ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

University of Westminster

The University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) is pleased to announce this year’s Quintin Hogg Trust (QHT) PhD Studentships for UK and International applicants to commence in the 2024/25 academic year. 

Full information about the studentships, entry requirements and the application procedure can be found here: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research-degrees/studentships/quintin-hogg-trust-phd-studentships-at-the-university-of-the-westminster-0

HOW TO APPLY

To apply please select the “MPhil/PhD Media Studies” programme, and make sure you indicate on your application form that you wish to be considered for a QHT studentship.

Applications must be submitted by 5pm on Friday 2 February 2024.

Interviews will take place in the week beginning 11 March 2024.

ABOUT CAMRI

The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) in the School of Media and Communication is a world-leading centre in the study of media and communication, renowned for its critical and international research, which has consistently been ranked highly according to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the QS World University Rankings. In REF 2021 83% of CAMRI's overall research was judged to be ‘world-leading’ and ‘internationally excellent’.

CAMRI welcomes applications which explore the political, economic, social and cultural significance of the media across the globe. CAMRI research is focused on four key themes: Communication, Technology and Society; Cultural Identities and Social Change; Global Media; and Policy and Political Economy.

CONTACTS

Please contact Dr Alessandro D’Arma, Director of the CAMRI Doctoral Programme, who can advise you and put you in touch with prospective supervisors.

Email: darmaa@westminster.ac.uk

Alternatively, you can contact a prospective supervisor directly. Please consult the CAMRI’s website for details of our core research themes and the research expertise of academic staff.

Link: https://www.camri.ac.uk

December 12, 2023, at 09h00 UTC

https://iamcr.org/phd-webinars/de-westernizing

IAMCR is pleased to present the IAMCR Presidential PhD Research Webinar on “De-Westernizing Global Media Studies: Bridging Disciplinary, National, and Regional Divides for a More Inclusive and Decolonized Future” co-convened by Karl Patrick R. Mendoza and Samuel I. Cabbuag. 

This PhD webinar will investigate how media studies can progress towards a more inclusive and decolonised future by promoting the incorporation of diverse perspectives and theories from various disciplinary, national, and regional contexts. It will investigate how the historical dominance of Western perspectives and theories in shaping the discipline has led to a dearth of diversity and inclusion.

The webinar will examine potential strategies for de-Westernizing global media studies, such as promoting the incorporation of non-Western perspectives and theories and reconsidering the role of Western theories and approaches in shaping the field. In addition, it will investigate how to create more equitable and inclusive collaborations across disciplinary, national, and regional boundaries, as well as the challenges and opportunities associated with such collaborations.

Duration: 3 hours 

Location: The meeting will take place on Zoom. Attendees will receive their personal invitation at least 24 hours before the webinar begins.

The research group 'Diversidad Audiovisual / Audiovisual Diversity' of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) publishes the report 'Availability and prominence of Spanish works in subscription video-on-demand services – 2023 edition'. This report analyzes the Spanish films and series offered through the services Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Disney+ and AppleTV+.

The study provides hitherto unknown data of great interest for the audiovisual sector. In a context of strong inter-company competition and new regulatory obligations for these agents in the European Union, it sheds light on questions such as how many Spanish works make up the different catalogs, what are the main characteristics of these works and what prominence is given to them by each service. 

The work has been developed by Luis A. Albornoz, Mª Trinidad García Leiva and Pedro Gallo, has the support of the University Institute of Spanish Cinema of the UC3M and is part of the research project 'Diversity and subscription video-on-demand services' (PID2019-109639RB-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the State Research Agency (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/).

The full study, in Spanish and English, is available here.

Dear all, 

We are thrilled to announce that registration is now open for the Konstanz Methods Excellence Workshops (komex), organized by the University of Konstanz in collaboration with the Methods Excellence Network (MethodsNET). We offer excellent, inclusive, and sustainable PhD-level methods training held February 22nd to 23rd (short courses) and February 26th to March 1st, 2024 (compact & main courses). Our online courses cover a spectrum of quantitative and qualitative methods at budget-friendly rates:

Main course (5 days): €390 early bird (€460 regular)

Compact course (3 days): €220 early bird (€270 regular)

Short course (2 days): €120

Online Short Courses 

• Learning Data Visualisation in R by Massimiliano Canzi
  
• A Basic Introduction to R for Beginners by Karina Shyrokykh
  
• Outlierism – Learning from Deviant Cases by Anat Gofen
  
• Introduction to Python by Indira Sen

Online Main Courses 

• Introduction to Causal Process Tracing by Hilde van Meegdenburg
  
• Introduction to Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) by Barbora Valik and Ioana-Elena Oana
  
• Advanced Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) by Ioana-Elena Oana and Carsten Q. Schneider
  
• Qualitative Data Analysis Concepts and Techniques by Anka Kekez Koštro
  
• Doing Fieldwork in Challenging Contexts by Catherine Owen and Xianan Jin
  

Thank you for disseminating this information widely—and see you at KOMEX2024!

Browse the komex courses and register here: tinyurl.com/komexreg   

Follow komex: on X @komex_methods or on BlueSky  @komex.bsky.social

Best wishes,

KOMEX Team

May 21-24, 2024

Stuttgart (Germany)

Deadline: November 30, 2023

https://websci24.org/ 

Hosted by the University of Stuttgart | Sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) • Interchange Forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems (IRIS) | Partners ACM • Cyber Valley • Web Science Trust • SigWeb

• Papers [LINK] Submission Deadline: Nov. 30, 2023
  
• • Contact for questions: acmwebsci24@easychair.org
• Workshops/Tutorials [LINK] Submission Deadline: Dec 2, 2023
  
• • Contact for questions: workshops@iris.uni-stuttgart.de
  • Workshop/Tutorials on May 21, 2024
• Posters [LINK] Submission Deadline: Feb. 15, 2024
  
• • Contact for questions: posters@iris.uni-stuttgart.de
  • Poster Session on May 22, 2024 
• PhD Symposium [LINK] Submission Deadline: Feb. 26, 2024
  
• • Contact for questions: phd-symposium@iris.uni-stuttgart.de
  • PhD Symposium on May 21, 2024

Margaret Gallagher (Editor), Aimee Vega Montiel (Editor)

A timely feminist intervention on gender, communication, and women’s human rights

The Handbook on Gender, Communication, and Women's Human Rights engages contemporary debates on women’s rights, democracy, and neoliberalism through the lens of feminist communication scholarship. The first major collection of its kind published in the COVID-19 era, this unique volume frames a wide range of issues relevant to the gender and communication agenda within a human rights framework.

An international panel of feminist academics and activists examines how media, information, and communication systems contribute to enabling, ignoring, questioning, or denying women's human and communication rights. Divided into four parts, the Handbook covers governance and policy, systems and institutions, advocacy and activism, and content, rights, and freedoms. Throughout the text, the contributors demonstrate the need for strong feminist critiques of exclusionary power structures, highlight new opportunities and challenges in promoting change, illustrate both the risks and rewards associated with digital communication, and much more.

• Offers a state-of-the-art exploration of the intersection between gender, communication, and women's rights
  
• Addresses both core and emerging topics in feminist media scholarship and research
  
• Discusses the vital role of communication systems and processes in women's struggles to claim and exercise their rights
  
• Analyzes how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated structures of inequality and intensified the spread of disinformation
  
• Explores feminist-based concepts and approaches that could enrich communication policy at all levels
  

Part of the Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research series, TheHandbook of Gender, Communication, and Women's Human Rights is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, journalism, feminist studies, gender studies, global studies, and human rights programs at institutions around the world. It is also an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, policymakers, and civil society and human rights activists.

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Handbook+of+Gender,+Communication,+and+Women%27s+Human+Rights-p-9781119800682

Communication+1 (Special Issue)

Deadline: December 31, 2023

ed. Christoph Borbach, Carolin Gerlitz, and Tristan Thielmann

Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing, and new smart sensor technologies have an enormous disruptive potential: not only for the replacement of established media and cultural techniques, but also for the future shaping of digital practices, the cohesion of societies, data justice, and, last but not least, on contentious issues of digital sovereignty. The special issue of the platinum open access and double-blind peer review journal Communication+1 (https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/) on “Digital Sovereignty” will therefore bring together current research on the subject area.

This issue addresses sovereignties in a pluralistic way, regarding: the technical sovereignty of critical infrastructures; right to informational self-determination; cognitive sovereignty with respect to automated decisions; the supposed sovereignty of the internet of autonomous things, or digital practices like autonomous driving; and questioning the sovereignty of traditional scientific disciplines when it comes to overarching (Critical) Data Studies. Updating Callon and Latour’s classical analysis of a new body politic (1981), this issue conceptualizes digital sovereignty as a distributed accomplishment. It is based on a multitude of small socio-technical mediations that unfold agency in every step of data production, distribution, and consumption. Data-intensive media, distributed agency, and digital sovereignty are therefore co-constitutive.

The current ubiquity of environmental sensor technologies and the associated “environmental conditioning of media” (Thielmann 2022) results in a ubiquitous datafication (Cukier/Mayer-Schoenberger 2013) and the collection and valorization of huge amounts of big data – including sensitive data such as movement profiles, tracking of purchasing and internet behavior, or face and voice recognition, of which the datafied subjects are largely unaware. This touches on ethical as well as legal issues and establishes new forms of discrimination, which now appears as data discrimination. Data bias as ‘the dark side of big data’ directly touches on issues of sovereignty both of the subject and of entire cultures and societies, with technologies of the Global North often being the focus of research and aspects of indigenous data sovereignty (Kukutai/Taylor 2016) being neglected.

In 2022, the entire digital universe comprised a data volume of approx. 94 billion gigabytes which equates to 94 zettabytes. In 2025, the amount of global data will already exceed 200 zettabytes (Rydning 2022). Such quantities of data allow for new modes of capture (Agre 1994) and surveillance (Zuboff 2019) and can no longer be sensorily processed and understood by humans, even if artificial intelligence and algorithms harbor the promise of making the flood of data manageable. The transformation of contemporary cultures into scalable data societies or “datafied societies” (van Es/Schäfer 2017) demands interdisciplinary research on the consequences of today’s ubiquitous and omnipresent datafication.

The current discussion on digital sovereignty is an immediate consequence of economic, political, and technical developments. This concerns economic questions on the use of personal data; the political dimensions of digital sovereignty of whole nations, and individual self-determination regarding information; or the technological pervasion of our everyday lives by AI, machine learning, and blockchain media, as well as network technologies (Augsberg and Gehring 2022). To date, the discourse on digital data sovereignty has primarily been shaped by the social sciences. Hardly any research has been conducted on the media of sovereignty and their data practices (Couture and Toupin 2019; Amoore 2020). The planned special issue of the journal Communication+1 takes this as an opportunity to represent current research on the topic of digital sovereignty in all its breadth.

We are seeking abstracts (500 words max.) for submissions until December 31, 2023 (to be sent to christoph.borbach@uni-siegen.de, subject: “Communication+1 Special Issue: Digital Sovereignty”), that might address—but are not limited to—one or more of the following topics:

●        Practices and technologies of data sovereignty

●        Conceptual work on the terminology: what does “digital sovereignty” mean and what does it look like

●        Perspectives on digital and data sovereignty beyond the Global North

●        Data bias and data discrimination as counterparts of digital sovereignty

●        Histories and fictions/imaginaries of digital sovereignty

●        Relevance of activist groups and countercultures to prevent data discrimination

●        Legal aspects of data sovereignty, also from a historical perspective

●        Ethical aspects of sensor media

●        Media technologies and politics of sensors and sensing

●        Sociological perspectives on sensor practices

●        Ubiquitous datafication

●        Counterpractices to regain digital sovereignty

●        Potentials of praxeology to investigate modes of digital sovereignty

●        Dangers of ubiquitous datafication for sovereignty in the digital age

●        Data-processing law and legal aspects of digital data sovereignty

Deadline: January 9, 2024

The ICA 2024 conference theme Communication and Global Human Rights invites communication scholars to take stock of the contributions of communication scholarship to the study of human rights; to foreground current research and practice; and to outline promising directions for communication studies. Human rights are a central topic and point of concern in many overlapping crises and regarding fundamental questions of our times about war and conflict, climate change and the environment, health, migration, food insecurity, threats to public safety, social exclusion and hate and polarization.

ECREA will host one panel at ICA 2024 and invites the submission of panel proposals that are focused on timely and innovative topics and are diverse in terms of methodologies, theoretical standpoints and/or nationalities of the presenters. We especially encourage panel proposals which include a European perspective and a comparative research focus. This call for panel proposals is open to ECREA members of all ECREA sections and to all topics.

Please note the following information:

Panel submissions. Panels provide a good forum for the discussion of new approaches, ongoing developments, innovative ideas, and debates in the field.  If you plan to submit a panel, please submit the following details: (a) Panel theme or title, (b) a 75-word description of the panel for the conference program, (c) a 400-word rationale, providing justification for the panel and the participating panelists, (d) 300-word (max) abstract of each paper, (e) names of panel participants (usually 4-5 presenters, plus an optional designated respondent), and (f) name of panel chair/organizer. In terms of diversity, we expect a strong panel proposal to (a) include contributions of at least two different countries, (b) feature gender balance, and, ideally, (c) include not more than one contribution from a single faculty, department or school. Panel proposals need to be original and may not have been submitted to ICA before or at the same time. Panels consisting of personal on-site presentations are given priority, hybrid capabilities cannot be guaranteed. Please indicate in your submission if your panel consists of on-site presentations only or not. Accepted panel presentations do not count towards the max. allowed individual paper presentations at the ICA conference.

Registering panelists. All panelists must be ECREA members by the time the conference takes place and agree in advance of submission to participate as panel presenters and to register for the ICA conference. ICA only provides a registration waiver for the panel convener, not for the other panelists.

How to submit?

• Email to: info@ecrea.eu

• Submission deadline is 9 January 2024, 23:59 CET

• In case of questions please contact: Andreas Schuck (a.r.t.schuck@uva.nl)

ECREA-ICA Conference Review Committee:

Andreas Schuck (U Amsterdam, chair)

Christina Holtz-Bacha (U Erlangen-Nürnberg, co-chair)

Irena Reifová (Charles U Prague, co-chair)

June 30-July 4, 2024

Christchurch, New Zealand

Deadline: February 7, 2024 (23:59 UTC)

https://iamcr.org/christchurch2024/cfp-flow34 

The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) calls for academic audio/visual work to be presented at IAMCR 2024, which will be held in Christchurch, New Zealand, from 30 June to 4 July 2024. 

With this call, IAMCR aims to stimulate the use of a broader range of modes for the communication of academic knowledge, complementing conference papers and oral presentations with audio/visual work. In particular, we seek podcasts and videos that integrate academic and aesthetic dimensions, and that use sound and/or image creatively to communicate academic knowledge. This implies that we will not select audio/visual work that merely consists of recorded lectures. The selected works will be presented during the conference in Christchurch from 30 June to 04 July. Flow34 creators are not required to attend the Christchurch conference.

We call for audio/visual work with a maximum duration of 30 minutes, but shorter contributions are also welcomed. 

Submission guidelines

Proposals for the presentation of audio/visual work will consist of one abstract, which will have two parts, namely an academic description of the work and a (basic) script of the audio/visual work. The academic description describes the research communicated by the audio/visual work (its research question, theoretical framework, methodology, research design and corpus, …), while the script provides a chronological description of the form of the audio/visual work. The abstract (with its two parts) has a maximum length of 750 words. Abstracts must be submitted online by 07 February 2024.

The Flow34 evaluation team will review the submitted proposals and announce their decisions in March 2024. The audio/visual work itself will then need to be submitted by 7 June 2024.

Abstracts and scripts must be submitted in English. The final work can be in any language, but subtitles in English are appreciated (but not compulsory).

For further information about Flow34, please contact Mazlum Kemal Dagdelen at <mazlum@iamcr.org>.

Deadline: December 15, 2023

https://iamcr.org/awards/peace-fellowships 

The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) wants to support the creation of collaborative contact zones, with modest means at its disposal, by establishing IAMCR Peace Fellowships. IAMCR will facilitate the collaboration of pairs of individual scholars, who are based in, or strongly connected to, two regions or communities that are currently engaged, or recently have been engaged, in an antagonistic conflict. An IAMCR peace fellowship will last 2 years in order to provide sufficient time for collaboration, and IAMCR will select up to two pairs of peace fellows per year. After four years, IAMCR’s Executive Board will evaluate the project and decide on its continuation.

IAMCR will provide support to IAMCR peace fellows in the following ways:

A travel grant of 1500 USD, for both scholars, to attend one (1) main IAMCR conference, in order to present their collaborative work. When peace fellows are demonstrably in the impossibility of traveling to IAMCR conferences, the funds can be used, pending IAMCR approval, for a different channel of communication to the IAMCR community.

An individual membership for both scholars, for two years. 

Opportunities to present their work at online or face-to-face IAMCR fora, to be decided in consultation with both scholars.

Should you need more information, please do not hesitate to contact Mazlum Kemal Dagdelen at mazlum@iamcr.org.

Also, we would be grateful if you could share this call with those you think might be interested.