CMSTW'2019: Comparative Media Studies in Todays World School of Journalism & Mass Communications, St.Petersburg University, 26, 1 line Vasilievsky island St.Petersburg, Russia, April 16-18, 2019 |
Conference website | http://cmstw2019.org |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cmstw2019 |
Abstract registration deadline | January 14, 2019 |
Submission deadline | January 14, 2019 |
In the recent decades, proliferation of communicative channels, including digital ones, has led to fragmentation of mass communication and its overarching audiences. Digitalization, on one hand, has brought on stage new audience constellations aligned along new societal cleavages – the process that is often framed negatively in academic literature, as it potentially contributes to social disintegration in the absence of common information denominators. On the other hand, the boom on the market provides numerous opportunities to rethink relations between media and their audiences, focusing on constructing consumer, political, and/or cultural communities around media product on all levels, from hyperlocal to transnational.
In rethinking social groups as audiences and/or publics, one can go even further. When people are exposed to trans-border and multi-channel information flows, it is a person, not a group, who increasingly becomes the ultimate informational crossroads, forming a highly personal and hardly repeatable media diet. How do media survive upon highly individualized media consumption repertoires? Is there a balance between targeting masses and user-centricity? How do we turn a communicatively diverse community into a commercially viable and socially understandable media audience, as well as into a politically efficient public? Do media channels continue to form communities, increasingly shaping lifestyles, or do they fail?
Also, the economic recession, the growing complexity of societal choices, and post-ideological convergence of political markets have recently led to the rise of pseudo-ideological populism in established democracies, as well as to attempts of authoritarian regimes to co-opt Internet communication techniques for their benefit. On what communicative grounds do political publics form today? Do we face the birth of new types of public spheres? How do professional, cultural, and values-based communities find ways to communicate their political messages? And how does platform dependence reshape political and social communication?
And if we, indeed, face the fundamentally new, fragmented, redefined communicative groupings, how do we describe them? Can we actually measure ‘a public’ similar to the way we measure audiences – and how do we measure the latter, too? Do social media represent publics, and with what limitations? Is community equal to a platform? And can we draw parallels with the recent and no-so-recent past of the media systems when calling a constellation of people a community, an audience, a public?
The conference seeks contributions that deal with describing, measuring, and assessing the deliberative quality and consumer behavior of communicative communities, audiences, and publics, both today and in the past. The aim of this conference is to bring together sociological, economic, psychological, communicative, and technological perspectives in rethinking the relations between social groups, media markets, and communicative technologies. We especially welcome contributions of comparative nature, while single-case studies are also welcome if they state how the method may be expanded to involve comparisons.
Since 2013, the conference has gathered experts in a wide range of topics within comparative media research, from media systems studies and transformations in communication to the rise of platform-based communication to emotions and rationality in mediated discussions.
In 2019, the 7th conference will include a plenary podium discussion, four keynote speeches, special ‘guest country’ events, panels for presenting papers, book presentations, and a range of workshops (subject to submissions).
The conference is an integral part of the 58th Russian-speaking ‘Media in Modern World’ Annual Forum. Thus, interested audience is ensured, and you may wish to take part in the Plenary Session (with simultaneous translation into English), as well as other sessions and panels at the Annual Forum on April 18-19.
The cultural program of the conference will include excursions to the State Hermitage and the Russian Museum that holds one of the best collections of Russian fine art in the world.
Submission Guidelines and Deadlines
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following submission categories are welcome.
Individual submissions
Full papers: 9 to 15 pages, Springer formatted, anonymized
Short papers: 5 to 8 pages, Springer formatted, anonymized
Extended abstracts: 300 words, free form (pdf), anonymized
All submissions must be uploaded via the conference EasyChair account (will be available starting from November 15, 2018; please see the address on the conference website). Full and short papers will be considered for publication in the conference proceedings.
Group submissions
Panel submissions: a 300-word panel rationale plus 3 to 5 abstracts of max 200 words, free form (pdf), anonymized. Full and short papers may be submitted as parts of the panels to be included in the proceedings, but panels may also be accepted without full paper submission.
Workshops: 2 to 4 pages, Springer formatted, de-anonymized
All submissions must be uploaded via the conference EasyChair account (will be available starting from November 15, 2018; please see the address on the conference website).
Workshops
Workshops are a special group form of participation in the conference. They are dedicated to detailed in-group discussion of a collection of papers (up to ten). Workshop proposals are submitted by the general conference deadline; workshop papers are submitted by a later deadline, but are subject to blind peer-review just as the conference submissions. Accepted papers will be published in the second volume of proceedings after the conference. The initial payment for the workshop includes all the papers by workshop organizers; also, external individual submissions may be included in a workshop. Workshop chairs organize the reviewing process together with the conference organizers.
DEADLINES
Individual submissions
January 14, 2019 – main submission deadline (papers and extended abstracts, including papers that belong to panels)
February 5, 2019 – notifications of acceptance
February 15, 2019 – camera-ready papers deadline
February 10, 2019 – deadline to confirm participation
March 1, 2019 – early-bird registration deadline
April 1, 2019 – regular registration deadline
Group submissions
January 14, 2019 – main submission deadline (panel and workshop proposals)
January 20, 2019 – notification of acceptance and announcement of workshops on the website
February 5, 2019 – deadline for individual workshop submissions to EasyChair
February 20, 2019 – notification of acceptance for workshop papers
March 1, 2019 – registration deadline for group submissions
March 15, 2019 – early-bird registration deadline for individual workshop submissions
April 1, 2019 – regular registration deadline
Tracks
THEORY
Chairs: Silvio Waisbord, George Washington University, USA
Florian Toepfl, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
- (Re)defining communities, audiences, publics: academic vs. industrial definitions of communicative groupings
- Today’s grounds of formation of audiences and publics: towards multi-dimensional assessment of group communication
- Group communication and its role in social change: national to regional to global
- New types of democratic and authoritarian publics and their social and political roles
- Public sphere(s): old, new, (non)existent
- Communicative affordances and their roles in community building
- Media effects in fragmented communication
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL
Chairs: Svetlana Bodrunova, St.Petersburg State University, Russia
Anna Litvinenko, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany – St.Petersburg State University, Russia
- New socio-economic order and communication in the post-recession world
- Personal vs. group communication: the borders of the social in public discussions
- Social gaps and political publics
- Communicating ideology in today’s world
- The state and co-optation of platforms: free speech, communicative authoritarianism, and computational propaganda
- Communities communicating: practices in comparative perspective
- Minority, ethnicity, and migration as communicative triggers
MEDIA INDUSTRY AND JOURNALISM
Chair: Federico Subervi, University of Leeds, UK
- Communication as belonging: media consumption as community builder/destroyer
- Business models for newspapers and beyond: is there an audience?
- Group interests and media content: new rituals of audience involvement
- Online journalism and the blurred borders of media consumption
- Personalized or mass journalism? Decisions for today’s fragmentation of media use
- Community media and their resources for survival
- Measuring audiences: media metric industries of today
- The visual: representing communities and creating audience involvement
TECH AND METHODS
Chair: Olessia Koltsova, National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Russia
- Platform affordances and community formation
- Media and their audiences on social networks
- Communities and computationals: bots, trolls, and their real impact tested
- Detection of communities and publics: automated and semi-automated methods
- Measuring publics: conceptualization and instruments
- Approaches to comparisons in online community detection
When submitting to the conference, please start your title with naming the track, e.g. ‘THEORY A new definition of community building on Twitter’.
Committees
Steering Committee
- Katrin Voltmer (University of Leeds, UK)
- Nico Carpentier (University of Uppsala, Sweden - Belguim)
- Florian Toepfl (Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany)
- Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska (University of Wroclaw, Poland)
- Kaarle Nordenstreng (Universtity of Tampere, Finland)
Organizing committee
- Svetlana Bodrunova - general conference chair
- Anna Smoliarova - reviews chair
- Alexander Marchenko - visas and transportation
- Anna-Alina Maigurova - management and accommodation
- Alexander Yakunin - website management
Invited Speakers
Tentative keynote speakers
- Jean Burgess (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
- Barbara Pfetsch (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
- Andreas Hepp (University of Bremen, Germany)
- Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska (University of Wroclaw, Poland)
- Florian Töpfl (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
Track chairs
- Silvio Waisbord (George Washington University, USA)
- Florian Töpfl (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
- Svetlana Bodrunova (St.Petersburg State University, Russia)
- Anna Litvinenko (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany - St.Petersburg State University, Russia)
- Federico Subervi (University of Leeds, UK)
- Olessia Koltsova (National Research University - Higher School of Economics, Russia)
Guest country of the conference
This year, Poland will be the guest country of the conference. In the recent years, Poland has experienced both political polarization and development of new forms of digital activism. The delegation will be chaired by Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska (University of Wroclaw) and Teresa Sasinska-Klas (University of Krakow).
Publishing Opportunities and Awards
Springer International Publishing
The conference has applied to Springer International Publishing to publish its proceedings in one of its series (SCOPUS). We ask all the authors of full, short papers, and workshop proposals, to use the Springer templates. The templates and the guidelines for authors: www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines?countryChanged=true&countryChanged=true
Special issue at Social Media + Society
The conference will feature its best papers at Social Media + Society, a leading journal in the field (SCOPUS Q1). The journal focuses on research upon social media and their roles in social and political life. While submitting via EasyChair, please tick the box ‘I want my paper to be considered for the special issue’ if you wish so. Note that the issue is regarded ‘invited content’, which makes this open access publication free of charge.
Digital Journalism publishing opportunity
The conference steering committee will identify (based on the reviews) the best conference paper on issues that relate to digital media and online journalism. This paper will be suggested for publication in Digital Journalism (SCOPUS Q1), another distinguished journal in communication studies. Prof. Svetlana Bodrunova, the CMSTW program chair and Digital Journalism board member, will advise on how to make the paper fit the standards of the journal before submitting it to the journal peer review.
Katrin Voltmer’s prize for the best PhD student paper
In 2018, Katrin Voltmer established a prize for the best PhD student’s paper of the conference; this prize is equal to 10,000 RUR. The prize will be handed in at the closing ceremony.
Venue
The conference will be held in Schol of Journalism and Mass Communications, St.Petersburg University, Russia
The address is: 26, 1st line of Vasilievsky island, St.Petersburg 197372 Russia
Contact and Visas
All questions about submissions should be emailed to cmstw2019@spbu.ru
St.Petersburg University provides visa support for the conference participants. Visa invitation letters will be sent out on request. Please note that, for the USA and UK citizens, preparation of an official invitation may take up to 5 weeks, while for the EU citizens it takes 1 to 2 weeks.
Sponsors
St.Petersburg University, Russia
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Germany
Center for German and European Studies - CGES, Germany - Russia