[Commlist] Mobile Socialities - IAMCR Post Conference

MOBILE SOCIALITIES
Post conference Friday 12th July 2019, University of Segovia, Spain
Organisers Annette Hill, Peter Lunt, Miguel Vicente, Asta 
Zelenkauskaite, Erika Polson

The Audiences Section of IAMCR is organising a one day post-conference 
on the concept of Mobile Socialities. The Audiences section aims to 
encourage new thinking and approaches to global audience research and to 
inspire greater interest in exploring and understanding audiences in 
diverse settings, including non-Western approaches to audiences, the 
nature of audiences as ‘knowledge communities’, ethnographic approaches 
to researching them, and the extent to which traditional classifications 
of audiences (masses, publics and markets) are being challenged by the 
fluidity and ephemeral nature of virtual and mobile audiences.
 The themed post-conference critically examines the bridging concept of 
mobile socialities across international perspectives, ensuring dialogue 
on the connections between audience studies, mobilities and mobile 
communication research. Key questions include:
 1) What forms of socialities do we find in mobile times?
2) In what ways are time and place critical to mobile socialities?
3) How do we research the mobile nature of screen content for 
transnational audiences, users and publics?
 Mobile socialities is a bridging concept that links the phenomena of 
people on the move and the role of mobile media in everyday life. People 
are on the move across national borders through, for example, economic 
and forced migration or tourism; people are on the move from rural 
contexts to urban centres and transitions in social class. There are 
opportunities and barriers to mobility within working and living 
conditions and people transition between public and private spheres, 
home and workspaces through media. These movements question, and 
sometimes reinforce, existing notions of boundaries, differences and 
power relations. In such mobile contexts, we find media entangled in 
audiences’ lived realities, for example in mobile media and place, 
knowledge work and mobile spaces, or mobile media and time.

This post-conference addresses mobile socialites through empirical and 
theoretical analysis of audiences in situated contexts. Areas of 
interest include: mobile media and time, mobile media and geography, 
mobile communications directed at connecting people to place, 
transportation and media research, the blurred boundaries between work 
place-space within mobile communications, transnational audiences for 
global media; mobile apps and social relations, critical algorithm 
studies and intimacies, migration and mobile media, conviviality and 
mobile communications, historical approaches to mobile media and people 
on the move, methodological challenges for mobile media audiences, as 
well as other areas of interest.

We encourage multi-method and theoretical approaches to audience 
research that explores the concept of mobile socialities as something 
concerned with not only fluidity and movement, or place and scale, but 
also the possibilities and barriers to being mobile. In such a way, the 
post-conference addresses the flow and stillness of digital technologies 
and our lived realities, and the power dynamics of emerging forms of the 
social in mobile times.

Keynote speakers include Professor Maren Hartmann (Berlin University of 
the Arts), Professor Peter Lunt (Leicester University) and Erika Polson 
(University of Denver). The schedule will include a combination of 
keynote panels, workshops and panel presentations.

The post-conference takes place at the Segovia Campus of the University 
of Valladolid on Friday 12th  July 2019. A fee of 20-50 Euros for 
participants and IAMCR members covers food and beverages for the day. 
There are regular high speed trains and buses from Madrid to Segovia; 
and local hotels ranging from 30-70 Euros per night. There are 
scholarships of 150 US dollars per person to cover the costs of 
registration, transportation and/or accommodation to support early-stage 
scholars from middle or low income countries.
 Please send abstracts of 300 to 500 words by 21st March 2019 to 
(Miguel.vincente /at/ uva.es). This section is only able to receive proposals 
and schedule sessions in English for the post-conference.



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