[ecrea] New CFP and extension of deadline 2011 ECREA Symposium on the mediation of scandal and moral outrage

Dear All,

In the light of recent events in the UK, we are re-launching the call 
for papers and extend the deadline for the ECREA Symposium at the LSE on 
16-17 December 2011. We added a dimension to the call to take into 
account the News International scandal and we would also be receptive to 
panel proposals relating to the current ongoing hacking scandal raising 
serious questions regarding the ethics of journalism, privacy concerns, 
collusion of politics and media owners, weak oversight, etc.

We look forward to your abstracts.

All the best,
Bart



*ECREA Symposium 2011
*Communication and Democracy - Gender and Communication - YECREA
* Call for Papers *
*The Mediation of Scandal and Moral Outrage
*16-17 December 2011 at the LSE (UK)

/The mind conscious of innocence despises false reports: but we are a 
set always ready to believe a scandal./ (Ovid, Fasti - IV, 311)

/The mightier man, the mightier is the thing That makes him honored or 
begets him hate; For greatest scandal waits on greatest state./ (William 
Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece - l. 1,004)

/Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality./ (Oscar Wilde)
Scandals and the moral outrage they invariably provoke are not new, but 
the networked synoptic viewer society that we have become, makes 
scandalitis more permanent, more global and above all a highly 
profitable business for media organisations. The advent of 
crowdsourcing, web 2.0, blogging, CCTV, mobile phones with video 
capacity and an ever more hungry media eager to produce scandal and 
direct moral outrage, has made that not only celebrities and politicians 
are the object of scandal, but ordinary people caught doing something 
morally condemnable are increasingly thrown into the media frenzy as 
well, while police brutality has become easier to expose through 
so-called sousveillance or 'inverse surveillance' - watching those that 
watch. In politics, the fostering of a culture of scandal and the 
mobilisation of moral outrage has very much become a core activity in 
political journalism and an essential part of (negative) campaigning by 
political parties/candidates and civil society. Unsurprisingly, sex 
scandals involving male or female politicians or other celebrities 
remain of particular interest to the media and the public at large. 
These are often based on a moralistic agenda advocating heteronormative 
monogamy whilst constructing a sense of normality. A gender divide can 
also be observed in moral standards being projected on women and men. 
This symposium aims to bring a critical perspective to the way scandals 
are mediated, produced, consumed, and how they increasingly feed a 
polyoptic society whereby everybody is watching and watched by 
everybody. Recent events in the UK have also shown how this phenomenon 
driven by commercial and ideological interests can have negative 
consequences for trust in politicians, the police and journalism. The 
eagerness with which News International was chasing scandals became a 
scandal in its own right and the object of widespread moral outrage.

We invite paper and panel proposals related to the central theme of the 
symposium, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

o Political journalism and scandal
o Mediation of political scandals through new media
o Political campaigning and scandal
o Privacy and the surveillance society
o Celebrity, scandal and moral outrage
o Violent protest and moral outrage
o Sex, morality and scandals
o Gendered scandals
o The concealment of scandal
o Peer2Peer surveillance and micro-scandals
o Individual meaning, appropriation and the audience of scandals
o The political economy of scandals
o Methods and strategies of mediated scandalisation
o Historical accounts of scandals and mediated moral outrage
o News International and the ethics of journalism

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Prof. John B. Thompson and Dr. Jo Littler

New deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 August 2011
Abstract Submission:_ https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msmo2011
_Contact email:_ ecrea2011@hotmail.com_