Leeds conference on media transformations, July 2012

Call for Papers: Deadline Tuesday 6 March. Abstracts to TransformationICSConference@leeds.ac.uk. An international conference on Transformations in/of Broadcasting. Where: Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds. In association with The ECREA Media Industries and Cultural Production Temporary Working Group; The Media Industries Research Centre, University of Leeds; Centre for Digital Citizenship, University of Leeds.

Leeds is a major city in the north of England, just over two hours by rail from London, and with five flights a day to the major international hub of Amsterdam Airport. It has superb cultural resources, and to the north are hundreds of miles of beautiful countryside, including the world-famous Yorkshire Dales.

When: July 12-13th 2012

Confirmed speakers include: Stephen Coleman, John Corner, Des Freedman, Sylvia Harvey, David Hesmondhalgh, Lynn Spigel, Graeme Turner

The media continue to undergo remarkable change. To what extent have recent and continuing changes enhanced or constrained broadcasting’s potential to benefit societies, citizens and publics? This international conference addresses this broad question, across a number of themes, including (but not confined to) those below. The aim is to bring together researchers across a number of specialisms, to discuss questions of transformation across traditional research divisions. Papers and panels relating to civic engagement and participation and transformations related to digitalization are welcome, as is historical research. We welcome the submission of papers involving research within and across any national contexts. Although the focus is contemporary, we welcome historical research that adds to understanding of current transformations and continuities.

• Audience/hood. How have broadcasting audiences changed? What new challenges are changes in audience behaviour throwing up for audience research, both within industry and among academics concerned with questions of identity, meaning and pleasure? How are social media monitoring, opinion mining, sentiment analysis impacting onto understandings, conceptions, and practices of audience engagement? Are interactivity and user-generated content useful concepts in the new broadcasting ecology, and if so, how might we understand them in relation to agency, consumerism, choice, democratization?

• Representation and aesthetics To what extent have transformations in broadcasting involved changing relations between representation and power? What notable changes have there been in representations of gender, of ethnic and religious groups, of different types of body? What new forms and genres are developing to represent contemporary experience and identity? How are traditional genres mutating, and with what effect on quality? How are certain genres such as news, journalism, and reality TV adopting to the emerging challenges of transformations? How are new technologies, such as HDTV and widescreen, changing the aesthetics of television and other media?

• Industry and institution. What are the impacts of commercialization of public broadcasting and how is this occurring? What are the implications of the continuing multiplication of channels for notions of quality, professionalism, integrity? What is the impact of co-creation and amateur forms of production for broadcasting and the cultural industries more generally?

• Policy and regulation How are policy makers and regulators responding to transformations in broadcasting? How are questions of copyright and intellectual property affecting dynamics? What principles ought to guide policy in this changing environment? Are concepts such as neo-liberalism and marketization adequate to characterise tendencies in policy over recent decades? Regulators, policy, localism, issues of copyright, ownerships, power relations within industry, power relations (between brands, service providers and audiences etc)

Abstracts 300 words maximum. Panel proposals should consist of 3-5 papers. Panel descriptions should include paper abstracts; a maximum of 1000 per panel description.