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[Commlist] CFP: Journalism Studies Special Issue on ‘Bodies in Journalism'
Tue May 14 08:47:50 GMT 2024
CFP: Journalism Studies Special Issue on ‘Bodies in Journalism' *
*Manuscript deadline: 31 July 2024*
The body has been a focal point of cultural critique in humanities and
social sciences research since the corporeal or bodily turn of the 1980s
and 1990s, when it began to be perceived as discursively shaped by
language, culture, and ideology, rather than a fixed biological entity
(Clever and Ruberg, 2014). In journalism, bodies play a crucial role in
the day-to-day performance of news work: interacting with sources,
collecting sensitive information, and negotiating access are integral
aspects of the emotional labour of the profession (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020;
Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti, 2021). Despite its essential role in
journalism, the body – encompassing its senses, emotions, moods, and
impulses – has been relatively overlooked as an object of research
(Francoeur, 2021). When the body does receive attention, it is often
portrayed as an obstacle that hinders ‘good journalism’, particularly in
discourses concerning professional objectivity (Francoeur, 2021, 203).
The need to move beyond the mind/body dualism that has structured
western thought with its negative valuation of the body (though a
necessary precondition for the mind) is widely acknowledged, along with
the need to understand its material and discursive positionings.
This special issue is particularly interested in the different meanings,
practices, identities, and dimensions of bodies in journalism. It aims
to foster new perspectives on the ways in which practitioners
experience, deploy and utilise this corporeal mode of communication
(Francoeur 2021; see also Postema 2024, Sánchez Laws 2020). In turn,
contributions will consider how such insights shape the profession’s
conception, practices and values. An intervention of this kind is all
the more urgent given the technological, institutional and cultural
factors shaping bodies in journalism.
In the context of the technological, AI, algorithms and automation are
increasingly being integrated into newsrooms. Alongside contemporary
analyses of the innovative and disruptive potential of these
technologies (Lewis and Westlund 2015), are studies of the consequences
of human-machine interactions in news production contexts and the
capacity of technological actors to function not merely as mediators of
knowledge but as active communicators (Lewis et al., 2019).
Understanding how these new (mostly disembodied) actors reconfigure
professional roles and routines, extend the human body with its sensory
capacities, and the consequences for our understanding of who is a
journalist and what constitutes journalism are pressing areas for research.
With regard to the institutional, the development of sensory, artistic,
and affective forms of journalism point to ways in which the body can be
positioned as the medium of storytelling and/or deployed to (re)create
the richness and complexity of journalistic practices. Recent work on
‘journalistic theatre’ (Postema 2024) and embodied storytelling through
narrative, dance, and movement, has been shown to increase audience
engagement (Adams and Cooper 2022), and challenge press censorship
(Nenjerama and Sibanda 2019), while the use of social media as a form of
‘flesh witnessing’ to record the lives of people caught in the
crosshairs of conflict, opens up to reporters embodied experiences that
would be otherwise inaccessible (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi 2022). Others
have explored journalism as artistic practice that involves aesthetic,
sensory, affective, and experiential elements (Postema and Deuze 2020)
as well as arts-based methods for researching journalism that include
sketching, painting, visualising, and handwriting letters (Hölsgens, de
Wildt and Witschge 2020). Understanding storytelling approaches that
privilege the body as well as embodied approaches to journalism research
is crucial given the recognised need for truth-telling that is
authentic, credible and captures a community’s lived experience.
Finally, scholars of corporeal feminism argue that bodies are
discursively constructed and culturally determined: they function as
both material objects and cultural signs that are mutually constitutive
(Balsamo 1995). Where it concerns practices of production and reception
in contemporary journalism, this argument raises a number of questions:
how do the embodied markers of cultural identity inform and shape
networked, digital journalism practice? How are gendered, raced,
classed, sexualised, and differently abled bodies perceived and
represented in journalistic content and what are the economy of meanings
ascribed to them? These questions suggest the need to understand the
role of culturally produced bodies in evolving journalistic contexts
brought about by the digital era.
We welcome submissions encompassing both conceptual and empirical
approaches, spanning quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods
research. We encourage contributions ranging from single-country studies
to cross-national comparisons that contribute to advancing our
understanding of the relationship between bodies and journalism amid
technological, institutional, and cultural transformations.
We encourage submissions including, but not limited to, the following areas:
Spaces, genres, and forms of embodied storytelling
Embodied practices of journalists and affective knowledge
New bodily configurations in human-machine news contexts
New journalistic methodologies involving the body
Innovative approaches to the body as a medium of news storytelling
Audience’s embodied responses to journalistic texts
Critiques of the representation of bodies in and by news media
*Instructions for contributors and timeline*
We invite interested contributors to submit a full draft manuscript of
8,000 words (including all text, notes, references, tables, charts,
etc.) with author name(s), institutional affiliation, and contact
details to the Journalism Studies journal by 31 July 2024. Please select
'special issue title' when submitting your paper to ScholarOne. The
submission should clearly address the relevance of the proposed article
to the theme of the special issue. Please follow the instructions on the
journal homepage for formatting your paper. The guest editors will
conduct a desk review of submissions and those accepted will proceed to
anonymous peer review. Note that acceptance of the paper for anonymous
peer review is not a guarantee of final publication in the themed issue.
The due date for final revisions on accepted papers is 14 October 2024,
with the special issue expected to be published in early 2025.No payment
from the authors will be required.
*Guest editors*
Belinda Middleweek, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
E. (Belinda.Middleweek /at/ uts.edu.au) <mailto:(Belinda.Middleweek /at/ uts.edu.au)>
Saba Bebawi, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
E. (Saba.Bebawi /at/ uts.edu.au) <mailto:(Saba.Bebawi /at/ uts.edu.au)>
*References*
Adams, C., & Cooper, G. (2022). “I felt I got to know everyone”: How
news on stage combines theatre and journalism for a live audience.
/Journalism Practice/. doi:10.1080/17512786.2022.2052345
Balsamo, A. (1995).Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body
in Contemporary Culture. /Body & Society/, 1(3-4), 215-237.
Chouliaraki, L., & Al-Ghazzi, O. (2022). Beyond verification: Flesh
witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict
news./ Journalism/, 23(3), 649-667.
https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849211060628
<https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849211060628>
Clever, I. and Ruberg, W. (2014) Beyond Cultural History? The Material
Turn, Praxiography, and Body History. /Humanities./ 3(4):546-566.
https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040546 <https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040546>
Francoeur, C. (2021). (Reprint) – Bodying the Journalist. /Brazilian
Journalism Research/, 17(1), 202–227.
https://doi.org/10.25200/BJR.v17n1.2021.1354
<https://doi.org/10.25200/BJR.v17n1.2021.1354>.
Hölsgens, S., de Wildt, S., & Witschge, T. (2020). Towards an
Experientialist Understanding of Journalism: Exploring Arts-based
Research for Journalism Studies. /Journalism Studies/, 21(7), 928-946.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2019.1703121
<https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2019.1703121>
Lewis, S. C., Guzman, A. L., & Schmidt, T. R. (2019). Automation,
Journalism, and Human–Machine Communication: Rethinking Roles and
Relationships of Humans and Machines in News. /Digital Journalism/,
7(4), 409-427. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1577147
<https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1577147>
Lewis, S.C. & Westlund, O. (2015) Actors, Actants, Audiences, and
Activities in Cross-Media News Work, /Digital
Journalism/, 3:1, 19-37, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2014.927986
<https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.927986>
Nenjerama, T., & Sibanda, N. (2019). Navigating between protest theatre
and journalism in post-2000 Zimbabwe. /Communicatio/, 45(2), 18–33.
doi:10.1080/02500167.2019.1626457
Postema, S. (2024). Journalistic Theater: A Case Study of Reporting on
People’s Emotional Response to Current Affairs with the Body as Medium.
/International Journal of Communication/, 18, 363–383.
https://doi.org/1932–8036/20240005
<https://doi.org/1932%E2%80%938036/20240005>
Postema, S., & Deuze, M. (2020) Artistic Journalism: Confluence in
Forms, Values and Practices, /Journalism Studies/, 21:10, 1305-1322,
DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2020.1745666
<https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2020.1745666>
Sánchez Laws, A. L. (2020). Can immersive journalism enhance empathy?
/Digital Journalism/, 8(2), 213–228. doi:10.1080/21670811.2017.1389286
Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2020). An emotional turn in journalism studies?
/Digital Journalism/ 8 (2), 175- 194. 10.1080/21670811.2019.1697626
Wahl-Jorgensen, K., & Pantti, M. (2021). Introduction: The emotional
turn in journalism. /Journalism/, 22(5), 1147–1154.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920985704
<https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920985704>
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