[Commlist] cfp: Nationalism and media

Nationalism and media
Call for papers

This call for papers is also available to download as a PDF.
https://nationalismand.media/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Call-for-Papers-Nationalism-and-Media.pdf

Introduction

The 31st Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity 
and Nationalism (ASEN) will take place 5-7 April 2022 in Antwerp 
(Belgium), in cooperation with National movements and Intermediary 
Structures in Europe (NISE), the University of Antwerp, and Ghent 
University. This year’s theme will be nationalism and media.

Call for papers

For as long as nationalist movements have existed, ideological 
pamphlets, historical novels that constructed a romantic national past 
to visual arts and hashtags such as #maga on Twitter have 
instrumentalised media. Next to disseminating explicit nationalist 
messages, media (printed press and visual arts included) also play a 
role for nationalism by making national symbols and discourses part of 
everyday life. By continuously providing representations of the nation 
and by presenting the world as a world of nations, media help to 
naturalise nationalism.

Since Karl Deutsch’s Nationalism and social communication (1953/1966), 
many studies of nationalism and national movements have pointed at the 
role of media. Most famously, in Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict 
Anderson emphasized the importance of ‘print capitalism’ in the 
emergence of modern nations. The growing distribution of newspapers, 
magazines, books and other print media facilitated language 
standardisation and literacy and through that to the development of a 
collective consciousness and the formation of an imagined community.

The so-called ‘second Gutenberg revolution’ (early 19th century) 
rendered printing considerably faster and cheaper, eventually putting 
the ‘mass’ in mass media. This was salutary for national movements, 
often lacking the infrastructure that modern states possessed, and 
facilitated their global development. Global reach and very low costs 
associated with social media today provide platforms not only to 
national movements aspiring to state-building, but also to fringe 
ultra-nationalist groups without access to mainstream media.

While media can contribute to the construction of nations, media are 
also formed by nations, since nations often determine the institutional 
and legal frameworks within which media operate. For the study of 
nationalism, the question is then whether this media dissemination 
coincides with a nation, or rather reaches another community.

Studies on the organization of media usually depart from a top-down 
approach, without taking into consideration the active roles that 
audiences take up in making meaning. The ‘everyday nationhood’ concept 
complements these studies by proposing a bottom-up approach, focusing on 
the place ‘ordinary’ people give to the national through their media 
consumption and their own production of media content. As a consequence, 
social media have unifying and dividing effects on nation building as 
through them competing definitions of modern nationhood come to the fore.

Despite the consensus about the idea that media are important for 
nationalism, this relationship is rarely explored in depth. How exactly 
can we understand the relationship between different forms of both media 
and nationalism? What are the common characteristics and the differences 
between different geographical and political contexts? How did the 
relationship between media and nationalism evolve? Given the enormous 
growth of media in late modern and contemporary history, has its 
importance for nationalism grown accordingly? And how did the rise of 
transnational (social) media and user generated content media affect 
nationalism?

This conference is intended to cover cases from all parts of the world 
and welcomes papers based on different theoretical perspectives and 
methodological approaches, and from different disciplines and fields, 
such as history, media and communication studies, political science, 
sociology, linguistics and literature. The conference will take place in 
person, at the University of Antwerp. However, certain timeslots will be 
reserved for online sessions, in order to facilitate the participation 
of scholars who would otherwise be unable to travel to Antwerp, and to 
encourage scholars from outside Europe to participate. Requests for a 
place in the online sessions should be clearly indicated when submitting 
an abstract.

Themes

Possible themes include:

    Revisiting media and nationalism theories;
    Media and nationalist propaganda;
    Media and banal nationalism;
    Media and everyday nationalism;
    Media and national indifference;
    New media and nationalism;
    Media, nationalism and gender/sexuality/class/age/ethnicity;
    The representation of nations in media;
    The role of media in naturalizing the idea of a ‘world of nations’;
    Media as sources for nationalism research;
    Social media and nationalism as a part of civil societies and 
public spheres
    Competing definitions in both visual and literary media
    Media, education and nationalism

Abstracts

Abstracts may contain proposals for individual papers, entire panels and 
workshops. Abstracts are to be submitted before November 15th 2021 at 
nationalismand.media/abstract.

All abstracts will be peer reviewed before final acceptance.

We will let you know whether your abstract has been accepted in January 
2022.

Conference organizers

The conference is organized by ASEN (asen.ac.uk), NISE (nise.eu), the 
University of Antwerp’s Departments of History, Literature, and 
Communications Studies (uantwerpen.be), and Ghent University’s 
Departments of History and Communications Studies (ugent.be).

Contact

If you have any queries, you can contact the organizing team by email at 
hello@nationalismand.media or by telephone and WhatsApp on +44 78 85 99 
16 33.

We look forward to welcoming you to Antwerp.

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