[ecrea] ICA pre-conference "Audiences Elsewhere?"

The last date for registering to attend the ICA pre-conference 
Audiences, elsewhere? at the University of Leicester is 10th May 2013. 
We welcome all colleagues interested in attending the conference even if 
they are not presenters.

Please register on the ICA website - 
https://www.icahdq.org/conf/index.asp. Please register by 10th May

The pre-conference programme is available on this link - 
http://audienceselsewhere.wordpress.com/pre-conference-programme/

The pre-conference website has travel and accommodation details - 
http://audienceselsewhere.wordpress.com

This pre-conference at ICA 2013 co-organized by the Audience and 
Reception Studies section of ECREA and the COST Action IS0906 
Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, and presented in 
collaboration with ICA Division for Communication and Technology

Hosted by the University of Leicester

June 17th, 2013

Opening keynote address: Professor Kirsten Drotner,  Institute of 
Literature, Culture and Media Studies, University of Southern Denmark 
and founding director of DREAM: Danish Research Centre on Education and 
Advanced Media Materials.

Closing keynote address: Professor Sonia Livingstone, Department of 
Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political 
Science, director of EU Kids Online network.

Intellectual scope - More than five decades after the theoretical and 
empirical appearance of in communications research, it seems apt to ask 
what, if at all, the idea of audiences and the insights from reception 
studies might imply for those elsewhere. Caught up in internal debates 
about establishing the role of the reader, countering and then 
qualifying the narrative of powerful media effects, over-celebrating 
diversity, accumulating too much empirical work at the expense of 
theoretical advancement, and lately, the advent of users and produsers 
-- audience research has seldom had the chance to (re)consider its 
applicability and utility for other fields. Some of these links 
'elsewhere' have already been theorised by audience researchers -- 
consider the public or the citizen from democratic participation theory. 
Consider also, how the text-reader metaphor that lies at the heart of 
audience reception becomes a tool worthy of interest in the face of 
discussions about technologies as texts or the affordances and 
appropriation of technologies.  But there are other links waiting to be 
unpicked -- how best might the audience (a media-framed concept) and 
insights from reception research inform, for instance, education 
studies, tourism, sociologies of the family? Such a line of questioning 
places the tradition of audience research into a direct dialogue with 
other trajectories communication scholars walk on.

We suggest that reviewing the applicability of audience research to 
those outside communication studies is an important task for two 
overlapping reasons. First, in intellectual terms, indeed, there is a 
danger in not engaging with these questions, for these fields, 
'elsewhere' often assume the audience to be homogenous, singular, or 
even passive -- an ironical fact after the last fifty years of 
theoretical advancements in audience studies, which have proved 
otherwise. Second, in more socio-economic terms, audience researchers 
are often called upon to inform policy, a task in which we must convey 
the justification for our agenda to economists, political scientists, 
sociologists, educators and others. This should make us question as to 
what we must cross-fertilise for these bridges to be built, which 
insights shall not prove to be useful. And so, Audiences, Elsewhere 
brings together keynote speakers from both within and outside the field 
of academic audience research and proposes a work-in-progress format 
where the latest research can be discussed with aim to look at what may 
be useful for 'elsewhere'.

Organising teams

ECREA organising team: Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Ranjana Das, Jakob Bjur

COST organising team: Geoffroy Patriarche, Helena Bilandzic and the 
Steering Group of the COST Action IS0906

ICA Division for Communication and Technology: Lee Kwan, James Danowski 
and Lee Humphreys

Best,

Ranjana

Dr. Ranjana Das

Lecturer

Department of Media and Communications

Bankfield House 1.02

132 New Walk

Leicester

LE2 3EN

E: (rd207 /at/ le.ac.uk)

W: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/media/people/dr-ranjana-das