[Commlist] CfP ECREA Organisational and Strategic Communication Section conference

*Call for papers*

*Complexity, hybridity, liminality: Challenges of researching 
contemporary promotional cultures*

**

A European Communication Research and Education Association conference 
co-sponsored by the ECREA Organisational and Strategic Communication 
section; the Department of Media and Communications, LSE; and the School 
of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester.

*Date/Time:* Friday 21 February 2020, 09:30-17:30

*Venue:* The Silverstone Room, Department of Media and Communications, 
Fawcett House (7th floor), London School of Economics and Political 
Science, London WC2A 2AE

We live in a time characterised by uncertainty, hybridity and 
complexity, when the powerful dualisms that characterised the 
post-Enlightenment era (nature/society, human/machine, male/female, 
etc.) are being problematised in a fundamental way. This conference 
explores how we research the promotional cultures that have become 
central to the liminal times in which we live. What strategies do we use 
to explore and attempt to understand the assemblage of technologies, 
texts, networks, and actors in contemporary promotion?

The moniker ‘promotional culture’ is now well-established as a way of 
describing the ubiquitous presence of promotional work – whether public 
relations, branding, advertising or other forms - in all aspects of our 
lives (Davis, 2013). It is enacted by organisations working in all 
sectors, from politics to the arts, in non-profit and commercial 
environments, while individuals also adopt promotional techniques in the 
ways they present themselves and their lives to others.  However, the 
singularity of the term ‘culture’ belies the fluid and complex worlds 
that promotion is built on, engages with, and perpetuates. Organisations 
that use promotional tools in their strategic communication can be 
implicated in the worst excesses of persuasion and propaganda, yet can 
also contribute to positive social change (Demetrious, 2013; Miller & 
Dinan, 2007). Communication campaigns track, survey and instrumentalise 
our lives through their endless appetite for data, yet ensure 
organisations can deliver convenience and interest precisely because 
they know us so well (Turow, 2006). Mainstream public relations and 
advertising tactics are used to sell us cars, face creams and holidays, 
but are deployed to greenwash environmental damage, whitewash corporate 
corruption, woke-wash social causes, and frame political opportunism as 
strategic thinking. Promotional culture cannot be pinned down to one 
form, process or purpose, so how do we account for its complex modes of 
production and deployment in our research questions, methods and sites?

To talk about promotional /culture/ is to acknowledge the deep 
embeddedness of promotion in quotidian life and the importance of its 
circulatory dynamics (Aronczyk, 2013). Just as Williams argued that 
culture is a ‘whole way of life’ rather than an elite set of activities 
(Williams, 1981), when individuals use promotional tools and tactics on 
their own terms, those tools are transformed from being a mechanism of 
elite power and repurposed to serve our own agency. Agentic power 
circulates through promotional work, via digital and analogue channels, 
and with unpredictable outcomes (Collister, 2016; Hutchins & Tindall, 
2016). In this sense, promotional culture is a continually emergent 
manifestation of the struggle between agency and structure, a hybrid 
form of power of which the outcome is never certain. Can research 
adequately address the tensions and power struggles that underpin all 
promotional work, including inequalities within and between nations and 
regions, whether in the Global North and the Global South? To what 
extent do we incorporate a wide range of sites, voices and articulations 
of its effects, and where are the gaps in our current practice?

This ECREA interim conference invites submissions that address the 
challenges of researching the complex, hybrid and liminal nature of 
promotion in a range of ways. Submissions may include (but are not 
limited to) the following topics:

-Structures of promotion – platforms, suppliers, industry structures, 
networked movements, industry hybridity and blurred boundaries between 
professional territory in theory and practice;

-Technologies of promotion – modes of production for promotional work, 
including digital technologies (data, AI, algorithms, bots) as well as 
old (but still current) techniques such as press releases, events and 
sponsorships, display advertising, and their effects on the development 
of promotional work; the power of promotional industries and the 
diffusion or limitation of promotional culture;

-Agents of promotion – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practitioners and organisations; 
producers and/as audiences; non-human agents and their effects on 
promotional campaigns, circulation, and impact;

-Representations of promotion – practice, practitioners, organisations, 
industries and professional fields as good, bad, inevitable, normal, 
deficient, diverse, or a matter of professional pride, and their 
continuity and change over time.

-Effects of promotion – from populism in politics to excessive or 
ethical consumption, to social and political activism and change; from 
racialised, gendered and classed audiences, messages and images to 
subaltern discourses and representations that reassert the power of the 
‘other’ on a local, national and global scale;

-Ethics of promotion – from deontological, teleological or virtue 
ethics, to an ethics of practice, feminist ethics, globalised ethics, 
or, alternatively, contractual ethics, ethics in the digital sphere, and 
their effects on practice;

-Methods of promotional research – challenges of researching the 
digital, excavating promotional ideologies, confronting professions, 
engaging audiences through academic work, and the risks and realities of 
research that can equally promote change or speak into a vacuum.

To submit to the conference, abstracts of 500 words should be submitted 
by 31 August 2019 to the conference organisers, at the following email: 
(media.promotion2020 /at/ lse.ac.uk) <mailto:(media.promotion2020 /at/ lse.ac.uk)>. 
Decisions on papers will be made by 30 September 2019. Full papers 
should be submitted by 15 January 2020, to give time for them to be 
circulated to conference participants.

The Department of Media and Communications at the LSE and the School of 
Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester are 
making travel stipends available for a small number of PhD students, to 
support their attendance at the conference. The application process for 
the stipends will be publicised closer to the conference date.

If you have any further questions please contact the conference 
organisers Lee Edwards ((l.edwards2 /at/ lse.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(l.edwards2 /at/ lse.ac.uk)>) or Ian Somerville ((ijas1 /at/ le.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(ijas1 /at/ le.ac.uk)>). **

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