CMSC2019: PACE Communication and Media Studies Conference 2019 Far Eastern University Manila, Philippines, September 12-13, 2019 |
Conference website | http://www.pace.org.ph |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cmsc2019 |
Poster | download |
Abstract registration deadline | July 20, 2019 |
Notice of acceptance | August 15, 2019 |
Submission deadline | September 2, 2019 |
Theme: “Conflation and Convergence”
Humans, as social and political beings, always tend to come together. Supporters congregate in Plaza Miranda in Manila or Union Square in New York with a livestream to listen to a political speech. Friends and families flock together to SM Cinemas, Cultural Center of the Philippines, or through Netflix for entertainment. A borderless, multicultural audience converge on Facebook to use, exchange, create, and merge images and texts.
In any of these communicative transactions, conflation and convergence occur, which both mirror and conjure up contentious issues on social and power relations in a mediatized world. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “conflation” as the “combination or fusion of two variant readings of a text into a composite reading” while “convergence” refers to the meeting point of ideas coming from multiple perspectives. “Mediatization”, on the other hand, is a general approach to the “critical analysis of the interrelation between the change of media and communication, on the one hand, and the change of culture and society on the other” (Hepp & Krotz, 2014). Take for example the conflation of paid trolls and staunch political supporters who are engaged in a corrosive online discourse during an electoral campaign season. They both support freedom of expression as a democratic ideal but are at the same time divided by conflicting political ideologies. When the same is done face to face, the impassioned online exchange ironically diminishes in intensity.
The PACE Communication and Media Studies Conference (CMSC) 2019 problematizes the conflicts and opportunities arising from the points of conflation and convergence in any communicative transaction especially in a mediatized world which strongly shapes how humans position or reposition themselves in the social world. How are conflicts emphasized and managed? How are the nodes of similarity and dissimilarity enhancing or hindering the process of communication? What new ideas, relations, issues, and challenges emerge from either conflation or convergence?
The conference also ultimately aims to critically examine the conflation and convergence of media and social spaces. Jansson and Lindell’s (2018) Rethinking Media and Social Space succinctly points to these problems that inform the conference theme: “(1) the annihilation of the socially structured and structuring role of media technologies and practices; (2) the conflation of inherent social capacities of media technologies and discourses with existing mediations of power, and (3) the reduction of social space to one predominant dimension which overshadows all other forms of social power that media technologies, discourses, and practices.“
Conference Objectives
- Analyze conflation and convergence as inevitable components of the communication process in a mediatized world,
- Develop collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking competencies resulting from the analysis of the opportunities and challenges of conflation and convergence,
- Propose collective solutions in addressing the problems and issues arising from the conflation and convergence of social relations in a mediatized communication,
Paper Presentation Sub-Themes
The theme is a multilayered discussion of the intricate play of media technologies, social spaces and relationships, and current issues. Highlight the conflation and convergence, the conflicts and resolutions in any of the following sub-themes:
- media and power relations in government, family, school, church, military, creative industries, and all other social spaces
- media, class, and gender
- international media
- online activism
- social media and education
- media and business
- interpersonal relationships (face to face and mediated)
- intercultural communication
- media and war
- communication, games, augmented realities
- digital citizenship and identities