[ecrea] Call for Proposals: 2014 Challenging Media Landscapes Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

CHALLENGING MEDIA LANDSCAPES CONFERENCE 2014

Date: Monday 17-Tuesday 18 November 2014

Venue: University of Salford, MediacityUK, Salford, Manchester.

The theme for Challenging Media Landscapes conference is Exploring Media 
Choice and Freedom. It is hosted and organized by the University of 
Salford at MediacityUK and is part of the five day 2014 International 
Media Festival, Salford.



Conference Aim

The aim of the 2014 Challenging Media Landscapes conference is to 
undertake an exploration of a range of the main conceptual and practice 
based issues which have framed the academic analysis of ideas, practical 
expressions and critiques of freedom and choice in media environments 
over the course of at least the last decade.

Papers may have as their focus empirical cases, conceptual and 
theoretical contributions, or both. They may also report on practice 
based research across the range of media scholarship. Research which is 
of an exploratory and interdisciplinary orientation is welcome. Broadly 
speaking, papers are invited which address the range of actors, 
institutions, structures, instruments and processes in media 
environments that affect and challenge in some significant way our 
understanding of media freedom and choice.

Below is a set of five core themes, to be interpreted flexibly, around 
which contributions might be centred, though ideas for papers which do 
not sit in or across one or more of these areas, but which address the 
core aim of the conference, are also welcomed.



Theme One: Freedom, Choice and Privacy in Media Environments

Debates about privacy in media environments, particularly the online 
world, burn as strongly as they ever have. Some even contend that we are 
already in a post-privacy age, with the envelopment of professional and 
personal interactions and relations through social media and the melding 
of the two spheres, manifest, for example, in forms of immaterial 
labour. Concerns are expressed about surveillance, the treatment of 
protest by the State, and abandonment of respect for privacy by 
commercial organisations. Yet, high profile dissenting organisations and 
analysts, such as Wikileaks, IndyMedia and The Invisible Committee, for 
example – provide evidence of a more complex, contested environment. 
Wikileaks’s maxim “privacy for individuals and transparency for 
institutions” is suggestive of a new paradigm of what must be private, 
and what will be public. This theme calls for papers which explore the 
contemporary nature of privacy. What imperatives arise from its 
protection and what challenges arise in trying to secure it?





Theme Two: Policy Choices and Freedom in Changing Media Environments

The Internet is eroding the boundaries between the press, broadcasting 
and new, on-demand media services. The re-articulation of traditional 
Public Service Broadcasting as Public Service Media has now arguably 
been well-established. The rise of social media has created a set of new 
online communications environments where the associated commercial and 
governance protocols are still very much in their infancy and thus 
contested. What are the different ways of considering freedom and choice 
in this evolving era of media convergence? What are the key challenges 
that are developing in converging communications environments in terms 
of broadening and maintaining choice and what are the implications of 
this? How has this been manifest in the consideration of issues such as 
market regulation and the prescription of base line public service? This 
theme of the conference calls for papers which evoke new thinking in 
areas such as: new media market environments; possible subsidisation of 
media content, copyright regulation, ‘net neutrality’, and the possible 
regulation of social media.



Theme Three: The Growth of Big Data and Media Freedom

Debates about freedom, choice and control have been heightened by 
exponential growth in the range and amount of digitally collected and 
stored information. This has led to claims that the application of so 
called “Big Data” offers unparalleled opportunities to: understand 
social problems; track changes in public behaviour; and to develop more 
precise, incisive and nuanced policy responses to the needs of people as 
citizens, audience members, readers and consumers. More fundamentally, 
Big Data has been seen as challenging what we know and how we know it. 
However, superficial and deterministic assumptions that Big Data can 
automaticially produce solutions to a range of social problems ignore 
key questions around the interests which gather and have access to such 
data; exercise control over data flows; and undertake action to analyse 
and interpret such data. These concerns are already important sites of 
analysis and contestation in academic, governmental and media circles 
and this theme calls for contributions which will take forward the 
important debates this activity has generated.



Theme 4: Journalism, Media Freedom and Democracy

The principle of journalistic freedom centres on ideas about democracy, 
the Fourth Estate and the public sphere. However, the Leveson Inquiry 
(2012) in the UK was a potent reminder both of the limits of those 
freedoms and of their capacity to be abused. Globally, journalists are 
struggling to establish and maintain their freedom in fledgling 
democracies, such as the post-Arab Spring countries. The emergence of 
participatory (or ‘citizen’) journalism represents another important 
development, including a challenge to the professional status and values 
of journalists and to their ability to foster and regain public trust. 
Some argue that we are witnessing a democratisation of media through 
growing interactivity in journalism and apparently decentralised social 
media. This theme focuses on the range of possible responses to ideas 
about freedom in journalism in a variety of contexts in the twenty-first 
century. It welcomes both specific case studies of the notion of freedom 
in journalism and new attempts to theorise and explain critically the 
evolving and often elusive nature this idea.



Theme 5: Articulations of, and Barriers to, Creativity, Freedom and 
Choice in Media Practices

Media practice has long been a core manifestation of creativity, and the 
exercising of freedom and choice in the pursuit of excellence. However, 
media technologies and practices, individual and collective, commercial 
and non-commercial, are constantly changing. This theme calls for 
contributions which explore key changes in media practice from the 
perspective of creativity, freedom and choice. Papers and other 
contributions (such as audiovisual materials) may train their focus on 
the gamut of media practice from screenwriting to distribution and 
exhibition, from performance practices to cinematographic practices, 
from directing to sound design, from animation to games designs. Papers 
which explore multi-disciplinary and converged media practices, creative 
forms and business models are particular welcome.



Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be submitted in Word document 
format by 9 June 2014 to:

(artdes-cmlabstracts /at/ salford.ac.uk).

Your abstract should address one of the above themes (please indicate 
which) and have a separate cover sheet providing your name(s), 
institutional affiliation(s) and e-mail address(es). You will be 
notified of acceptance by 15 July, 2014. Full papers are due no later 
than 1 November, 2013.

It is the intention of the organisers to put together an edited volume 
of the conference contributions.



Details on booking registration and accommodation options will follow on 
acceptance of your proposal.



For further information, contact the conference director:

Seamus Simpson,
Professor of Media Policy,
Director of the Communication, Cultural and Media Studies Research Centre,

University of Salford,
MediaCityUK,
Salford Quays,
Salford.
Manchester M502HE

Email: (s.simpson /at/ salford.ac.uk)















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