[Commlist] Call for Papers: All That Melts into Air Is Solid: World of Change

An International Conference Event:
“All That Melts into Air Is Solid:
World of Change”
The Department of Communication at Saint Louis
University’s Madrid, Spain campus announces an upcoming international,
interdisciplinary conference that examines change from a wide panorama of
angles.
The conference will take place across Thursday and
Friday, 2-3 October 2025 on the SLU-Madrid Campus, close to central Madrid
(seven metro stops from Puerta del Sol).
We invite abstracts of 250 words, plus up to six key
words, by 15 June 2025. Decisions to invite candidates will happen shortly
after the due date to assure adequate time for participants to make 
travel plans
as needed.

Call for Papers
In the epochal year of 1989, as the Cold War
ostensibly heaved and began to expire, David Harvey discussed time/space
compression. In Harvey’s view, the techniques and technologies of capitalism
were associated with profound changes in the quotidian practices of everyday
life; deeply inscribed changes included the fundamental categories of time
(speed up by neoliberal convulsions) and space (shrunk down by waves of
innovations in media and transport). With similar theoretical reach at 
the same
moment, Arjun Appadurai’s famous 1990 essay proposed five “-scapes” in which
globalized activity and change occurs. In particular, Appadurai posits
ethnoscapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, and mediascapes 
that are
further complexified by their disjunctive boundaries. In the decades 
following
these theoretical contributions, the upheavals of multiply-determined 
changes
in life across the globe have become more acute.
It is time to take stock.
We will try to revive the ambitious scope of past studies on constant 
change in
daily life, as seen through media in all its forms, politics,
culture, the economy, political economy, and patterns of social 
interaction. We
are also interested in specifying what really is a rupture with the past and
what presents old wine in new bottles.
Topics and case studies are limited only by the
imagination and include these central concerns:
-Crisis in all its dimensions, including invented
crises and real ones that are ignored
-Mediated representation of change & crisis
-New contours of the news
-Neoliberalism & its cultural concomitants
-Social media tidal waves
-Stops & starts in globalization
-Identities under construction
-The tense alliance between online and f2f life
We are also interested in abstracts that address
topics that may include the following:
-The shape-shifting European Union and the discourses
that surround it
-Novel forms of mobility
-New geographies of power
-Utopia & dystopia (and representations of them)
-New forms of conflict and cohesion
-Shifts in media industries
-The metamorphosizing classroom

Keynote Speaker
The conference has confirmed the Keynote Speaker
participation of Dr. Christopher A. Chávez (School of Journalism and
Communication, University of Oregon, Carolyn Silva
Chambers Distinguished Professor).

Apply to participate through this form:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=ngMRZ2XCLEO2gKOvZnkOBnP8k8NvhzlKlR4BSTemeHFURUtBUEVURFZOUFBIN0VTS1oxVkdZUE4yWS4u&origin=Invitation&channel=0

Contact
Questions? The conference email address is:
(change-conf-madrid /at/ slu.edu)

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