[Commlist] cfp: Media Technologies and Accessibility: Politics, Representations and Paradigms

The Department of Electronic Media and Mass Communication, Pondicherry 
University (A Central University), in association with i3M, Ingemedia 
Department, University of Toulon and Association of Communication 
Teachers - Tamilnadu & Pondicherry, is organizing an International 
Seminar on "Media Technologies and Accessibility: Politics, 
Representations and Paradigms" on December 23-24, 2019. Abstracts and 
full papers are invited from interested academicians, research scholars, 
activists and media practitioners. Seminar website: 
https://www.emmcconference2019.com/

*Call for Papers*


Media access is increasingly woven into the textures and cultural 
practices of everyday lives. To Raymond Williams (1983), access is an 
integral part of the ordinary culture. Some of the works on media 
accessibility seek to see accessibility as an afterthought to address 
concerns of the excluded and at the same time engage with it as a 
critical project for all.

While the older notion of access referred to exposure to media 
technologies, the term ‘access’ has now a reconfigured import with the 
interchangeable relationship between readers, text and producers 
dominating content production, consumption and distribution. This has 
contributed to diversity and plurality of information. But, access is 
never insulated from grand political and economic imperatives. Access 
and diversity cannot be understood without predicating them on power, 
inequity, and exclusionist agenda of media, state and the corporate. In 
capitalism, the control of media by dominant class has resulted in 
“monopolised communications industries that in new ways make voice, 
visibility and access selective and a realm of asymmetric power” (Fuchs, 
2017).

For instance, access to the Internet is /de jure/ right but it is 
controlled by a country/countries, corporate and the State. Access is 
thus implicated in control and network society inheres in control 
society, what Deleuze (1992) writes about lucidly in his /Postscript on 
Control Society/. The rise of digital technologies informs how 
perceptions of control are overshadowed by perceptions of access, 
resulting in the notion of participatory surveillance or, put in other 
words, consenting to be surveilled.

Further, on the one hand, access merely constitutes exposure to 
spectacles (Debord, 1967), whereas Benjamin (1935) argues for 
technological reproducibility, an indicator of increased access, as a 
possibility for political ramifications. If access to excess content has 
resulted in producing media spectacles thereby denying us subjectivity, 
the meanings of access needs to be engaged with more critically than 
reifying it. Access leading to empowerment is also caught in a 
structural and linguistic dialectic between abundance and alienation, 
abundance of media, technologies and content on the one hand and 
alienation and deprivation of people from access to media and its ensemble.

Access has also received impetus from another perspective wherein media 
technologies designed and developed are more amenable to normal citizens 
as well as men (Oudshoorn, 2004). As a result, the disabled and women 
are excluded from access to technologies. While W3C proposes guidelines 
to make internet user-friendly to all, the design of technologies 
enables normal users, characterised by ableism, to produce public 
spheres that further create and reproduce disability as a deprived 
category. How can technologies be used for articulations of the 
subaltern and not merely that of the normative populations? It is quite 
interesting to engage with questions of hegemonic arrangement of uses of 
technologies accomplished through their intended user positions, mostly 
predefined and preconfigured. Does that mean that there is a wilful 
attempt not to be inclusive because disability can possibly destabilise 
the intended potential of the medium? Likewise, spatial production in 
terms of women having no access to public spaces with wifi zones 
underlie productions of discourses of gendered inaccessibility.

Another outcome of the advancements in digital technologies is the shift 
from industrial to post-industrial society, marked by ‘knowledge 
economy’ and the emergence of the concept of open access. Making 
knowledge available to everyone became the central tenet of open access. 
But the politics of open access as we see it in the forms of corporate 
dominating the market or the State muffling the voices emanating from 
open access and collaborative tools registers a new highpoint in 
accessibility.

Access is also linked to aspirations (Appadurai, 2004); lack of access 
can lead to crippling of the drive to aspire. Access is an enabler of 
aspirations and therefore individual preferences and collective 
capabilities. Media access in the context of social media does 
strengthen the potential of users to aspire, aspiration that is not 
linked to material benefits but knowledge, critical inquiry and 
reflection on future possibilities.

This seminar seeks to discover several dimensions of media access and 
related concepts from multiple perspectives, including films, paintings, 
social media, print, television etc. This year's conference aims at 
probing into the realms of access and how access has evolved to include 
the growing derivatives of technology.

This seminar marks the 100th anniversary of journalism and communication 
in Tamil Nadu and India. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Annie 
Besant, theosophist, journalist, educationist and freedom fighter, the 
first formal initiative to offer journalism as a course in an 
institutionalised setting took shape in 1919 in Madras. Though short 
lived, it brought alive the potential of journalism as a site of 
education alongside journalism as a site of freedom struggle. 
Pondicherry University and ACT TNP are proud to commemorate this 
centenary with a topic of accessibility that was also dear to Annie 
Besant. Abstracts are invited from interested academicians, research 
scholars and media practitioners as well as activists.

*Sub-themes (but not limited to)*
• LGBTQ / Queer visibilities in and through social media
• Body positivity in media / social media
• Access, Poverty and Media
• Political economy of start-up digital firms: Have they refashioned the 
discourse of media access?
• Access Denied or Enabled: Injustice to women and media reportage
• Media, inclusivism and differently abled
• (De)legitimising media: how is access configured?
• Connected Activism or Fragmented connectivism: Social media offerings 
for citizens
• Political participation and local people: speaking loudly about social 
issues
• Documentaries and representations of media access
• Films as access points for literacy
• Droning and Surveillance: Access society or control society?
• Invasive data gathering and Privacy rights
• Access to information: Symmetry or Asymmetry
• Understanding media access from feminist perspectives
• Media literacy on what to access than access per se
• Gendered labour and women’s political participation
• Free Software and Open Access
• Platform Politics
• Internet: A site for potential discrimination or equality
• Privacy and Data Protection Policy
• Media, disability and the politics of participation
• Access to excess content: Spectacles of screened reality and imageries
• Reality and truth in access-driven mediatised society
• Digital media accessibility and identities
• Histories of images in/through archives (photographs, films, 
engravings, paintings, videos, games etc.)
• Politics of images in contemporary cultures
• Accessibility in E-content courseware
• Accessibility, conflicting forms of knowledge and social reality
• Accessing science through media
• Communicating environment through Media
• Accessibility, technologies and health

*Timeline*
• Abstract Submission: December 10, 2019
• Abstract Notification: December 15, 2019

• Deadline for registration fee payment: December 25, 2019
• Full paper Submission (in not less than 5000 words): January 11, 2020

**

**

*About Pondicherry University, India*

Pondicherry University is a Central University established by an Act of 
Parliament in October 1985. It is an affiliating University with a 
jurisdiction spread over the Union Territory of Puducherry, Lakshwadeep 
and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The University’s objectives are to 
disseminate and advance knowledge by offering teaching and research 
facilities, to make provisions for studies in French and integrated 
courses in Humanities and the Sciences, and to promote interdisciplinary 
studies and research. The University’s motto is 'Vers la lumière’ 
meaning 'towards the light’. The main campus is located at Kalapet, 10 
kms from the town of Puducherry, in a serene and beautiful campus of 800 
acres adjoining the scenic Bay of Bengal. The University also has 
campuses at Karaikal and Port Blair which currently offer P.G. and 
Doctoral programmes.


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