The Department of Communication Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel is happy to invite you to the 2022 Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap, the conference bringing together Dutch and Belgian communication scholars across all fields.

This year’s Etmaal conference puts ‘Diversity, democracy & communication’ central as its core theme. Challenges related to diversity, and how these impact democratic societies, are closely interlinked with emerging and reconfigured media and communications infrastructures and practices.

Pressure on business models of newspapers and the growing importance of the use of algorithms have sparked discussion and debate on news diversity. Media consumption has become more personalized than ever, and have been pivotal in business models developed by social media platforms and video-on-demand services like Netflix. And, although algorithms present users with the content they may want, in the form they want it, numerous concerns arise with regard to their effects on news diversity, transparency, and control, or the lack thereof.

In the audiovisual field, policymakers have imposed players like Netflix and the likes with quota, as a means to safeguard original production. The #metoo and time’s up movement have triggered discussions on discrimination of media workers, and diversity of production crews; evolving societal discussion resulted in an increasing push for media players to be more inclusive in representing diversity in media.

These developments have triggered the media scholarly community. While some of the issues related to diversity, democracy and communication echo the concerns of established research fields (e.g., flow theory, feminism studies, cultural studies), others warrant new methods and approaches to understand and grasp the complexity of the interplay between technology, media users, message, and messenger.

At the 2022 Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap, we invite our academic community to reflect on these debates. A keynote lecture and panel debate on the topic will also be organized, alongside a range of panels. We invite scholars to send in proposals in the broad field of media and communication studies that intertwine democracy and communications, and highly welcome contributions investigating diversity and communication, in its broadest sense, and this in terms of theoretical concepts, applied methodology and empirical findings.

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be:

• 750 words, references excluded
• Written in Dutch or English
• Clearly present topic, theoretical framework, method, data, results and conclusion
• Indicate – at the beginning of your abstract – a division in which it should be considered (see NefCa for a description of each division)

The deadline for abstract submission is 22 November 2021, 23u59.

Etmaal will only accept a maximum of one submission as the first author (with no limitation regarding submissions as co-author) to guarantee a diversity of speakers and equal chances for all to attend the conference. All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by experts in the field.

List of Divisions

• Educational Network
• Health Communication
• Intercultural Communication and Diversity
• Journalism
• Media Psychology
• Media Industries and Policies
• Organizational Communication
• Persuasive Communication
• Political Communication
• Popular Communication
• Science Communication

Venue

The conference will be held at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. 

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to  etmaal2022@vub.be.