[ecrea] ICA Pre-conference: Conditions of Mediation - 17 June 2013 at Birkbeck, University of London

Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, 
Technology and Communication



2013 International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference

Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division

17 June 2013, Birkbeck, University of London



Organizers: Dr Scott Rodgers ((s.rodgers /at/ bbk.ac.uk)) and Dr Tim Markham 
((t.markham /at/ bbk.ac.uk))



Confirmed keynote speakers: Dr David Berry, Professor Nick Couldry, 
Professor Graham Harman, Professor Lisa Parks, Professor Paddy Scannell.



Conference Outline:

Media theory seems to have reached a moment in which it is effectively 
orthodox to presume we must pay attention first and foremost to the 
intricacies of everyday experience. Ethnographic audience studies, for 
example, have attacked assumptions that there is a discrete relationship 
between media content and audiences, arguing that media forms, content 
and technologies have indeterminate and multifaceted significance within 
the daily rhythms and spaces of their everyday lives. Studies of digital 
and networked media, meanwhile, have put into question the very notion 
of ‘audiences’ as the starting point for understanding mediated experience.



For some, accounting for the intricacies of everyday mediated experience 
has implied asking people what they actually do with media. But for 
others this is not enough: instead, the question is what constitutes the 
conditions of media experience in the first place. How do political 
configurations of discourses and inherited dispositions prefigure 
mediated action? How do material arrangements themselves constitute 
environments for mediated experience? How might we account for nonhuman 
agency, for example the ways in which software objects interact not only 
with human perceptions but also each other? Such questions point to a 
renewed confidence in explaining not just how but also why media, 
technology and communication are experienced as they are – all the while 
resisting a reversion to functionalism.



These interests in the very conditions of mediation suggest, if 
sometimes only implicitly, an emerging interest in a phenomenology of 
media. Indeed, phenomenology – broadly the structuring of perception – 
has seemingly obvious relevance for recent academic interests in media 
experience. Yet its use or invocation in media studies has been 
scattered. While this might simply reflect the considerable diversity of 
phenomenological philosophies and their applications, there have also 
been concerted efforts recently to rethink phenomenology across the 
social sciences and humanities. Paired with recent interests in mediated 
experience, the time seems apt to reassess what it might mean to 
theorize media phenomenologically.



Conditions of Mediation seeks to bring together scholars from a very 
wide range of perspectives – such as media history, media archaeology, 
audience studies, political theory, metaphysics, software studies, 
science and technology studies, digital aesthetics, cultural geography 
and urban studies – to reflect explicitly on the phenomenological 
groundings of their work on media. The phenomenological thinking to 
which participants might connect will be broad-based, ranging from core 
thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre to those 
with looser affiliations to phenomenology per se, for example Arendt, 
Bergson, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Garfinkel, Ingold, Latour, Whitehead and Harman.



In short, the overall aim is that this preconference goes beyond a mere 
congregation of media phenomenologists. Instead, it will encourage 
critical reflection on what various readings of phenomenology might 
offer media and technology studies that other approaches cannot. 
Conversely, it will also welcome reflections on the limits of 
phenomenological approaches in philosophical, theoretical, political and 
empirical terms.



Format:

The pre-conference will feature two plenaries of keynote speakers, as 
well as four-to-six panels of paper presentations selected from 
submissions of abstracts.



Paper submission process:

Please send an abstract (max 200 words) of your paper to both Scott 
Rodgers ((s.rodgers /at/ bbk.ac.uk)) and Tim Markham ((t.markham /at/ bbk.ac.uk)) by 
20 November 2012. Authors will be informed regarding 
acceptance/rejection for the preconference no later than December 20, 2012.



Venue:

The preconference will be hosted at Birkbeck, University of London WC1E 
7HX. Based in Bloomsbury, the intellectual heart of London and home to 
several of the University of London’s constituent colleges, the Birkbeck 
campus is just three tube stops away from the Hilton London Metropole 
(the ICA conference hotel). The event will be held in the Clore 
Management Centre, which offers an excellent lecture theatre, rooms for 
parallel streams and break-out discussions as well as space for catering 
and informal networking.



For further information:

http://conditionsofmediation.wordpress.com (conference website)



--

Dr Tim Markham

Reader in Journalism and Media

Head of Department, Media and Cultural Studies

Programme Director, MA/PGCert Journalism, BA Media and Business Applications

Director of Graduate Research, Media and Cultural Studies

Assistant Dean for Recruitment and Retention, School of Arts

Birkbeck, University of London

43 Gordon Square

London WC1H 0PD

tel: (020) 3073 8380

(t.markham /at/ bbk.ac.uk)

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/culture/our-staff/tim_markham



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