[ecrea] cfp: youth, media and diversities

/// CALL FOR PAPER /// YOUTH, MEDIA AND DIVERSITIES /// DEADLINE FOR 
SUBMISSIONS : DECEMBER 17TH ///

YMdiv: YOUTH, MEDIA AND DIVERSITIES

Practices of diversity: from production to reception



International conference

April 2015, 2nd-3rd

Brussels, Belgium



Organised by the Centre d’études sur les jeunes et les médias
(Centre for Youth and Media Studies)

in partnership with Media Animation and the Masters Program of the 
IHECS, Brussels



Calendar

Deadline for submissions: December 17, 2014

Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2015

Conference: April 2 and 3, 2015

INFOS : www.jeunesetmedias.fr



Diversity is either considered as a situation in which our societies 
exist or as a value to be promoted; however as a concept, it remains 
polysemous and complex. The definition of diversity comes back to the 
character of what counts as diverse, varied and different. Yet, the term 
is commonly used to refer to categories of citizens marked by the 
singularity of their geographic, sociocultural or religious origins or 
background, by their age or gender, etc. But diversity is also 
associated with heterogeneous practices – in short, to plural practices.

Media, as they institute symbolic, technical and social mediations 
between individuals and their environment, underline the complexity of 
diversity. As symbolic industries, they build and show a ‘reality’ of 
the world in its diversity. Thereafter, what are the traits of 
diversity, a notion set by and with media? How do the production and 
reception of content, mechanisms, tools and outlets represent 
experiences of diversity? Is the experience of diversity within media 
linked with social and cultural diversity as it is lived on a daily basis?

In different countries and different periods of their history, diversity 
issues and media issues have been brought closer. In each case, this has 
led to both civic debate and political/activist positions – and this has 
fed into academic research on them.

Continuing previous research undertaken by the Centre d’études sur les 
jeunes et les médias and by its partners IHECS and Media Animation, the 
Youth and Media diversities (YMdiv) Conference aims to discuss the 
fields of youth and media through the prism of diversity. The aim is to 
focus on relationships between the young and diversity via media, on 
three levels:

° micro: the level of reception and of various experiences of diversity 
via media practices;

° meso: the level of the production of diversity, whether it is reached 
within professional practices or by content creation;

° macro: the level of cultural, educative and communication industries 
in a transnational perspective.

The YMdiv Conference has the ambition of dealing with several 
situations, thoughts and trends about youth and media experiencing 
diversity, through three academic approaches.



Approach 1 – Diversity of practices, practices of diversity

The reception of symbolic content and media experiences are complex 
phenomena. The theoretical current of Cultural Studies has highlighted 
the cultural specificity of reception phenomena (Hall, Katz, Liebes, 
etc.). Reception in the issue of diversity raises many questions: what 
place for cultural diversity in understanding the phenomena of reception 
and media experiences of youth? What understanding of divergent 
readings? How can we consider the media practices culture of young 
people without being culturalist?

 If this posture of consumer engages the individual in a specific 
relation to cultural content, which positions does he himself/she 
herself adopt on the issue of diversity in the media? What perception of 
diversity do consumers of cultural products have? Are phenomena of 
transnationalization perceived by young media users? Are they aware of 
being constantly in touch with diversity? Do they value it through their 
consumption? What roles do media play in the perception of youth about 
cultural diversity? What connections can be established between an 
increased consumption of content from a plurality of production contexts 
(Bollywood, Telenovelas, Sitcom, etc.) and the use of various cultural 
codes to interpret them? Is any support available in understanding this 
diversity? Which media literacy practices are likely to develop young 
people’s media skills concerning these issues?

 As the issue of diversity in media is directly related to the issue of 
minority representation, what perceptions of the Other are there in 
active reception? And what perception of an “us” is there in relation to 
content depicting a minority to which one belongs? How is 
self-representation as an ‘‘Other’’ experienced? When so-called 
‘‘diverse’’ communities are given a voice, what do they say about 
diversity in media? From a young user point of view, are media “places 
of recognition” for minorities (Malonga, 2008), for their minorities?

 In a different register, at a time when the digitizing of content 
allows for increased circulation of cultural goods and when devices are 
multiplying, what does the user do with this diversity of content? Are 
they “cultural affinities” in the consumption of symbolic contents? Work 
on Media and Migrations (Mattelart, 2007) testifies to complex 
situations of media use and questions concomitant streams of media and 
migration, but what about reception mechanisms in these complex 
situations? Are young people users of these devices or so-called 
diasporas media?

 Finally, if media practices are now supported by a participatory form 
of engagement, are the productions of young media users a reflection of 
this ongoing encounter with cultural diversity? Do participatory 
platforms enable a great meeting of cultures and diversity? Do media 
literacy integrate diversity issues in projects supporting production?


Approach 2 – Media and the diversity of production: visibility and content



Many works, mainly sociological and historical, have shown how media 
deal with migration phenomena and cultural and religious minorities. 
Some have the effect of marginalizing young people and people of 
immigrant ancestry by carrying essentialising discourses about the 
residents of working-class neighborhoods in large urban centers. Others, 
on the contrary, are part of a multiculturalist perspective that aims to 
bring together an audience of young people around the sense of belonging 
based on universal values. Today, what are the media representations of 
diversity? Do other innovative journalistic practices exist? Has the 
internet contributed to an evolution of modes of representation? Is 
there ethical reflection on this issue by information professionals? Are 
young content producers (in a family, professional or educational 
context) carrying these changes?

 Studies have also highlighted the difficulties faced by the media in 
the practice and implementation of diversity, and particularly of 
cultural diversity. One the one hand, a sociography of media 
professionals would help a better understanding of the sociological 
contours in order to measure possible evolution. What training in 
diversity does exist for media professionals? Who writes, composes, 
expresses, shows but also diffuses and conveys content in the media? 
What journalistic practices can develop an inclusive treatment of 
diversity? On the other hand, are media content a reflection of 
diversity in terms of culture, religion, gender, age…? How is the figure 
of the "Other" in a highly transnational market built today? In their 
approaches to production and contribution, are young people distinctive 
in how they stage diversity?

 For a century and a half, ethnic minorities have gone into media space 
at the margins -whether in special dedicated sections or pages within 
the mainstream media, or in specific media – in the same way that women 
in the English-speaking press did in the nineteenth century. In this 
context, are minority youth successful in achieving innovation in 
editorial, aesthetic or narrative contents, and in giving a voice to 
different topics in journalistic and media spaces? Is there an 
adversarial relationship between ethnic minority media and mainstream 
media? Or on the contrary, to what extent are ethnic media replicating 
forms of organization, systems of constraint, and a division of labor 
comparable to hegemonic models within more mainstream media? In 
addition, does the popularization of information and communication 
technologies enable access by the most undervalued groups to the media 
sphere? In today’s web era, are young people bearing a positive vision 
of diversity? With the boom of ethnic virtual social networks in all 
countries of immigration, is the use of ICT by ethnic minority youth a 
re-appropriation of new types of media, from “below”? Does media 
literacy take into account this richness and diversity?

Approach 3 – Cultural and educative industries through the prism of 
diversity

If diversity can be questioned on the one hand from the users (and their 
practices) and on the other hand from production (and regulation), it 
also must be thought through from an encounter between these two 
dimensions in the context of recent shifts in cultural and educational 
industries. The twentieth century saw the gradual emergence of large 
multinational media and cultural industries that for nearly half a 
century shaped the eyes of the world on standardized North-Western 
cultural models, visible in the mass media: newspapers, movies, 
television, literature, music, etc. From the 1980s, the advent of 
satellite technology, followed in the 1990s by the explosion of the 
internet has enabled these communication companies to expand, multiply 
and diversify the means of distribution of their audiovisual products to 
audiences and especially young people. Therefore, the proliferation of 
television channels and the development of the Internet since the 2000s 
paved the way for an unprecedented visibility of cultural entertainment 
products from various sources, and encouraged creation and dissemination 
of culture worldwide. In this way, information and communication 
technologies have often led people to believe that the national 
framework could be transcended. Is there not a tension here between a 
widespread production of flexible common formats (reality TV is a prime 
example) and the co-existence of practices of diversion, adaptation, 
conversion or transfer of these products? In other words, which means, 
what perspectives, what issues? In this changing media market, how are 
cultural industries meeting the challenge of diversity? What models of 
transnationalization of media production are there? What are the driving 
forces of a possible cultural internationalization? What are the 
possible reactions of states in response to these commercial and 
sometimes political (protectionism, cultural exception, media literacy 
systems) challenges?

Young people, who are major consumers of cultural and especially 
audiovisual content, represent an major stake in the development of 
transnational markets. Is youth approached as a transnational culture? 
Also, at a time when cultural industries are slightly redefining 
themselves in this movement of transnationalization and 
transmediatization, are they also looking to invest in other markets 
such as education (or edu-tainment) for example? How are socio-technical 
and socio-educational systems crossing cultural boundaries? And what 
about the issue of language used in these media (the hegemony of 
English, of Spanish ...)?

Some studies show that transnational cultural products can have explicit 
or implicit social functions (democracy promotion, health education, 
etc.) to the public, and sometimes specifically with youth. Do these 
media products act as mirror (or group listening) or projector? As an 
issue of the exercise of representative democracy, has the question of 
cultural diversity taken its place at the heart of political public 
spaces and citizen participation? Do modes of media regulation including 
this issue articulate it with youth practices? Finally, in the context 
of relations between the economy and culture that characterize the 
cultural industries, what place is there for cultural diversity?

So this Approach 3 places the issue of diversity at the heart of 
cultural industries in a transnational and possibly comparative 
approach, which seeks to grasp the phenomena of cultural adaptation, as 
well as the development of inter/transnational educational markets.

For this conference, multidisciplinary and international approaches will 
be highly appreciated. In order to offer a powerful and critical look at 
these issues, a discussion will be engaged with social and political 
actors in the professional media world.



Abstracts should be submitted by December 17, 2014 in French or English 
(maximum 5,000 characters, including spaces, Times New Roman, font size 
12, single spaced, 5 keywords, one title) to the address 
(jeunesetmedias.events /at/ gmail.com). All proposals will be evaluated 
double-blind by the scientific committee. Proposals and papers may be 
given in English or French.



In the email, please provide the following information: first name, 
name, email address, academic/professional status, university and 
research centre affiliation, title of the paper. Please send the paper 
proposal itself in an attached document in .doc format with your name 
(FirstnameName.doc). In the paper, on the other hand, you are asked to 
respect anonymity, even if you are referring to some of your previous 
publications.



Selected papers will be grouped in an academic publication whose terms 
will be specified later.



Calendar for publication:

Sending texts for evaluation: June 1, 2015

Notification of Assessment: September 30, 2015

Submission of final texts: November 10, 2015

Expected Publication: Spring 2016



Scientific committee

Christian Agbobli (Professor, UQAM, GERACII, Quebec)

Baptiste Campion (IHECS, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium)

Sirin Dilli (Lecturer, HDR, University of Giresun, Turkey)

Pierre Fastrez (Professor, UCL, Belgique)

Claire Frachon (Media and Diversity Expert, European Council)

Alec Hargreaves (Professor, University of the State of Florida, 
Winthrop-King Institute, USA)

Angeliki Koukoutsaki-Monnier (Lecturer, University of Haute-Alsace, 
CREM, France)

Christine Larrazet (Lecturer, University of Bordeaux, Centre Emile 
Durkheim, France)

Guy Lochard (Emeritus Professor, University of Paris 3, CIM, France)

Tristan Mattelart (Professor, University of Paris 8, CEMTI, France)

Maria Ranieri (Lecturer, University of Florence, Italy)

Virginie Sassoon (Twiki Productions, IFP, CARISM, France)

Aude Seurat (Lecturer, University of Paris 13, LABSIC, France)

Daya Thussu (Professor, University of Westminster, UK)

Carsten Wilhelm (Lecturer, University of Haute-Alsace, CRESAT, France)







Organization committee

Paul de Theux (Director of Média Animation)

Isabelle Feroc Dumez (University of Poitiers, ESPE, Laboratoire TECHNE)

Marlène Loicq (President of Centre d’études sur les jeunes et les médias)

Jérémie Nicey (University of Tours, Laboratoire CIM-MCPN)

Anne Claire Orban (International Project Manager, Media Animation)

Isabelle Rigoni (INS HEA, Grhapes / Centre Émile Durkheim / MICA)

Patrick Verniers (President of Master en Éducation aux médias IHECS)





Contact

Marlène Loicq, (marleneloicq /at/ gmail.com)





More information at www.jeunesetmedias.fr

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