[ecrea] CFP: Media and Place

CALL FOR PAPERS



‘Media and Place’



School of Humanities and Cultural Studies

Faculty of Arts, Environment and Technology

Leeds Metropolitan University



To celebrate the launch of the new ‘Media and Place’ Masters programme, 
we are pleased to announce our conference on the 11-12th July 2014.



Confirmed Keynote speakers:

Prof Shaun Moores (University of Sunderland); Prof Kevin Hetherington 
(The Open University); Prof Helen Wheatley (University of Warwick)



Media operate in settings and environments: they exist in place. Some 
media spaces we occupy feel like home - listening to our favourite radio 
stations while we drive to work - while others enable virtual travel 
across vast physical spaces to different geographical locations. Media 
can escort us in an instant from the glamour of the global city to the 
minute, quotidian details of life lived at the local. Television’s 
liveness can gather very different people in the same physical space or 
draw together disparately located audiences around political events, 
sports tournaments and ecological disasters. Film makes possible 
different versions of the same city, multiplied as it filters 
differently through the eyes of the director to the audience. Media can 
blur the boundaries between the private and the professional, transform 
domestic boundaries into global businesses, and offer individual 
opportunities for public confessionals. New media connect us across 
continents with friends, loved ones and those we’ve never met. Yet place 
is always more than a location on a map; it is lived and experienced 
through repetition such that some places become laden with meanings of 
belonging and affective attachment. In what ways does place matter to 
the media? How far do we inhabit or live inside the media we use? Or 
rather, has the electronic world created a culture of placelessness? 
This inter-disciplinary conference welcomes researchers and 
practitioners from media and cultural studies, urban history, 
post-colonial studies, gender studies, urban sociology, cultural and 
phenomenological geography, politics, political economy, philosophy, 
social and cultural theory, cultural policy, anthropology, town 
planning, architecture, design, visual arts and ecology.



Conference themes

Themes and issues that the conference seeks to cover include (but is not 
limited to):



1. The cultural representations of land and urbanscapes across time and 
space;

2. Media and other representations of place and in particular of the 
North of England;

3. Transitory and marginalised spaces – suburbia, media as navigation, 
disadvantaged and stigmatised neighbourhoods, urban fringes, places en 
route;

4. Urban arts and media responses to the economic crisis post 2008, 
including – issues of cultural activism, resistance and culture-led 
regeneration;

5. Theories of rural and urban media mindscapes and imaginaries and of 
media, place and affect;

6. Drama, literature, cinema and television of the North: Kes, East is 
East, Last of the Summer Wine, The Red Riding trilogy, Wuthering 
Heights, Haweswater, Fat Friends …..

7. Post-colonial/global city spaces, hybrid and intercultural uses of 
media in urban and rural places;

8. Guerilla gardening, ecological DIY protest, pop-up urbanism, the 
emergence of new informal cultural venues and other grassroots 
interventions in urban and rural environments;

9. Digital technologies and new uses of urban and rural space;

10.Disruption, artistic intervention and subversive tactics (eg in 
post-communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe);

11.Transport, communication networks as media spaces;

12.Utopian/dystopian places;

13.The reputation of places in austerity times;

14.New media and spaces of protest, conflict and subversion.

15.The places and practices of sporting media (eg. Le Tour de France, 
the Paralympics, the World Cup);

16.Bottom-up, participatory urban and rural media and cultural policies.





Publication

The conference organisers are liaising with Palgrave MacMillan with a 
view to collecting selected conference papers together in an edited 
collection for publication in 2015.



Submission of abstracts

The conference organisers welcome proposals for single papers and panels 
of up to three papers. Please send short proposals of no more than 300 
words to (mediaplaceconf2014 /at/ gmail.com), by 1st February 2014 including a 
title, abstract, the theme your paper speaks to and your affiliation 
details.





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