[Commlist] The Audience Network Symposium CFP

**

*Call for Papers*

*Researching Media Audiences from the Movie Theatre to the Digital Age *

*Methods, Challenges, Opportunities***

*29 April 2024, Lancaster University***

*Organizers: The Audience Network at Lancaster University (ANLU)*

*Confirmed Speaker: Prof. Annette Kuhn (Queen Mary University of London)*

**

*Deadline for submission of abstracts: 29 March 2024*

*Notification of Acceptance: 12 April 2024*

Since its first engagements with television, radio, and popular culture 
(Williams 1974; Hall 1973; Ang 1985), audience studies have explored 
everyday media consumption through bottom-up approaches that merge 
critical and feminist theory with qualitative methods. In tackling the 
impact of globalization and digital media, the field has expanded and 
diversified its scope to capture a broader range of audience practices 
and positionings. In order to address the growing fragmentation of 
contemporary audiences (Livingstone 2007) the field has shifted its 
prevailing focus on the Anglo-American context to a polycentric 
geography that includes a wider spectrum of media cultures across the 
world. At the same time, research focusing on mainstream forms of media 
consumption goes hand in hand with the investigation of a diverse set of 
situated and niche practices. Scholarship on transnational (Athique 
2016), migrant and diasporic audiences (Smets 2013; Hedge 2016) has also 
contributed to a much needed conversation around decolonization of 
methods and research agendas. Such diversification of topics, practices 
and objectives has also entailed a complexification of methodologies, 
which exceed the ‘traditional’ domains of media and cultural studies to 
include tools and methods from the digital humanities and data science, 
as well as a wider spectrum of qualitative methods (i.e., oral history, 
visual methods).  In 2017, the Deutsche Welle Akademie explored the 
challenges of audience research and media development. In their 
findings, they highlight that even though mixed methods approaches are 
often used in audience research, mixed methods designs are often 
misunderstood; and called universities to do the work of critical 
reflection on methods, as well as to offer sustained support and 
monitoring of implementation (Reineck et. al. 2017)

Outside of academia, the study of audiences has become a strategic 
branch in corporate and commercial research, particularly for marketing 
and branding (Mytton, Diem and van Dam 2016), with national bodies like 
Ofcom (2020, 2022) commissioning investigations to private companies 
instead of educational institutions. This raises broader questions about 
the incommensurability between theories of audience that inform 
professional industry practices and theories of audience used in 
empirical research, and points to the fact that audiences cannot be 
studied outside of their analytical construction (Ang 2002; Nightingale 
1996).

All these considerations are relevant to the many subfields that 
constitute audience research today, which span from the historical 
inquiry on cinema-going (Kuhn 2002; Treveri-Gennari et al. 2024; Dass 
2015; Li 2023) to the study of fandom, social media and digital 
audiences (Morrissey 2016; Booth 2010; Procter, Voss  and Lvov 2015; 
Al-Rawi 2017).Drawing from the liveliness and growing complexity of the 
field, this symposium aims to generate discussions around audience 
research with a specific attention to methods, the politics of location, 
ethics and inclusivity.

Proposals (300 words max) should be sent via this form 
https://forms.office.com/e/RYPRtsBYjA. 
<https://forms.office.com/e/RYPRtsBYjA.>We are especially interested in 
15–20-minute papers – including work in progress – focusing on 
methodology in relation to specific projects but also in a more 
speculative fashion. Contributions from PGRs and Early Career Scholars 
are particularly welcome.

Possible areas include:

·Feminist and Queer Methods

·Audience Locations and Geographies

·Historical Audiences

·Digital Audiences

·Decolonization of research methods and agendas

·Institutional Audiences

·Marketisation and commercialization of audience research

·Reflexivity and Positionality

·Audience Identities

This is a free event supported by the LICA Research Fund. Registration 
required. Light lunch provided.


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