[Commlist] Call for Proposals_ Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication | Media and Ambivalence | January 2024

*4^th Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication*

*Media and Ambivalence*

**

*9-12 January 2024*

The 4^th  Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication takes a 
comparative and global approach to the study of media and ambivalence. 
Jointly organized by the Faculty of Human Sciences (Universidade 
Católica Portuguesa) and the Center for Media@Risk at the Annenberg 
School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania), in cooperation 
with the School of Journalism and Communication (Chinese University of 
Hong Kong), and the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and 
Humanities (University of Helsinki), the 4^th  Lisbon Winter School 
offers an opportunity for doctoral students and early career 
post-doctoral researchers to strategize around the study of media and 
ambivalence together with senior scholars in the field.

*Call for Applications*

It is perhaps paradoxical that media scholars tend to regard ambivalence 
in ambivalent ways. Many maintain that ambivalence undercuts and 
undermines the media environments it inhabits, introducing a level of 
uncertainty that obscures not only multiple aspects of the media’s 
workings—including its messages, roles, technologies, practices and 
effects—but also what is most patterned and exceptional about the media 
writ large. Others see ambivalence as a necessary complication of the 
tired and overused binaries of late modernity, sustaining what the 
American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the “test of a 
first-rate intelligence,” whose “ability to hold two opposed ideas in 
the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” 
would produce generative opportunities built around the “the improbable, 
the implausible, often the impossible.”

Regardless, then, of how positively or negatively scholars feel about 
ambivalence, its presence is a clear component of media environments 
everywhere. But what kind of presence does it have? What are its primary 
attributes and pitfalls? In what ways does ambivalence make media 
environments better or worse? In what ways does it foster or complicate 
widely-adopted notions of media practices, processes, production, 
consumption and effects? How does it foster resistance and under which 
conditions?


This Winter School will examine the pairing of media and ambivalence in 
all its recognizable forms. Orienting to the broad spread of ways in 
which ambivalence can be understood to inhabit the media, it aims to 
develop a fuller understanding of why ambivalence is such a longstanding 
inhabitant of media environments. Possible questions stretch across the 
wide range of entry points for contemplating the media that allow for 
media representation and processing, media use and media refusal, media 
production and consumption. They include, how do the media and 
ambivalence shape each other? What role do the media and associated 
technologies play in structuring ambivalence, and what role does 
ambivalence play when associated with the media? Under which conditions 
does ambivalence emerge? How is it represented and where? How is it 
recognized and by whom? What impact does it have on media fare, the 
representation of marginalized groups or the shape of audience 
engagement? How does it affect the capacity to form identities, make 
informed decisions or embrace polarization? How does it figure in 
decisions to refuse or reject the media? How is ambivalence being 
weaponized in current political climates, and to what end? How has it 
been weaponized in the past?

*We welcome proposals by doctoral students and early career 
post-doctoral researchers from all over the world *to discuss the 
intertwined relation between media and ambivalence in different 
geographies and temporalities. The list below illustrates some topics 
for possible consideration. Other topics dealing with media and 
ambivalence are also welcome:

·Ambivalence towards media platforms, content, practices or effects

·Ambivalence and AI

·Techniques to counter ambivalence

·Ambivalence and identity formation

·Ambivalence and human rights

·Promoting ambivalent representations of the past

·Ambivalence in the public arena in specific national or regional contexts

·Ambivalent discourses on science and climate change

·Ambivalent discourses on racism, misogyny, classism, settler colonialism

·Ambivalence and journalism

·Ambivalence and popular culture

·Resistance to media, including media rejection, media detox, pushback 
on social media, news avoidance or domestic practices to control media usage

·Children and media ambivalence

·Ambivalence, media and imaginative future

·Ambivalence and conflict

·Ambivalence and overload

·…

*PAPER PROPOSALS*

Proposals should be sent to *(lisbonwinterschool /at/ gmail.com)* 
<mailto:(lisbonwinterschool /at/ gmail.com)>**no later than 30 September 2023 
and include a paper title, extended abstract in English (700 words), 
name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 
100 words) mentioning ongoing research. Applicants will be informed of 
the result of their submissions by mid-October.**

**

*FULL PAPER SUBMISSION *

Presenters will be required to send in full papers (max. 20 pages, 1.5 
spacing) by 15 December 2023.

*CONFIRMED KEYNOTES*


Juliane Prade-Weiss, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich

Larry Gross, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, 
University of Southern California

Patrícia Dias, Catholic University of Portugal

Valerie Traub, University of Michigan

*More to be announced *

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