[ecrea] Call for Papers - Pathologies and Dysfunctions of Democracy in the Media Context

Call for Papers - Pathologies and Dysfunctions of Democracy in the Media 
Context II
21th Century's New Dystopian Imaginary. From George Orwell to Black 
Mirror. From Big Brother to Big Data

November 12-14/UBI, Covilhã, Portugal

http://labcom-ifp.ubi.pt/files/pddemocracy/en.php

University of Beira Interior, along with SOPCOM’s Political 
Communication Working Group, will be hosting the 2nd Conferences on 
Pathologies and Dysfunctions of Democracy in Media Context, between 
November 12th and 14h 2018, choosing as this edition’s subtopic 21th 
Century’s New Dystopian Imaginary. From George Orwell to Black Mirror. 
From Big Brother to Big Data.

Conceptual framework:

20th Century's dystopian predictions have become object of a recent 
revisitation. Donald Trump's election in the United States of America, 
the several xenophobic and ultra-nationalist threats emerging in 
different geographical and political contexts, populism phenomena, as 
well as excessive surveillance, counter-information, and the so-called 
"fake news" have drawn attention to some dystopian portrays conceived in 
the 20th Century which are now being considered an appropriate depiction 
of democracy and political communication's new pathologies.

The Huffington Post has published a text by Christian Fuchs examining 
Donald Trump's leadership style from the perspective of Theodor Adorno's 
worldview on authoritarian personality. The Guardian has turned to the 
Frankfurt School to analyze the now famous "alt-right" connected with 
Steve Bannon’s name. Neil Postman's essays have been recurrently 
referred around and about surveillance studies. The New York Review of 
Books has included essays speculating on which book best-anticipated new 
forms of political intervention within media context, after phenomena 
such as fake news and the infamous post-truth: would it be George 
Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World? These two classics 
registered substantial increases in sales and popularity. The George 
Orwell essays on language were mentioned, in traditional press, 
following the phenomena of media manipulation. Cinephile memory was 
evoked alluding to films such as King Vidor's The Crowd. Finally, 
televised fiction itself has inaugurated a string of quality series 
pointing to a dystopian depiction of contemporary political 
communication, having Mr. Robot and Black Mirror as two of the most 
manifest examples.

In this Conference, participants are asked to privilege contemporary or 
classical sources with dystopian perspectives related to social 
mediatisation processes which are still currently able to translate a 
certain degree of topicality regarding contemporary phenomena.

Examples of such sources and references include:
- Social Science’s classical works; dystopian or critical approaches, 
such as Orwell's essays on literature and the writings of Canetti, 
Freud, Bakhtin, Adorno, Marcuse, Postman, among several other pertinent 
authors.
- Classical Dystopian Literature: from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to 
Robert L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hide, paradigmatic from the 
first reactions to scientific research and technological progress, other 
significant works have befallen, such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal 
Farm, Aldous Huxley's Island or Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, 
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, Anthony 
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Stephen 
King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman’s The Running Man, William Gibson’s 
Neuromancer, not forgetting the works from Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and 
Philip K. Dick (the significant Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep), nor 
more recent novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale and 
Oryx and Crake, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and Kristen 
Simmons´s Article 5. Among us, resorting to fantastic fiction has been 
employed to criticize consumption capitalism with José Saramago's Essay 
on Blindness.

Visual arts and some utterly diverse fictional perspectives include 
shows like Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, The Man on the High Castle, Altered 
Carbon or The Handmaid’s tale), films such as Ridley Scott's Blade 
Runner, Lars von Trier's Dogville, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, or King 
Vidor's The Crowd, comics like the unique works of Moebius or Enki 
Bilal, among many others, design (Dunne & Raby, Metahaven), and also 
other contemporary artistic forms with a deeply interventional and 
critical character.

Therefore, we aim to mobilize a wide diversity of classical and 
contemporary contributions which, departing from the perspectives of 
Communication Sciences, Critical Theory, Film Studies, Arts and Literary 
Studies, may allow us to approach elements of the new contemporary 
political landscape defined, among other social phenomena, by the 
presence of digital media.

Following the 1st Symposium on Pathologies and Dysfunctions of Democracy 
in Media Context, this second edition will also be structured after 
three thematic axes, useful to focus our attention on a few chosen 
phenomena.

1. Hyper-surveillance, and control mechanisms:
Within digital social networks and infotainment, invisibility, the right 
to forget and be forgotten, and the reserve of a private life acquire an 
almost subversive nature in an age defined by hyper-communication.

2. Leadership, transgression, and manipulation: "scandalogy" as a new 
science of communication?
The media staging of power mobilizes protagonists to a reality in which 
rationality and public responsibility are confronted with multiple risks 
of scandal arising from a permanent state of collective scrutiny. 
"Scandalogy" is a concept already used to project the study of image 
crisis’ phenomena, increasingly emerging due to the opportunities of 
political exposure.
On the other hand, opportunities to mobilize data in order to reinforce 
manifestations of panic or alarm are becoming more evident. Concepts 
such as "information", "agenda-setting " and "participation" are being 
challenged today by a an almost belligerent mobilization of media resources.

3. Identities and policies of life in a hyper-mediated society
Recent developments on the recognition of women’s rights and promotion 
of new affirmative policies intended to improve gender equality coincide 
with an ever-increasing controversy around the concept of "political 
correctness".
At the same time, while affirmations concerning human dignity appear to 
be progressively incorporated in political discourse, phenomena such as 
xenophobia, misogyny, racism, cultural, racial and ethnic confrontation, 
and, at the limit, the proliferation of genocides, rise to a previously 
unimaginable proportion and extent.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURES

Considering this context,

A) Labcom.IFP and the Organizing Committee invite all researchers, 
artists, performers, and activists interested in examining such issues 
(as much from classical as from contemporary references) to present an 
expanded abstract of 600 words in which social-scientific approaches, 
fictional topics, or their multiple possible combinations are to be 
discussed. If the presentation consists in a documentary, short film or 
animation, the author(s) must submit both a synopsis and a 2,5 minutes 
sample of the proposal.

B) After the blind peer reviewing process, 45 submissions will be 
selected. Those submissions may assume the form of Case Studies, 
Empirical Observations, Literature Reviews, Essays, Documentaries, Short 
films and Animations.

C) Essays and Scientific papers should not exceed 10 pages, intended to 
a fifteen-minute presentation. Documentaries, short films, and 
animations are to be presented in digital format and have a maximum 
duration of 10 minutes, since their full presentation must also not 
exceed fifteen minutes.
Each of these three axes will include a plenary panel, with national and 
international guest keynote speakers. Each plenary panel will then be 
followed by three parallel thematic sessions, each of them containing 
five of the selected presentations, to a total of 45 peer reviewed 
participations.

D) Abstracts and synopses must be submitted - both in English and in the 
original language of the selected works, until June 15, at 6:00 p.m. 
Author's acceptance notification will be announced by the end of the 
first week of July. Non-selected proposals will not receive any 
notification.

E) The written submissions will be published, either in a scientific 
journal or in the Conference's Proceedings, with ISBN.

F) The audiovisual and / or non-written submissions will be displayed in 
a proper digital platform.

G) All the authors with accepted proposals must formalize and pay their 
registration.

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