions

Many studies on alternative media and related concepts are single-country case studies. This ties the empirical insights to the specific media- and political contexts, making it difficult to transfer and compare results across national or regional contexts. Moreover, most European studies focus on Nordic or Central media systems, leaving understudied the Western, Southern, and Eastern European contexts. This part of the book invites contributions that seek to develop media- and political systemic perspectives that can be applied and allow comparison across dissimilar contexts, e.g. by shedding light on the different mainstreams new media-political actors challenge in different European media systems and what different contexts mean for the roles these actors play in the media- and political systems they enter.

How to submit

Abstracts should be approximately 200 words. Please send your abstract to: miriam.brems@cc.au.dk. Deadline: 12 February.

Editors:

• Miriam Kroman Brems. Aarhus University, Denmark.
  
• Tine Ustad Figenschou. Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.
  
• Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk. Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.
  
• Eva Mayerhöffer. Roskilde University, Denmark.