[ecrea] CFP - History in the Making Arab Media and Processes of Remembering, Conference, London

CALL FOR PAPERS



History in the Making:

Arab Media and Processes of Remembering



Conference organised by the

Arab Media Centre

Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI),



Date: Friday 24 April, 2015

Venue: University of Westminster, Regent Street Campus,

309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW



Keynote Speaker: Kay Dickinson, Concordia University, Montreal. Author 
of Off Key: When Film and Music Won't Work Together (2008) and co-editor 
of The Arab Avant-Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East (2013)





‘If history is a term that means both what happened in the past and the 
varied practices of representing that past, then media are historical at 
several levels’. These words of Lisa Gitelman in her 2008 book, Always 
Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, highlight the 
multiple ways in which media are implicated in our retelling of history. 
It is not just a question of journalism being seen as the first ‘rough 
draft’ of history (an observation credited to a former publisher of The 
Washington Post), or the fact that what are now sometimes called ‘legacy 
media’ were themselves new media several decades ago. It is also the 
role of films and other entertainment media in our awareness and 
understanding of the past, as well as the deliberate or unwitting 
silencing of histories through the highly selective processes of media 
representation. Such silencing is compounded when archives, or parts of 
archives, are neglected or destroyed.



Yet digital media and political upheaval in Arab countries raise new 
theoretical and practical questions about historical records. On one 
hand, online archiving of user-generated content seems to contradict the 
old maxim that history is written by the victors. On the other, who now 
has the right to be forgotten? Online digital infrastructures make it 
possible to trace dissident voices and sources in ways that threaten to 
sustain the entrenched control mechanisms of dictatorships.



Perhaps because Arab media outlets have expanded so rapidly in recent 
years, historical dimensions of media development or media use in the 
region have received limited attention. Eric Davis noted in the 1990s 
how much writing about the Arab world suffers from a ‘presentist’ 
fallacy, whereby inadequate or cursory coverage of historical forces 
contributes to essentialist constructions, which in turn represent the 
Middle East as incomprehensible political spectacle. More recently 
Walter Armbrust has pointed out the dangers of what he describes as a 
‘relentless presentism’ and predominant ahistoricism in Arab media 
studies, born in his view from a form of technological determinism.



This one-day conference will seek to address issues raised by the place 
of media in history, the function of media artefacts as historical 
sources, and the processes involved in documenting and storing media 
images and accounts that will make the past accessible to future 
generations. A focus on history seems appropriate for what will be the 
tenth in the Arab Media Centre’s series of annual international conferences.



We welcome papers from scholars and media practitioners that engage 
critically with the issues outlined above. Themes may include, but are 
not limited to, the following:



· Arab media history and historiography

· The place of history in Arab media studies

· Methodological questions in researching Arab history: the place of media

· Oral histories of Arab media

· Formation of film and broadcasting through colonial and postcolonial times

· Suppressed histories from the media sector

· Historicising the rise of subversive media across different political 
contexts

· Archiving and digitizing: who decides what and how?

· The performance of museums and libraries in preserving media artefacts

· Translation of historic media texts

· Gender, media and social history

· Media and memory studies

· Historic patterns in media coverage of Arab affairs

· Audience feedback in 20th century Arab media







PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION

This one-day conference, taking place on Friday, 24th April 2015, will 
include a keynote address, plenary sessions and parallel workshops. The 
fee for registration for all participants, including presenters, will be 
£110, with a concessionary rate of £59 for students, to cover all 
conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs. 
Registration will open in February 2015.



DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS

The deadline for abstracts is Monday, November 3rd, 2014. Successful 
applicants will be notified early in mid-December 2014. Abstracts should 
be 300 words. They must be accompanied by the presenter’s name, 
affiliation, email and postal addresses, together with the title of the 
paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter. Please send all 
these items together in a single Word file, not as pdf, and give the 
file and message the title ‘AMC 2015’ followed by your surname. The file 
should be sent by email to the Events Administrator, Helen Cohen, at 
(journalism /at/ westminster.ac.uk)





TRAVEL EXPENSES

Participants fund their own travel and accommodation expenses.





PUBLICATION

There will be various openings for publication of selected conference 
papers, which will be discussed further after the conference.

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