[Commlist] PSA Media and Politics Group annual conference

CFP announcement — Our next annual conference will be on January 8-9 
2025 at the University of Birmingham.

The conference theme this year is "Electoral communication in 2024: 
Responding to a year of turbulence in media and politics", with keynotes 
from Dr Patricia Rossini (University of Glasgow) and Professor Darren 
Lilleker (Bournemouth University) .
Full CFP accessed here and is shared below: 
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/englishlanguage/events/2025/political-studies-association-media-and-politics-group-annual-conference-2024-25

The deadline for abstracts (250 words max) is Monday, 29 July 2024. We 
also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers. Please send to 
(a.j.rhodes /at/ bham.ac.uk).

This is a hybrid conference, and we encourage applications from Early 
Career Researchers. We have reduced conference fees for PhD 
researchers/precarious workers and those participating remotely. We also 
have a limited number of travel subsidies for PGRs.

***
The School of English Language and Linguistics at the University of 
Birmingham will host the PSA Media & Politics Specialist Group Annual 
Conference in January 2025. This will be a hybrid event.
2024 is set to be one of the biggest election years in history with 
voters across the world taking to the polls. Political campaigners have 
been using media in innovative ways for decades, but recent years have 
seen digitalized changes and challenges take place.

Before 2024, politicians and their parties were finding novel ways to 
communicate and campaign. The increasingly erratic party leader 
engagement with televised political debates, the steady decline in news 
consumption, and the use of social media, now so ubiquitous, have 
brought changes to communication strategies. One example is the use of 
video game spaces as election hubs. In 2020, US presidential campaigners 
and senators took to the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) 
to communicate with voters. Alongside politicians, social movements also 
took to Animal Crossing to host protests, including the Pro-Democracy 
Hong Kong movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the global climate 
strike, and the Pride celebrations. Aside from demonstrations in gaming 
spaces, in recent years social movements have adopted voter-interaction 
within their campaigning to communicate with the electorate both on and 
offline.

As the cycle of the elections in 2024 advances, election experts think 
that advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the potential to 
introduce novel disruptions to the democratic process. Previous 
campaigning used technology to curate and match specific communications 
with targeted audiences. Today, the disinformation tactics of the past 
few elections, combined with the emerging wave of technology adept at 
autonomously crafting tailored content, are elevating concerns about 
AI’s influence on public discourse. Concerns around ‘election hacking’ 
have entered public conversations. In 2023, deep fakes of President Joe 
Biden were circulating in the US, and AI-generated news anchors have 
been created and used to spread disinformation ahead of the 2024 
Venezuelan and Bangladeshi elections. Big tech companies such as Google 
and Meta are responding by developing policies to adapt to the 
challenges of AI-generated content, and well-resourced broadcasters and 
journalists are formulating content authenticity protocols with which to 
identify the rhetoric of dis/misinformation and deep fakes.

In 2024, political campaigning and advertising from across the globe and 
political spectrum will take centre stage across multiple mediated 
spaces. From legacy media outlets to social media tech giants and on to 
social movements and citizen journalists, the range of 
(dis/mis)information available to voters is broader than ever before. 
This conference invites contributions that explore how politicians, 
strategists, social movements, journalists, the electorate, citizens, 
and other political actors are responding to the challenges faced in 
this mediated landscape. It asks, in what ways has mediated political 
communication changed in 2024? Are new actors and new ways of 
campaigning emerging? And how do we, as media and politics scholars, 
respond?

While the main theme of this conference is electoral communication, the 
Media and Politics Group operates an open and inclusive policy, and 
papers dealing with any aspect of media and politics are welcomed. This 
may include areas of political communication and journalism but also 
includes a broader view of the political within online media, 
television, gaming, cinema and media arts, both factual and fictional.

Potential topics could include (but are not limited to):

- The role of social movement communication in elections
- Legacy media’s role in political and electoral communication
- Alternative media and electoral communication
- Relations between political actors and journalists
- The implications of AI in elections
- The power of political satire, cartoons, and memes
- Online harassment and abuse
- The role of affect, emotion, and authenticity within political 
communication
- Disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and threats to 
democratic health
- The opportunities and challenges of digital campaigning
- Datafication and challenges to democracy
- Activism, social movements, and the media
- The methodological challenges of researching election-focused media 
and political communication
- Decolonising/diversifying political and electoral communication research

Keynote speakers
We are delighted to share our two keynote speakers for the conference 
who will discuss electoral communication:

• Dr Patricia Rossini (University of Glasgow) on polarization, political 
intolerance, and the role of social media and messaging apps in the 2022 
Presidential election in Brazil

• Professor Darren Lilleker (Bournemouth University) on how digital 
technology is impacting political communication and democracy

Call For papers
Please send abstract proposals for 15-minute papers to 
(a.j.rhodes /at/ bham.ac.uk) . These should include the following: title and 
name, institutional affiliation and address, and email address, together 
with a paper title and abstract of no more than 250 words. Proposers 
should also indicate whether they are a current postgraduate student and 
if they intend to present their work remotely.

Panel proposals
We welcome panel proposals for this conference. If you wish to propose a 
panel, please note the following stipulations from the organising committee:

• Panel proposals should include a panel overview (max. 300 words), 
outlining the title, synopsis, and chair details, as well as the 
abstracts for each contributor (no more than 250 words).

• Panels usually consist of three to four papers and a chair.

• Panels should aim to reflect the diversity of the profession and 
all-male panels will not be considered.

Deadline for submitting abstracts: Monday, 29 July 2024

Decisions about inclusion in the programme will be communicated on 
Monday 2 September 2024
Registration fees
The cost of in-person attendance is £150 for salaried academics and £80 
for PGR/low waged. This covers lunches and coffee breaks.

The cost of remote attendance for online participants is £50 for 
salaried academics and £25 for PGR/low waged.

Booking for our conference dinner on Wednesday January 8th will be 
available once registration is opened.

Financial support
The Media & Politics Group offers a limited number of travel subsidies 
(up to the value of £100) to support postgraduate student participation 
in this event. Postgraduate students interested in applying for these 
subsidies should please note this in their submission.
James Thomas Memorial Prize
Full papers of a maximum of 2000 words submitted by postgraduate 
students will be entered into the James Thomas Memorial Prize. This 
annual award is presented to the most outstanding paper by a 
postgraduate student at the Media & Politics Group Annual Conference. 
Postgraduate students wishing to be considered for the prize should 
please note this in their submission. Please send full papers to Abi 
Rhodes: (a.j.rhodes /at/ bham.ac.uk) by Monday 25 November 2024.

Travel
The University of Birmingham is accessible via a direct train from 
London Euston to Birmingham in around 90 minutes. There are also direct 
train services from Birmingham International Airport. Information on 
directions to Birmingham and to our Edgbaston campus are available on 
the Getting here page.  The conference will be held in the Alan Walters 
Building R29 in the red zone on our campus map

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