[ecrea] CFP: New Perspectives on Media Production Spaces, GeoMedia 2015 Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS



Proposed Thematic Panel for GeoMedia 2015: Spaces and Mobilities in 
Mediatized Worlds (An Interdisciplinary International Conference 
Karlstad, SWEDEN, 5-8 May 2015, website: http://geomedia.se/)





New Perspectives on Media Production Spaces



By no means have media production spaces been ignored in academic 
research. Analyses of media production have often been anchored to 
specific settings, for example the studio in television production 
studies, the newsroom in journalism ethnographies, or the loft-style 
office in creative industries research. Yet in many ways these 
traditions sit uneasily alongside the sorts of media spaces that emerge 
through recent attempts to theorise media in terms of ‘practices’. The 
value of work on media practices has been to emphasize the highly 
contingent interweaving of media into ‘everyday life’, a process which 
is fluid, indeterminate, and non-media centric. Yet, such work has 
overwhelmingly centred on the spaces of media consumption. Media 
production spaces, by contrast, are theorized as institutionalised, 
closed-off, strategically coherent and medium-specific. The geographies 
of media production, in other words, are often implicitly assumed to 
inhabit a different level of analysis.



This thematic panel aims to offer new perspectives that trouble the 
dichotomy between the geographies of media production and everyday 
mediation, and particularly how the former is often seen as 
institutionalized while the latter mundane. To begin with, what counts 
as media production is up for grabs, for example in the erosion of 
producer/audience distinctions, the loosening of medium specificity in 
the wake of digitalization, or in the dispersal of media production 
sites. At the same time, there are conceptual reasons to challenge the 
idea that media production spaces are centers of power. This session 
will explore the indeterminate spaces of media ‘production’ and their 
contingent negotiation with, anticipation of and even subjugation to the 
spaces, values and sensibilities of everyday life.



Papers might address the above themes via the following topics:



·      Affective/emotional dimensions of media production spaces/places

·      The social spaces of professionalized media fields and their 
material geographies

·      Localized geographies of film/television/music 
production/post-production

·      Code/software spaces and media production

·      Sport spaces and media production

·      The urban habitus of media professionals and semi-professionals

·      Site-specific encounters of media and non-media people

·      Spaces of ‘produsers’, ‘prosumers’, ‘citizen journalists’ and 
other non-professional media contributors

·      Time/temporality/timeliness/rhythm and media production spaces

·      Media producer anticipations/constructions of audience/user 
geographies

·      Architectural/infrastructural environments of media production

·      Cultural policy and the governance of media production

·      The body as site of media production

·      Practices of media space branding

·      Below the line media production spaces



The above list is indicative rather than exhaustive – proposals on other 
topics still within the above broad session theme will be gratefully 
received.



If you are interested in proposing a paper for this panel, please send 
an abstract between 200-250 words to both Helen Morgan Parmett 
((Helen.MorganParmett /at/ wwu.edu)) and Scott Rodgers ((s.rodgers /at/ bbk.ac.uk)) by 
no later than 15 September 2014.



Following the GeoMedia conference, we plan to propose the papers from 
this panel (or a development thereof) into a special theme issue for a 
refereed journal in media and cultural studies.





---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier and ECREA.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chauss�de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------