[ecrea] CFP: Workshop on ‘Post-socialist media audiences’

*CFP: Workshop on ‘Post-socialist media audiences’*

The project ‘Post-socialist media audiences’, a national partner of COST 
Action IS0906 ‘Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies’, would 
like to invite submissions of abstracts for papers to be presented at a 
day workshop on post-socialist audiences and audience research. It will 
deal with aspects of, and reflections on political and economic 
transformation in media consumption in post-socialist cultures and the 
research about it.

Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, 25^ May 212

Web: http://www.post-socialist-audiences.eu/

Accommodation costs in Prague will be covered by the organizers.

The papers will be published in the peer-reviewed journal.

************************************************************************

We are inviting your proposals for the presentations at the workshop. 
Abstracts must be written in English. MS Word is the preferred format 
for the abstracts. Proposals should be max 300 words long and contain 
the author's name and university affiliation. The recommended structure 
of a paper proposal embraces the paper title and description of the 
issue to be presented (research project, theoretical consideration, 
policy analysis, etc.) Please submit your abstract to the following 
email: (reifova /at/ seznam.cz)

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 March, 2012.

Notification of acceptance: 16 April, 2012

Workshop: 25 May, 2012

The past two decades of political and economic transformation in the 
region of Central and Eastern Europe have been reflected in media and 
communication studies mainly through research projects and questions 
focusing on the political and economic transformation of the media 
landscape and its functioning: issues of legislation, de-regulation, 
democratization, commercialization, the role of public service media, 
and importantly dealing with the history of media institutions of the 
region and propaganda. The transformation, however, is also cultural. It 
was not only the institutions and their mechanisms that have undergone a 
transformation, but also the everyday, and within that the use and 
consumption of media and the role that media play in people’s lives.

This workshop is intended as a platform for researchers dealing with the 
audiences of the post-socialist region to meet their counterparts from 
other CEE countries, where the participants will share and discuss 
research findings from the field of audience research within the region 
and debate how the media and societal transformation is reflected in the 
use and consumption of media, and how are media and various (political 
as well as non-political) media contents incorporated into everyday life 
and used for making sense of it. How do the post-socialist audiences 
make sense of media and whether and how are they critical? Have the 
freedom of expression and speech, democratization and the liberalization 
of the political system created a space for people to ask more questions 
of the society they live in? How is the transformation of media 
consumption performed across the different countries across the region? 
What are the main questions that audience research of the post-socialist 
region need to deal with?

We invite abstracts from all academics, whose research is concerned 
primarily with audiences of the CEE countries and the political change 
of the last twenty years.

The call for papers is not restricted to research on a particular media 
content or media technology or channels. More broadly, we are interested 
to see and discuss how audience research is approached and practiced in 
the CEE countries as we are interested in whether and how the political 
and economical changes of the region were reflected in the audiences’ 
consumption and use of media.

Organizers will provide accommodation for the accepted participants for 
two nights, however travel expenses are not covered.

Please be assured that to contribute in this workshop you do NOT need to 
be a member of the Cost Action IS0906.

Consequently a themed issue of the journal Mediální studia (Media 
studies) devoted to the audiences in the post-socialist media cultures 
will be based on the workshop presentations. Authors of selected papers 
will then be invited to re-work their contributions to the workshop into 
journal articles for a special issue of Mediální studia (Media Studies), 
a Czech biannual academic journal included in the EBSCO database that 
will be published in spring 2013. The host editor of the special issue 
is Irena Carpentier Reifova.

Submission of selected papers for a special issue of Mediální 
studia/Media studies: October 2012

Publication of the special issue: May 2013

For more details visit: http://www.post-socialist-audiences.eu/

Or contact Irena Carpentier Reifova at (reifova /at/ seznam.cz) 
<mailto:(reifova /at/ seznam.cz)> or Tereza Pavlickova at (tereez /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(tereez /at/ gmail.com)>