[Commlist] Ecrea's ARS section joint call for papers with Nordmedia Audience Studies section

Nordmedia-ECREA joint event

Malmö, Sweden, 21-23 August 2019

The Audience Studies section of Nordmedia

The Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA

Joint call for papers for the Audience Studies section of Nordmedia and 
the Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA.

As we know, rumors of the death of the audience in an age of social 
media and participation were greatly exaggerated. On the contrary, a new 
“audience turn” can be witnessed in many areas of media and 
communication studies. As the media environment changes and expands it 
is vital we understand the contours and patterns of audiences as 
publics, users, consumers, and producers.

This Nordmedia-Ecrea joint event addresses the re-vitalisation of 
audience studies, following the 1980s audience turn in media and 
communication. Unlike this earlier account which focused on texts, 
audiences, and everyday life, this new approach offers a fresh 
theoretical territory that follows the patterns and contours of the new 
objective and subjective conditions of being an audience within digital 
media and society. These new lines of thinking can shape the future of 
audience studies as it intersects with other disciplines, for example  
media industries, distribution and policy, social media, journalism 
studies, performative arts, museum studies, film studies, memory 
studies, or mobility and migration studies.

Audience studies have developed a tradition promoting a multifaceted 
understanding of audiences, emphasizing the complexity and diversity of 
uses, meanings, pleasures, affects and emotions that audiences invest in 
media and communication. But this understanding of audience studies 
still represents a challenge for organizing research, communicating the 
field and engendering dialogue with academic and industry sectors.

On the one hand, nuanced and complex understandings of audiences are 
threatened by diverse dualities that are still commanding major 
narratives of research. Utopian-dystopian or emancipation-colonization 
debates have recently informed the work on audience participation and 
creativity. Emerging discussions on mediatization or the datafication of 
society seem to repeat a familiar pattern to those who have studied 
other media panics in the past. While such dichotomies are a challenge 
to more nuanced and multifaceted account of audiences, they do offer 
clear narratives to relate to when organizing and communicating research 
and creating impact. On the other hand, findings about the complexity 
and diversity of audience experiences remain challenging both to carve 
into the scholarly space, to apply in pragmatic contexts, and 
communicate straightforwardly to industry and public stakeholders

In line with the general call of the Nordmedia conference encouraging 
creativity in research, the Nordmedia-ECREA joint event asks how 
holistic, nuanced, multifaceted understandings of audiences can be 
theorized, how research can move beyond dualistic narratives, how 
innovative methods can be deployed to account for varying degrees of 
audience agencies and complex media conditions, or how imagination in 
conceptualization of audiences, especially as a way to address 
artificial binaries, can orient the new audience turn that the field is 
currently experiencing.

Special events:

As part of this joint event, there will be:

A special ECREA panel highlighting papers from ECREA members

A round table on industry/stakeholder relations

An informal dinner for Nordmedia and ECREA audience researchers to mingle

Registration and paper submission:

This is an event integrated to the biennial Nordmedia conference, which 
entails participation to the whole conference programme of the Nordmedia 
conference.

Deadline for paper, panel or workshop submission exclusively to this 
joint event is set to April 4th for ECREA members. We invite Nordic 
scholars to abide to the deadline set by Nordmedia on March 18th.

Guidelines and submission procedures are available here: 
https://www.delegia.com/app/netattm/attendee/page/81871

Please also contact the Chair of ECREA’s Audience and Reception Studies 
section, David Mathieu ((mathieu /at/ ruc.dk) <mailto:(mathieu /at/ ruc.dk)>) or the 
Vice-chairs Alessandro Nani ((nani /at/ tlu.ee) <mailto:(nani /at/ tlu.ee)>) and Vivi 
Theodoropoulou ((vivi.theodoropoulou /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(vivi.theodoropoulou /at/ gmail.com)>) for more information.


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