[Commlist] CFP Researching Media Audiences - The Audience Network Symposium

CALL FOR PAPERS

Researching Media Audiences from the Movie Theatre to the Digital Age

Methods, Challenges, Opportunities

29 April 2024, Lancaster University

Organizers: The Audience Network at Lancaster University (ANLU)

Confirmed Speaker: Prof. Annette Kuhn (Queen Mary University of London)

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 29 March 2024

Notification of Acceptance: 12 April 2024

Contact: (audiencenetwork /at/ lancaster.ac.uk)

Submission link <https://forms.office.com/e/RYPRtsBYjA>

Since its first engagements with television, radio, and popular culture 
(Williams 1974; Hall 1973; Ang 1985), audience studies have explored 
everyday media consumption through bottom-up approaches that merge 
critical and feminist theory with qualitative methods. In tackling the 
impact of globalization and digital media, the field has expanded and 
diversified its scope to capture a broader range of audience practices 
and positionings. To address the growing fragmentation of contemporary 
audiences (Livingstone 2007) the field has shifted its prevailing focus 
on the Anglo-American context to a polycentric geography that includes a 
wider spectrum of media cultures across the world. At the same time, 
research focusing on mainstream forms of media consumption goes hand in 
hand with the investigation of a diverse set of situated and niche 
practices. Scholarship on transnational (Athique 2016), migrant and 
diasporic audiences (Smets 2013; Hedge 2016) has also contributed to a 
much-needed conversation around decolonization of methods and research 
agendas. Such diversification of topics, practices and objectives has 
also entailed a complexification of methodologies, which exceed the 
‘traditional’ domains of media and cultural studies to include tools and 
methods from the digital humanities and data science, as well as a wider 
spectrum of qualitative methods (i.e., oral history, visual methods).  
In 2017, the Deutsche Welle Akademie explored the challenges of audience 
research and media development. In their findings, they highlight that 
even though mixed methods approaches are often used in audience 
research, mixed methods designs are often misunderstood; and called 
universities to do the work of critical reflection on methods, as well 
as to offer sustained support and monitoring of implementation (Reineck 
et. al. 2017)

Outside of academia, the study of audiences has become a strategic 
branch in corporate and commercial research, particularly for marketing 
and branding (Mytton, Diem and van Dam 2016), with national bodies like 
Ofcom (2020, 2022) commissioning investigations to private companies 
instead of educational institutions. This raises broader questions about 
the incommensurability between theories of audience that inform 
professional industry practices and theories of audience used in 
empirical research, and points to the fact that audiences cannot be 
studied outside of their analytical construction (Ang 2002; Nightingale 
1996).

All these considerations are relevant to the many subfields that 
constitute audience research today, which span from the historical 
inquiry on cinema-going (Kuhn 2002; Treveri-Gennari et al. 2024; Dass 
2015; Li 2023) to the study of fandom, social media, and digital 
audiences (Morrissey 2016; Booth 2010; Procter, Voss and Lvov 2015; 
Al-Rawi 2017). Drawing from the liveliness and growing complexity of the 
field, this symposium aims to generate discussions around audience 
research with a specific attention to methods, the politics of location, 
ethics, and inclusivity.

  Proposals (300 words max) should be sent via this 
form <https://forms.office.com/e/RYPRtsBYjA> We are especially 
interested in 15–20-minute papers – including work in progress – 
focusing on methodology in relation to specific projects but also in a 
more speculative fashion. Contributions from PGRs and Early Career 
Scholars are particularly welcome.

Possible areas include:

·

Feminist and Queer Methods

Audience Locations and Geographies

Historical Audiences

Digital Audiences

Decolonization of research methods and agendas

Institutional Audiences

Marketisation and commercialization of audience research

Reflexivity and Positionality

Audience Identities

This is a free event supported by the LICA Research Fund. Registration 
required. Light lunch provided.

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