[ecrea] Call for Chapter, Critical Studies of Advertising

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Working book title: “Critical Studies in Advertising; Theory and Critique.”

Few other areas of communication research are as ripe for a critical 
reassessment as is the critical study of advertising.

A good case can be made that current and impending practices of 
advertising have exceeded the grasp of traditional modes of critique. 
The culture-industry thesis developed by the Frankfurt School, the 
mass-culture thesis of social criticism, theses of cultural imperialism, 
of semiotic criticism, and of simulacra (to name just a few) emerged at 
a time of and are premised upon advertising and media systems up through 
the 1980s, which were comparatively highly centralized, professionalized 
and routinized.

However, emergent advertising/media systems today increasingly exceed 
such characterizations and the perspectives upon which they are 
premised. These include:

• A growing and digitally-driven advertising ecosystem, which depends 
more and more on marketing research to improve the efficiency and value 
of ad spending.
• The practice of tracking consumer behavior across ubiquitous computing 
environments to profile and personalize ad content, which is 
reconfiguring the ad industry and its practices, with important social 
implications.
• The expansion of advertising and promotion into increasingly broader 
realms of society and experience.
• Data-driven targeting, marketing and consumer response, which raises 
long-standing issues of privacy, autonomy, and the production of 
individual experience to qualitatively different levels.
• The steady incorporation of user activity in the forms of mobile media 
and social media, which renders less and less adequate binary 
conceptions of rank manipulation by an elite or of the implications of 
advertising as ones of false consciousness, misinformation, the 
production of simulations/spectacle, and the like.
• Digital profiling and personalization based on tracking user content, 
which may usher in new forms of manipulation and social discrimination 
that current critical approaches are ill-equipped to address.

To address the need to develop greater theoretical purchase on existing 
and imminent practices of advertising, this edited collection seeks to 
historicize current critical approaches to advertising, as well as to 
theorize resources for what a critical approach to advertising could 
perhaps be. In doing so, it also seeks to critically interrogate 
“advertising” itself, recognizing it not as a naturally occurring and 
obvious thing, but as a concept and historical practice, and thus to 
reconstruct how it might be made available for critique.

The impetus for this edited collection was a successful preconference at 
ICA in 2013. We have already received expressions of interest from 
acquisitions editors at major international publishers in the 
media-studies field. We expect this collection to be a major 
international compendium that will quickly become a key source for 
critical students and scholars of advertising across the world.

While empirical evidence can often be useful in substantiating a case, 
the focus of all chapters should not be empirical case studies. Rather, 
all chapters should address primarily theoretical and philosophical 
issues consonant with the focus sketched above.

As some examples, chapters can:

1.    Trace historical, constitutive relationships between traditional 
critiques of advertising and contexts of their emergence;
2.     Compare and critique different critical perspectives;
3.    Probe, discuss and evaluate recent and emergent theoretical resources;
4.    Explore and assess new or neglected critical approaches to 
advertising.

We particularly encourage international and/or transnational 
perspectives and arguments.

For full consideration, abstracts of 500 words (maximum) must be 
received no later than 1 March 2015.

Please send abstracts along with complete contact information to both 
editors listed below.

Tentative project timeline (subject to change):

• Authors notified of proposal acceptance: 1 April 2015 (at this point, 
the book editors will begin the review process with major academic 
publishers)
• Chapter drafts due: 1 June 2015
• Completed, revised chapters due: 1 September 2015
• Edited collection in final production: 1 November 2015

Direct questions as well as completed abstracts *by 1 March 2015* to 
either of the two editors:

James F. Hamilton
Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Georgia (USA)
(Hamilton /at/ grady.uga.edu)

Robert Bodle
Department of Communication and Media Studies
Mount St. Joseph University (USA)
(robert_bodle /at/ mail.msj.edu)


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