CMSTW2020: Comparative Media Studies in Todays World - 2020 St.Petersburg State University St.Petersburg, Russia, April 21-23, 2020 |
Conference website | http://cmstw2020.org |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cmstw2020 |
Abstract registration deadline | January 15, 2020 |
Submission deadline | January 15, 2020 |
CMSTW'2020 is a conference dedicated to comparative studies of media and communication.
The 21st century may be called the time of disruptive public spheres. Segmentation and growth of complexity of today’s societies in lifestyles, consumer behavior, and media use has coincided with proliferation of communication channels and means of micro-production of media content and meanings. The state of public communication is characterized by loss of fields of common reference – in social life as well as in communication, and public communication is described as hybrid, liquid, transgressive, or post-. Inevitably, some players of the media market condemn news personalization, prosumerism, and quick-passing fashions of communication platforms, while others benefit from them. But the general feeling of multiplication of contexts is there, further spurred by multi-level communication flows.
How do we cope with the multiple contexts of living (Deuze 2019), and what is the new role of the media systems in this coping? Are media to reproduce and reflect the complexity of today’s societies, or, are they to reduce it to make life comprehensible and safe? Can one speak of ‘restricted contexts’ in non-democratic societies or ‘closed contexts’ hardly available for external examination like, to some extent, China or, almost absolutely, North Korea? Should everyday contextualization become the new large-scale aim of major media, or is this a step towards oppression of diversity and freezing of hierarchies and hegemonies (Mouffe 2000). And what, at all, do we mean today by common context and contextualization?
One answer to this seemed to come via big data research. The hope of many scholars was that collecting and running full data would ‘tell it all’. But, soon enough, it was realized that dealing with big datasets from both traditional and social media demanded even more local, longitudinal, and discursive knowledge. More and more both the industry and the academe feel that, without contextualization, ‘data lose its meaning and value’ (boyd & Crawford 2012). If so, how does one put together data-oriented research designs and the uniqueness of each case under scrutiny? What would be the rigorous procedure of selecting the proper contextual background for media research? How does context affect research questions, proxies, and variables? And how do me make sure that our results remain reproducible if contextualized? What is the perfect balance between theory, data, and context?
These issues become even more important in comparative perspective where a lot of side knowledge has to be omitted in order to make comparisons possible. This is why the 2020 CMSTW conference is dedicated to discussing the role of context in development of today’s media and communication in different countries and regions, as well as the impact of contextual knowledge upon the media research, both in case-oriented and comparative designs. The relations between theory and context, context and method, and contextual understandings and real-world practices are in the focus of the tracks described below.
Submission Guidelines
The following categories of submissions are welcome:
- Individual submissions
Full papers: 9 to 15 pages, anonymized
Short papers: 5 to 8 pages, anonymized
Extended abstracts: 300 words, anonymized
All submissions must be uploaded via the conference EasyChair account (will be available starting from November 20, 2019; 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: a 2-to-4-page workshop rationale, de-anonymized
All submissions must be uploaded via the conference EasyChair account (will be available starting from November 20, 2019; 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. The initial payment for the workshop includes all the papers by workshop organizers; also, external individual submissions may be included in a workshop, with separate payment on behalf of individual authors. Workshop chairs organize the reviewing process together with the conference organizers.
List of Topics
THEORY track
Chair: Silvio Waisbord, George Washington University, USA
Media theories vs. context: friends or foes?
Construction of meanings in media texts: how much of context is enough?
Media life: the contextualizational function of the press?
Hybridity, liquidity and other concepts of complexity and instability in media studies
Media systems as contexts: traditional and social media as contexts for each other
Contextualization and cross-country comparisons of media effects
Grounded theory in media and communication research
Critical approaches and neo-Marxism in media studies: context as basis, media as superstructures?
Communicative cultures and their impact upon media practices
Regional perspectives on communication: are there ‘macro-contexts’?
Public spheres: restructuring and re-contextualization
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL track
Chairs: Svetlana Bodrunova, St.Petersburg State University, Russia
Anna Litvinenko, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
‘Still bowling alone?’ Social atomization and personal media worlds
The fall of the national? Media systems and the challenge of platform giants
From mediatization of politics to politicization of media: mutual conditionality of media and political life
Media and social structure(s): hierarchies and hegemonies in inter-personal and inter-group communication
Media and memory: mediated history and ‘memories on demand’
Communication and cross-cultural understanding
Ethnic and migrant media inside host contexts
‘Closed contexts’: exploring communication beyond the ‘great firewalls’
‘Restrictive contexts’ and their ambiguous impact upon democratic communication, journalism cultures, and survival of media
Russia as context: media, social fragmentation, pseudo-politics, and cultural diversity
MEDIA INDUSTRY AND JOURNALISM track
Chair: Michal Glowacki, Warsaw University
Communicative capitalism and media life: platform policies and affordances as living conditions
News personalization: pro et contra
Context and content: reconstruction of reality in journalistic work and its constraints
Debunking fakes: contextual knowledge as a weapon of media literacy
De-professionalization of international journalism? ‘Parachute’ journalists, transnational broadcasters, and the Bellingcat in the struggle for interpretations
Media corporations and glocalization of news
Prosumer practices: self-produced communicative context?
Communication as belonging: audiences in mediated contexts
Web analytics and user tracking: the ‘audience shift’ in editorial decision-making
TECH AND METHODS track
Chair: Olessia Koltsova, National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Russia
Communication as a post-discipline: embracing inter-disciplinarity and mixed methodologies?
Data-oriented research designs and their proper contextualization
From case studies to cross-context comparisons in big social data
Field media research and big data studies: any links?
Discursive borders in communication and methods of their detection
Platform affordances as communicative contexts
Exploring conflicts and their backgrounds in online discussions
‘This is what people ask’: recommender systems and search engines as context shapers
Invited Speakers
Keynote speakers
Mark Deuze, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Claudia Mellado, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile
Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK
Kai Hafez, University of Erfurt, Germany
Natalia Zubarevich, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
Invited panelists and discussants
Carola Richter, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany
Oscar Westlund, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Daniela Stockmann, Hertie School of Governance, Germany
Daya Thussu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
Michal Glowacki, Warsaw University, Poland
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), a 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.
The Routledge Advances in Internationalizing Media Studies
The conference has received a confirmation from the Routledge Advances in Internationalizing Media Studies series (SCOPUS). For the information on the series, please see: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Internationalizing-Media-Studies/book-series/RAIM. We are grateful to Prof. Daya Thussu, the series editor, for this generous opportunity.
Venue
The conference will be held in St.Petersburg State University, St.Petersburg, Russia, on April 21 to 23, 2020.
Address: 26, 1st line of Vasilievsky island, St.Petersburg 199004 Russia
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to cmstw2020@spbu.ru
Sponsors
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (Germany)
Center for German and European Research (Germany - Russia)