[ecrea] ICA 2019 pre-conference call for papers: Sports communication and social justice

ICA 2019 pre-conference call for papers: Sports communication and social 
justice

Date: 24 May 2019. 9.00am - 5.00pm

Location: Institute on Disability and Public Policy at American 
University, Washington - http://www.idppglobal.org

Sponsoring divisions: Sports Communication, and Activism, Communication 
and Social Justice

Organisers: Dr Dan Jackson, Dr Emma Pullen, Prof Michael Silk 
(Bournemouth University) and Dr Filippo Trevisan (American University, 
Washington)

Keynote speaker: Prof Marie Hardin (Penn State)

Media sport is a highly celebrated constituent of popular culture that 
often intersects with shifting political, economic, technological and 
cultural conditions. This context creates tensions regarding issues of 
power and justice, particularly where media representations are framed 
around normative or ‘accepted’ production values, entrenched practices 
or financial imperatives by dominant organisations that can contribute 
to the symbolic stereotyping of marginalised groups.

At the same time, leading athletes from traditionally marginalized 
groups have been able to seize on their visibility to highlight issues 
of inequality and discrimination through innovative and highly symbolic 
forms of protest, from Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Black Power Salute 
at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest 
in 2016. In recent years, these iconic moments have sparked a flurry of 
debate on social media, where communities have coalesced around hashtags 
such as #takingaknee and the U.S. women soccer team’s high profile 
“Equal Play. Equal Pay” campaign. While legacy media organizations 
continue to play an important role in how these debates are framed, they 
have also become a catalyst for contributions from a range of actors 
including politicians, grassroots groups, and global brands interested 
in sponsorship deals.

The rapidly evolving sport media industry and the changing face of 
mediated sport production therefore continues to raise original critical 
questions in new emerging contexts.

This one-day preconference pays attention to issues of sport, 
representation, power and social justice. The preconference is sponsored 
by the ICA Interest Groups for Sports Communication, and Activism, 
Communication and Social Justice, but we welcome submissions that span 
the disciplinary interests of ICA and beyond. Crossing disciplinary 
boundaries – the theme of the 2019 ICA conference – is encouraged in 
proposed papers.

We welcome theoretical and empirical inquiries that examine the 
following areas and other relevant topics:

·      The conditions that impinge on production, and the place and 
thoughts of cultural producers in articulating and dis-articulating 
fields of representation;

·      The emergence, resistance and contestation of new sport cultures 
via mainstream and alternative sport media platforms;

·      The framing, marketing and production of dominant cultural 
narratives in the context of a neoliberalised enterprise sport media 
culture;

·      The dynamics of public opinion and audience meaning-making with 
respect to sport, politics and social justice;

·      The negotiation of identity politics in sport media 
representation, in particular, issues of (in)visibility (and resistance) 
of marginalised, non-normative groups who remain mostly 
under-represented in mainstream sport media (e.g. gender, race, 
disability, sexuality);

·      The use of sporting platforms as a vehicle for social justice 
campaigns by athletes, grassroots groups, and other actors;

·      The role of nationalism, representations of the ‘national 
normative body’ and ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson’s 1983) through 
sport media;

Outputs from the preconference: We are in discussion with relevant 
journals for a special issue on the conference topic. If successful, 
submissions for the conference will be considered and full papers 
invited in September 2019.

Submission procedure: Please send proposals for 15 minute paper 
presentations through this google form 
(https://goo.gl/forms/IiXZOJbvahSmfECE2) no later than 11 January 2019. 
Abstracts are limited to 4000 characters including spaces (approx. 500 
words).

Contributors will be selected by peer review, and will be notified of 
the outcome of their proposal by 25th January 2019. Authors are expected 
to attend the preconference and present in person.

All participants – whether speaking or not – must register and pay fees. 
Registration costs (including coffee breaks and lunch buffet) will be 
approximately 50 USD for presenters and non-presenters. We will also 
have discounted rates for graduate students. To register, participants 
need to go to www.icahdq.org and register online as part of their main 
ICA conference registration, or as a stand-alone registration. As spaces 
are limited, priority will be given to those accepted for presentation.

Key dates:

    11th January 2019. Deadline for paper submission.
    25th January 2019. Paper proposers notified of decision by 
conference committee.
    1 April 2019. Deadline for preconference registration.
    24th May 2019. Preconference starts in Washington DC.


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