[ecrea] cfp Audience Section IAMCR Istanbul conference - July 13-17, 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS - reminder

Audience Section

(IAMCR Conference at Istanbul, Turkey, July 13-17, 2011)

The Audience Section invites submissions for its 
open sessions at the IAMCR to be held in Istanbul 
(Turkey) 2011 from July 13-17.  The conference 
theme for 2011 is ?Cities, Creativity, Connectivity?.

The Audience Section invites papers within this 
overall theme and which reflect the Section?s 
interest in new approaches and thinking to 
audience research in the context of the urban, 
the creative, and the network.  The nature of 
audiences as ?knowledge communities? and 
producers, ethnographic approaches to researching 
them and their embeddedness in everyday life, and 
the extent to which traditional classifications 
of audiences (masses, publics and markets) are 
being challenged by the fluidity and ephemeral 
nature of virtual and mobile audiences are 
important concerns. The Section gives special 
attention to reassessing the theories, methods 
and issues that inform practices of audience 
researchers. The Section encourages and aims to 
inspire greater interest in exploring and 
understanding audiences in diverse settings. The 
Section also encompasses investigations of the 
appropriateness of ?Western? and ?non-Western? 
theories and methods in this diversity of settings.

Themes:

In addition to the open call for papers, we would 
like to invite papers and proposals for panels 
which address the following themes:


1.    Embedded audiences

The contextualisation of audiencehood in everyday 
life has opened up audience studies to look at 
the audience as radically embedded, also in 
space. The strong emphasis on the cultural turn 
has in some cases diverted our attention from an 
equally significant movement, which has been 
labelled the spatial turn. Falkheimer and 
Jansson's core questions (in Geographies of 
Communication: The Spatial Turn in Media Studies) 
touch upon the key issues of this spatial turn 
for communication and media studies scholars: how 
does communication produce space and how does 
space produce communication. The translation to 
audience studies raises questions about the 
geography and spatiality of audiencehood: How do 
audiences relate to private and public spaces, 
how does the local, cultural, national (and the 
translocal, transcultural and transnational) 
relate to audiencehood, how are audiences 
embedded and embodied in urban cultures, and how 
do audiences function in online, networked, liminal and alternative spaces?

2.    Resistant audiences, critical audiences, networked audiences

Central to the audience research tradition has 
been a commitment to examining forms of 
resistance and opposition exhibited by audiences. 
Much of the seminal work of audience studies was 
forged in a time of economic crisis through the 
1970s and 1980s when forms of audience resistance 
revealed deep-seated social tensions and a 
charged political environment. Are similar 
patterns evident in the current global economic 
crisis? The locus of resistance has shifted from 
the ideal-interpretative to the 
material-productive. How does this affect the 
nature of resistance? How do audiences network 
and join forces in alternative interpretative 
communities? How is the resistant and critical 
audience manifest across today?s more complex 
media landscape? How do media organizations and 
professionals deal with the resistant and 
critical audiences? And how is resistance, at the 
level of the ideal-interpretative and the 
material-productive incorporated and transformed 
into compliance? We invite papers that look 
across the full spectrum of audience experience 
and examine diverse accounts of readings, modes 
of engagement and mediation of audience relationships with the wider society.

3.    Decentralizing the audience

Audience studies have often implicitly 
centralized mediated experiences while at the 
same time contextualizing, qualifying and 
decentralizing the role of media in people?s 
everyday lives. This tension has lead to an 
over-emphasis on audience activity, both at the 
level of media consumption and media 
(self-)production, while more passive and 
indifferent media uses and referential 
interpretations are under-theorized and 
under-researched. We invite papers that focus on 
the everyday passiveness of (some) media 
audiences and their acceptance of or indifference 
to the media frameworks that are offered to them. 
Moreover, we also call for papers that theorize 
or research the sometimes limited importance 
attributed to media in the everyday life of audience members.

4.    Children as audiences

Children and young people represent are a hugely 
important constituency for today?s media and are 
frequently seen to be in the vanguard of new 
audience trends and emerging practices of 
consumption and engagement. As a distinct 
audience grouping, children are the focus of 
special public policy provisions including codes 
regarding media content, professional guidelines 
regarding children as subjects and participants 
in the media, and a host of initiatives designed 
to foster citizenship and creativity through 
media literacy. Empirical work on children as 
audiences remains scarce however and in this 
stream we invite papers that explore audience 
experience from the child?s perspective, and that 
examine opportunities, risks, and challenges 
faced by children in the current media 
environment. Questions might include the extent 
to which media literacies are evident in 
children?s audience practices  or how agency 
supported or strengthened through civil society, 
educational or governmental action?


Proposals for papers under any of the above can 
be made by submitting an abstract of between 
300-500 words long through the Conference 
website. Each abstract must include title, 
name(s), affiliation, institutional address and 
email address of author(s).  Proposals for 
panels, containing details of each paper, are 
also welcome.  IAMCR accepts presentations in 
English, French and Spanish. However, it is 
requested that abstracts, if at all possible, be submitted in English.

For more on the submission of abstracts, 
registration, theme, location, etc., please go to 
http://iamcr2011istanbul.com or visit IAMCR at: http://iamcr.org/


The deadlines are as follows:
February 8, 2011:  Submission of abstracts 
(papers will be assessed by double blind review of abstracts).
March 25, 2011: announcement of acceptances.
June 3, 2011: Full papers due.

For enquiries or further information, please contact:

*Section Head : Nico Carpentier

Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels ? Belgium
e: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)

*Deputy Head: Brian O?Neill

School of Media
Dublin Institute of Technology
Aungier Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
e: (brian.oneill /at/ dit.ie)

*Deputy Head: Toshie Takahashi

Department of Communication and Media Studies
Rikkyo University
3-34-1 Nishi-Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo, Japan 171-8501
e: (t-takahashi /at/ rikkyo.ac.jp)




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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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