Archive for August 2023

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[Commlist] Call for Papers Special Issue Publizistik Counterpublics

Sat Aug 19 12:54:46 GMT 2023






following our ECREA pre conference last year, Christian, Erik and I are editing a special issue of the German journal Publizistik "From emancipation to disinformation? Public dissent and its evaluation in change". We would very much appreciate submissions from you as contributors to the pre con. The deadline for abstracts is November 30, 2023. Full papers must then be submitted by April 30, 2024. There are no charges or fees for authors or publication. You can find the call for papers here: https://link.springer.com/collections/jajfeabafh

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Special issue: From emancipation to disinformation? Public dissent and its evaluation in change

Submission deadline
    30 April 2024

Once considered spaces and platforms of emancipatory and participatory discourse, in recent years, arenas of public dissent such as “counterpublics” and closely related “alternative media” have increasingly denoted right-wing to far-right communication. The special issue takes a long-term and comparative look at counterpublics and alternative media as their carriers in order to contribute to the understanding of recent transformations of the public sphere and to the reflection of current research. It analyzes both phenomena of counterpublics and alternative media as well as scholarly and social discourses about them.



For a long time, counterpublics were almost undisputedly leftist projects, both in terms of their own attribution and in academic research. Counterpublics were regarded as discursive arenas that allow members of subaltern or marginalized social groups to incent counter discourses, circulate alternate narratives, and to promote oppositional interpretations of social realities against a hegemony constituted by dominant publics (Fraser, 1990; Negt & Kluge, 1993; Squires, 2002; Warner, 2002). As such, counterpublics enable social actors to actively and autonomously bring visibility to their experiences, interests, and identities, to mobilize for their causes and not least to publicly voice dissent. In this regard, counterpublics help to reflect the societal status quo and can become indicative of existing social inequalities as well as the logics of inclusion and exclusion prevalent in dominant public spheres and to criticize their shortcomings (e.g., Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2020). In a similar vein, alternative media have long since been regarded important carriers and constituents of counterpublics and were regarded as closely linked to oftentimes progressive and typically (radically) pro-democratic social movements such as the Labor, feminist, or ecology movement (Atton, 2002; Bailey, Cammaerts, & Carpentier, 2007). Accordingly, research on counterpublics and alternative media focused mainly on progressive groups and their forms of communication.



Especially with the advent of the internet and social media and their principal potential to remove barriers for social and political participation, there were initially renewed high hopes regarding their emancipatory potential for public discourse. However, a shift took place both in self-attributions and through parts of the research. Instead of a public discourse freed of constraints of unequal power relations the optimisms regarding counterpublic spheres and alternative media have almost been reversed in recent years. In addition to or instead of left-wing media, conservative to extreme right-wing newspapers, TV offerings and social media channels increasingly refer to themselves as alternative media and claim to form counterpublics against a supposed left-wing hegemony (Freudenthaler, 2020; Schwarzenegger, 2021). Furthermore, a growing body of research on counterpublics and alternative media is focusing on the online communication of right-wing populist or fascist actors. Therefore, the same public arenas, practices, and communication strategies, once idealized as sentinel for democracy, voice and participation are increasingly suspicious regarding their contribution to societal polarization, spreading conspiracy myths and a manipulative undermining of democracy (Strömbäck, 2023). Against this backdrop, longitudinal and historical research contributes to contextualizing the phenomena and makes an important contribution to clarifying the controversial theoretical question of what can or should be understood as counterpublics or alternative media (Jackson & Kreiss, 2023).

This special issue addresses these transformations with a long term and comparative perspective on public dissent and its expression in counterpublics and alternative media. Proposals can present theoretical works or studies drawing on, for instance, quantitative, qualitative or hermeneutic methods. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:



- Conceptual and theoretical evolutions:

Submissions in this area may include new approaches to advancing theories of public dissent, counterpublics and related concepts such as alternative media. In particular, contributions are encouraged that classify and explain current upheavals of public dissent in hybrid media environments in a longitudinal or comparative perspective of past transformations. In this context, submissions can, for example, address the following questions: How can social theories be linked with approaches from communication and media studies? How must theoretical concepts be adapted to media and social changes? What heuristics are appropriate for the systematic analysis of current and past expressions of public dissent?

- Theoretical reflections:

Contributions may critically assess normative assumptions of research or analyze theories from a history of ideas perspective. For example, they may address the following questions: In how far are notions like counterpublic spheres or alternative media relative to their contemporary contexts, societies, media or political and economic systems and geographies? To what extent do academic concepts of counterpublics and alternative media contribute to essentializing or normalizing (implicitly or explicitly) a specific understanding of the public sphere, media organization, and also public dissent? To what extent is scholarly engagement with issues of counterpublics, alternative media, and public dissent – as public sphere theories in general – tied to specific, including normative value systems, and how much is it guided by whose critique and dissent one is dealing with? What role do ideology and ideology critique play in this? To what extent is scientific debate guided by who the bearers of criticism and dissent are? Is it important or possibly misleading if concepts are used too inclusively or too restrictively, e.g., can the public dissent of the radical left and the extreme right be described and analyzed with the same concepts? How can the antagonistic relationship of these disparate forms of counterpublics to dominant publics be conceptualized in a differentiated way? Do terms like counterpublic and alternative media need to be protected from being used to describe disinformation and propaganda media, and thus from being damaged? Is there a risk that criticism of alternative media and counterpublicity will also generally discredit and delegitimize the possibility of public opposition?

- Cases and examples of public dissent:

Contributions can be devoted to examples of (historical) forms of counterpublics and individual alternative media, focusing on the following questions, among others: How did different actors aim to establish (self-proclaimed) counterpublics and why did they see the need for it? What consequences did media and political change have on the emergence and development of counterpublics and alternative media? Which alternative media occurred and how did they evolve? What forms of counterpublics emerged in different political systems, e.g., in the Soviet Union and allied states against media under state and party control? What role did right-wing counterpublics play against an assumed left-wing hegemony in liberal democracies? To which understanding of (counter-)publics and (alternative) media did the protagonists refer? In how far can norms and practices of counterpublics be distinguished, e.g., regarding information or disinformation, propaganda or truth, conspiracy or enlightenment? In which respect did alternative media establish alternative practices of media production, distribution, and reception? To what extent did actors pursue strategies other than founding alternative media to create counterpublics, e.g., media policy? What is the role of trans- and international networking in the history of counterpublics and alternative media? What role did foreign media play in creating counterpublics, e.g., against the backdrop of wars, colonialism, imperialism, or the East-West conflict during the Cold War?

- Perceptions of and reactions to public dissent:

Submissions in this field can deal with the relationship of different societal actors to various forms of public dissent. Research may address questions such as: How did representatives of the state, political parties, established media, companies and business associations, trade unions or other interest groups perceive counterpublics or alternative media and how did they react to public dissent? How did they shape discourses about public dissent? What efforts of promotion, regulation, or suppression of public dissent occurred? What functions could a (partially controlled) opposition in the public sphere have for actors in power?

- Public dissent and references to history or memory:

What is the role of history and memory for and in counterpublics and alternative media? To what extent is their own history or the history of the social movements they are close to a resource for identity work and self-positioning of alternative media and counterpublics? To what extent do protagonists of public dissent deal with their own past and genealogy or their personal relationship to the mainstream? To what extent are historical connotations and meanings appropriated or reinterpreted across political camps? What are examples of how history and memory serve as a basis for argumentation, a point of reference or strategically used strawmen in alternative media communication and for the constitution of counterpublics?



Submission requirements

1. Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words of length (excluding references). Abstracts can be submitted in German or in English and should be sent to the special issue guest editors ((venema /at/ uni-leipzig.de)) until November 30, 2023. An additional file should include title, four to six keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, and contact details for each author. Authors will be notified of proposal acceptance/rejection until December 15, 2023.

2. If the proposal is accepted, author(s) will be asked to submit the full article, in German or English, by April 30, 2024. Submitting a manuscript will be taken to imply that the manuscript has not been published elsewhere or in another language and has not been and will not be submitted to another journal simultaneously. The manuscript must be sent in an open format (i.e., docx file) and as a PDF to the editorial office of Publizistik. Manuscripts must not exceed 70.000 characters (including spaces, references, and figures/tables). Please make sure that your manuscript adheres to the submission guidelines that can be found on the Publizistik website: https://www.springer.com/journal/11616/submission-guidelines

3. Contributions will be submitted to a double-blind peer review process. All submitted manuscripts will be reviewed by one external peer reviewer, one editor, and one special issue guest editor. Authors will be notified of the reviews and the decision (accept/revise/reject) by End of July, 2024. The special issue will be published as issue 2 of Publizistik in May 2025. If you have any questions, please contact the special issue editors at (venema /at/ uni-leipzig.de), (christian.schwarzenegger /at/ uni-bremen.de), (ekoenen /at/ uni-bremen.de)



Timing for this special issue

November 30, 2023 Deadline for the submission of abstracts (500 words)

December 15, 2023 Feedback on abstract – Invitation to submit a full paper

April 30, 2024 Submission deadline for full papers

End of July 2024 Reviews and decision (accept/revise/reject)

October 15, 2024 Submission deadline for revised versions

January 15, 2025 Final versions ready

May 2025 Publication special issue



References

Atton, C. (2002). Alternative media. Sage.

Bailey, O., Cammaerts, B., & Carpentier, N. (2007). Understanding alternative media. Open University Press.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 12(25/26), 56–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/466240

Freudenthaler, R. (2020). Which online counter-publics on Facebook are fostering agonistic respect? An assessment of counter-publics debating Germany’s refugee policy. Javnost – The Public, 27(3), 247-265. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2020.1804121

Jackson, S. J., Bailey, M., & Foucault Welles, B. (2020). #HashtagActivism. Networks of race and gender justice. Mit Press.

Jackson, S. J. & Kreiss, D. (2023). Recentering power: conceptualizing counterpublics and defensive publics. Communication Theory, online first. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtad004

Negt, O., & Kluge, A. (1993). Public sphere and experience: Analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere. University of Minnesota Press.

Schwarzenegger, C. (2021). Communities of darkness? Users and uses of anti-system alternative media between audience and community. Media and Communication, 9(1), 99–109. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v9i1.3418

Strömbäck, J. (2023). Political Alternative Media as a Democratic Challenge. Digital Journalism, online first, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2023.2178947

Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication Theory, 12(4), 446–468. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x

Warner, M. (2021). Publics and counterpublics. Princeton University Press.


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