Call for Papers: LSE Media and Communications PhD Symposium
2016"Everyday politics and media and communications:
New approaches for theories and methods in the 21st century"
Abstracts deadline: Friday, 22 April 2016 | Symposium date: Thursday, 30 June 2016, 9.00-18.00
The Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science invites submissions of abstracts for the 2016 PhD Symposium. This year's theme seeks to explore the multifarious forms of politics in everyday life, and to address questions of theory and method that current scholarship in media and communications confronts.
While 'politics' has long constituted one of the central themes in media and communications research, it has now assumed a renewed meaning that goes beyond partisan politics and ideological debates. With increasingly habitual political use of media, we are witnessing a broad range of practices: from community-building to mobilizing social movements, and from online collaboration and participatory culture, to the widespread visual forms of representations and narratives in global crises and struggles.
Roles of media in these diverse kinds of politics have been construed under varying frameworks and developed through a myriad of theories and methods from different disciplines of social science. However, in the 21st century when the definition of what we customarily call 'media' may have undergone a radical change with the advent of online digital media platforms, explorations of those roles encounter a key question: have current theoretical and methodological foundations in media and communications research captured the full range of both possibilities and challenges made available by the diverse developments in the field of information and communications technologies?
This one-day symposium seeks to provide a forum for PhD students to engage with questions of multiple forms of politics, theories, and methods in the field of media and communications. We cordially invite PhD students who critically reflect upon and explore these issues, as related to the topics that include (but are not limited to):
- News, journalism, and political communication
- Civic engagement, digital citizenship, and community-building
- Agency, resistance and forms of protest
- Digital collaboration and participatory culture
- Big Data, algorithms, surveillance, computational politics, and networks
- Media governance, regulation, and ethics
- Shifting forms of media production and consumption
- Representation of gender and identity
- ICTs and development
- Theoretical and/or methodological approaches in media and communications
Submissions can be works in progress, provocative ideas, or engaging questions, as well as completed research in the form of papers. The symposium is particularly geared towards PhD students in the early stages of their research. The emphasis will be on thoughtful discussion with fellow PhD students, along with feedback from leading academics from the Department. This year's keynote speech will be given by Professor Nick Couldry, the opening address will be given by Dr. Bart Cammaerts.
Please email an abstract with title (200-300 words) to: <Media.PhD.Symposium@lse.ac.uk> by Friday, 22 April 2016, with your name, university, department, year of study, and your email address. Those invited to present will be notified by the third week of May.
