[ecrea] CfP: GeoMedia 2015 International Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS & PANELS

GEOMEDIA 2015:
"Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds"
An Interdisciplinary International Conference

Karlstad, Sweden
5-8 May 2015

GeoMedia 2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research 
carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The 
aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication 
geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and 
assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized 
academic field.   GeoMedia 2015 welcomes scholars of all disciplines who 
address questions pertaining to the space-mobility-media-communication 
nexus and want to take part in current epistemological discussions 
regarding communication geography and its future(s).

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Mustafa Dikec – Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Mimi Sheller – Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA
John Tomlinson – Nottingham Trent University, UK

CONFIRMED PLENARY PANEL
Paul C. Adams (chair) – University of Texas at Austin, USA
Julie Cupples – University of Edinburgh, UK
Dana Diminescu – Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, France
Hille Koskela – University of Turku, Finland

CONFIRMED FILMS & DIRECTORS
“The Forgotten Space” – Noël Burch (director)
“Cosmopolitanism” – Erik Gandini (director)

ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS
GeoMedia 2015 welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as 
thematic panels in English through www.geomedia.se

Individual paper proposals: The author submits an abstract of 200-250 
words. Accepted papers are grouped by the organizers into sessions of 5 
papers according to thematic area.

Thematic panel proposals: The chair of the panel submits a proposal 
consisting of 4-5 individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) along with 
a general panel presentation of 200-250 words.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

- Communication geographies
- Mobilities and locative media
- Power geometries of/in motion
- “Newsworthy” spaces
- Mobilities, flows and new media
- Material geographies of media
- Policy mobilities and power
- Media ecologies
- Lifestyle and tourism mobilities
- Pervasive media
- Cinematic geographies
- Mobility and governance
- New media and the productions of place/space
- Urban and rural media spaces
- Geographies of media and culture industries
- Art and event spaces

We plan to put together an anthology (not a proceedings) of selected 
papers and publish it with an established international scholarly press. 
Information will be provided to conference participants.

CONFERENCE TIMELINE
August 16: Submission system opens
October 10 2014: Deadline for thematic panel proposals
December 1 2014: Deadline for individual paper proposals
December 15: Registration opens
January 16 2015: Notes of acceptance
March 31 2015: Last day of registration

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
Information about the registration, conference program, venue, social 
events and practical arrangements, will be posted continuously at the 
conference website: www.geomedia.se

CONTACT
You can reach us at (info /at/ geomedia.se)

ORGANIZERS AND VENUE
GeoMedia 2015 is hosted by the Department of Geography, Media and 
Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden.

Mekonnen Tesfahuney, Conference General
Linda Ryan Bengtsson, GeoMedia Co-ordinator
André Jansson, Director of GeoMedia

CONFERENCE STATEMENT
GeoMedia 2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research 
carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The 
aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication 
geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and 
assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized 
academic field.

As stated by a number of scholars during the last decade, there are 
obvious reasons as to why such a field has emerged. Notably, recent 
developments in terms of expanding (trans)media technologies/networks 
together with intensified forms of mobility (migration, tourism, 
commuting, etc.) have had ambiguous spatial consequences: they alter the 
ways in which spaces and places are produced; they create new hybrid and 
interstitial spaces, and they affect how people establish senses of 
belonging and understandings of the world. Spatial practices and 
experiences, whether we look at the mundane level of everyday life or 
institutionalized processes such as regional governance or cultural 
production, are thus increasingly mediatized, i.e., saturated by or 
dependent on various media technologies and symbolic flows. Traditional 
mass media, and their modes of interpreting and encoding the world, are 
being supplemented by various forms of privatized media that sometimes 
have direct geographical impacts on social life; materially (e.g., 
portable digital devices) and representationally (e.g., geo-tagging).

At the same time, the conditions for communication in general and media 
practices in particular become more complex in times of intensified 
mobility and porous (territorial) boundaries: the places and spaces of 
symbolic circulation are no longer as clear-cut as they used to be, and 
questions of policies and legislations pertaining to media 
infrastructures and content circulation become more open-ended. 
Pre-established centres of mediated and symbolic power are contested.

These on-going transformations account for converging research agendas 
among geographers and media/film scholars. Communication geography is 
also an epistemological project that must be open to neighbouring fields 
such as sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and political science. 
The mediatized relations between spatial processes and communication can 
be related to overarching transformations of modern, capitalist 
societies, and to the enduring significance of economic, cultural and 
social power structures. Whereas the means and expressions of spatial 
production (including phenomena ranging from the everyday textures of 
the domestic sphere to ideologies of urban transformation and place 
branding) may alter in tandem with media developments, these are still 
shaped by gender, ethnicity and class relations. Whereas concepts such 
as communication, place and distance are in need of problematization, as 
suggested by various epistemological “turns” (e.g. the “spatial turn”, 
the “mobility turn” and the “cultural turn”), such discussions have to 
be framed by structural understandings of society as well as 
micro-oriented accounts of human nature and agency.




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