ABSTRACT. This paper will present the French Digital Library (FDL), an interdisciplinary and collaborative digital education and language-learning project between the School of Modern Languages and Centre for Educational Enhancement and Development at the University of St Andrews. The FDL seeks to produce an engaging online support tool for learning modern languages through media: an accessible, flexible, and modular digital platform and depository of multimedia resources in French (podcasts, videos, music, articles…) aimed at school and undergraduate students to consolidate linguistic skills and cultural knowledge of the French-speaking world.

We will argue that the FDL strengthens the resilience of users in a context of increasing inequality, saving them much-needed time hunting for foreign-language media. It facilitates linguistic and cultural immersion to provide support or an alternative to going abroad, counteracting reduced mobility stemming from COVID-19, Brexit or socio-economic challenges disproportionately affecting disadvantaged students. The paper will reflect on misconceptions common to digital education, media consumption, and language learning surrounding the concept of ‘digital natives’. We argue that for students born in a ‘digital age’, it is not obvious how to navigate the multiplicity of foreign-language multimedia resources and can deter rather than encourage learners to pursue further studies. The paper thus demonstrates the need for careful curation of these resources and for the creation of a platform that is flexible enough to guide students, whilst offering a diversified and accessible range of media to appeal to learners from different backgrounds and with various experience of languages.

ABSTRACT. By assessing and exploring some of the issues facing Gaelic media in the Gaidhealtachd, defined (narrowly) here as the Inner and Outer Hebrides), this paper considers how the Gaelic speaking community of Scotland gets its news in Gaelic, and the historical constraints and promoters of this. Within this we will briefly examine the role of Gaelic radio and TV before considering the role of existing printed and on-line media such as the Stornoway Gazette, West Highland Free Press and the existing community press sector. It will also consider its future in the context of nations and regions media, social entrepreneurship, community enterprise and public interest news.

The issues raised will be analysed in the context of Practice and attempts to fill the democratic deficit for Gaelic speakers and the new Scottish Public Interest Journalism Institute, launched in 2022 by the Scottish Government following a review into the future of journalism in Scotland.

Building on our research into Gaelic use in Scotland (Chalmers, 2009, 2014) and attitudes to Gaelic within the press (Chalmers, Calvert and Irwin 2011). together with local media’s role in civic responsibility (McConville, 2012), the research will consider the role of the Gaelic language in grass-roots journalism.

This can be seen as vital in terms of civic responsibility and aligns to the UN SDG 16 of Peace and Justice and Strong Institutions.

Areas: Changing Journalistic Practices, Production and Consumption and The Future of Nations and Regions Media

ABSTRACT. Launched in 2008, the UK’s only Gaelic-language channel BBC Alba has proved to be a success, notwithstanding its relative lack of funding and the production constraints imposed on it by the then BBC Trust. Scotland has approximately 60 thousand fluent Gaelic speakers, however the channel itself has consistently achieved viewing figures of 300,000 plus, and at times has touched 780,000 viewers.

Within the offering from BBC Alba over this period there have been two significant soaps - Machair, initially launched by STV in 1993 and then rebroadcast by the channel, followed by Bannan, co-produced by the BBC and MG Alba. Machair, which ran for 151 episodes with an average audience pull of 450,000 viewers, was presented as not just relevant to Gaelic speakers: “Adultery, loneliness, revenge. Some things do translate” (Glasgow Herald). Bannan (translated as “The Ties That Bind”), ran from 2014 until 2022 and evidenced a higher prominence of strong female scriptwriters in its production. The plot also darkened somewhat dealing with issues such as rape and murder.

The latest serial drama offering launched in January 2023 - ‘An Clò Mòr’, literally “the big cloth” (Harris Tweed) ¬ has been announced as “a bold tale of passion, rivalry and intrigue with mysterious arrivals, illicit love affairs and a family on the brink of collapse” and billed as the “Outer Hebrides’ answer to Succession and Dallas “ (Scotsman). This paper will examine the evolution of Gaelic soaps and assess their possible future trajectories.

ABSTRACT. We live in an interconnected world that has transformed into a ‘single place’ (Robertson, 1992: 6). Despite this global interconnectedness, news agencies, particularly their foreign correspondents, play a crucial role in communicating world affairs. As the ‘first important cultural framers of events’ (Papathanassopoulos and Giannouli, 2015: 4), they bridge physical distances and provide us with representations of distant places and events we would not be able to see and experience ourselves.

In this process of contextualising and explaining, foreign correspondents can adjust information from the global to a local scale to ‘render these events comprehensible, appealing, and relevant to domestic audiences’ (Gurevitch et al., 1991: 206). By contrast, in our times of global interconnectedness, Ward (2005: 4) suggested that journalists should act as global agents serving ‘world citizens rather than local audiences’ (Ward, 2010: 162): Does this suggest compatibility or dichotomy?

The proposed paper explores this issue by focusing on European news agency foreign correspondents’ imagined audiences and trying to gain a more nuanced understanding of how these notions and imagined interpersonal connections translate into the news product(ion processes). The research behind this paper stems from the PhD project Mediating – Negotiating – Translating: News Agency Foreign Correspondents’ Role in Communicating Culture, drawing on in-depth interviews with foreign correspondents and a thematic analysis of their written outputs. (215 words)

References * Gurevitch, M.; Levy, M.R. and Roeh, I. 1991. The Global Newsroom: Convergences and Diversities in the Globalization of Television News. In: Dahlgren, P. and Sparks, C. eds. Communication and Citizenship. London: Routledge, pp.195-216. * Papathanassopoulos, S. and Giannouli, I. 2015. Introduction. Foreign Correspondents in Perspective. In: Terzis, G. ed. Mapping Foreign Correspondence in Europe. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-6. * Robertson, R. 1992. Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. * Ward, S. 2005. The Philosophical Foundations for Global Journalism Ethics. Journal of Mass Media Ethics. 20(1), pp.3-21. * Ward, S. 2010. Global Journalism Ethics. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

ABSTRACT. Media represent crucial spaces for ethnic and religious minorities to express their culture, celebrate their linguistic diversity and practice their religious rituals and practices. Scholars have noted the importance of radio as a medium to communities of color and minorities (Cottle, 1998; Hilgert et al., 2020). This study focuses on Muslim minority radio stations in West Yorkshire to understand how minorities use media to connect each other and perform religious and cultural practices. It examines Fever FM that serves South Asian Muslim communities with the express mission of combating under-representation and exclusion of minorities from mainstream media.

The research seeks to understand the importance the importance of radio as a medium to racial, ethnic and religious minorities and how UK Muslims use radio to express their culture and identity. It asks the question: how do local Muslim media producers, creators, professionals try to cater to the needs of their community and to combat their lack of visibility in mainstream media? and what role does minority local media play in fostering a sense of community belonging?

We propose a media ethnography as the best approach to this study, encompassing both media production and consumption sides of this case study. We intend to conduct semi-structured interviews with media professionals and audience members, site visits of the station, recording studios, and other relevant locations central to the production side of this project.

ABSTRACT. Following sustained interest in place- or genre-based musical collectivities around the millennium (Straw, 1991; Kruse, 1993; Thornton, 1996; Bennett, 1999; Bennett and Peterson, 2004; Hesmondhalgh, 2005), analysis of music scenes has fallen out of favour. Critical music scholarship has since turned elsewhere, with particular focus on digitalization and platformisation (Morris, 2015; Drott, 2018; Hesmondhalgh and Meier, 2018; Prey, 2018; Prior, 2018). While some literature analyses ‘digitally native’ musical formations (e.g. Born and Haworth, 2017; Winston and Saywood, 2019), most scholarship suggests that platformisation has watered down subcultural/scenic identity in music.

Using the ‘new London jazz scene’ as a case study, I complicate this narrative. Contemporary London jazz is characterised by convivial musical multiculture, rooted in live performance and dance. The scene’s distinctive ‘sonic intimacies’ (James, 2021) are routinely framed as a rejoinder to a growing digital malaise in music (see Hesmondhalgh, 2021) and social life (Gilroy-Ware, 2017; Han, 2017, 2022; Zuboff, 2019; Crary, 2022). Thus, the very fact of platformisation in the cultural industries (Poell, Nieborg and Duffy, 2021) and everyday life undergirds the scene’s appeal to audiences and latterly the cultural industries – a concept I call ‘scenic allure’. Using interviews with scene participants (n=30), this paper extends recent work (Jones, 2021) to argue that disaffection with digital media can, counterintuitively, be beneficial to forms of 'musicking' (Small, 1998) which appear to elude or overspill the ubiquity of mediation; and that in this context, ‘scene’ might be taking on *greater* resonance as a way of drawing together space, sound and the social.

ABSTRACT. The media platform TikTok has developed into what is now considered one of the main facilitators for promoting and consuming music online. It is also thought to be essential in developing the music industry’s future. This research aims to evaluate how TikTok now influences content providers and artists alike to best use this form of self-media, which enhances their profile.

Since it was launched in 2017, TikTok has become one of the most successful, fastest-growing forms of social media, particularly in music marketing. TikTok allows contributors to promote and access varying forms of media, predominantly those that focus on music content. Similar to alter-native forms of social media, such as Facebook and YouTube, the music industries have capitalised on this phenomenon through advertising revenue streams, copyright royalties, and content providers that overly music on their social media channels. Alternatively, contributors can utilise TikTok as a form of self-promotion, which enhances their profile and ability to perform their music. By applying a META analysis to twenty-five publications within a Systemic Literature Review (SLR), which addresses PRISMA guides, this research will add a greater understanding of the impact of the use of music within social media, therefore, adding to the discussion of Cultural diversity through music.

ABSTRACT. By way of two case studies, this paper will explore how ageing is negotiated, and even refashioned through different kinds of cultural practice. Drawing particular inspiration from Raymond Williams’ want for the difficult and original time and space needed for meaningful cultural growth, this paper pulls from research interested in collectively owned/managed spaces – and how these infrastructures support cultural practices, and broader political possibilities. Rather than thinking ageing a ‘static truth’ (Baron, 2021), and against an idea that cultural taste is predetermined and (almost) inevitable (Highmore, 2016), how do practices and meanings emerge differently in different stages of life? – not to deny common struggles for those ageing, but to recognise those experiences as mediated and changing. With ageing populations now a central policy concern, and the framings of these concerns political in their nature, through dancing and musical examples this paper will describe the value and values of ageing together.

ABSTRACT. This paper considers ethics as attention to the processes of meaning-making. It addresses some ongoing tensions in research into girlhood: tensions between the celebration of girls’ agency and resilience and anxieties over their vulnerability in their habitation of media cultures, and tensions between researchers' meaning-making and the voices of girls as research subjects. The necessary shift of qualitative research to virtual sites during the pandemic brought both online ethics and the power dynamics between researcher and researched to the forefront. In the process, it highlighted the limitations of top-down ethical frameworks necessitated by Ethics Committees, and drew attention to the need for a bottom-up, responsive and negotiated ethics-in-practice, both to attend to the well-being and to enhance the autonomy of subjects. This presentation will consider ways in which researchers might approach method via an ethics of agency. It will highlight how two projects incorporating mixed-method designs characterised by diverse power dynamics helped to inform online data gathering practices during lockdown. By framing the audience researcher as audience herself, it invites a critical reflection on the relationship between researcher and girl subjects as makers of meaning.

ABSTRACT. Standing in stark opposition to the traditional forms of knowledge, creative freedom (and chaos) proposes an unruly, uncertain and unpredicted way of working. The very definition of creativity requires that the outcome cannot be predicted in advance, but it emerges in the process of, usually, doing-thinking, often resulting in outside-of-the-box ideas. Strict disciplinary rules and expectations can often impede the innovation and imaginativeness of the process. Not to mention the psychology of creative practice which varies significantly from systematic and standardised work in hard sciences. This paper proposes to break from these limiting restrictions and legitimise creative freedom (and chaos) as a rightful methodology. Going forward, it advocates for broadening dissemination practices to accommodate for wider audiences (and impact). Academic rigour does not need to be limited to purely academic publishing with often restrictive academic jargon. Ultimately, the question remains whether the knowledge produced by creative practice research is different in some way from other knowledge.

ABSTRACT. We aim to contribute to the ongoing developments in digital methods by introducing a new tool we have developed, its conceptual, and methodological underpinnings. The Big Content Machine (BCM) is a lightweight open source software tool and has been designed to be used with the Windows; Mac OS and Linux operating systems. It is a multidisciplinary project including researchers working in computer science, information systems, digital media and culture. The BCM and its accompanying methodology offers students and researchers the ability to semi-automate the process interrogating and coding online textual and emoji big data available from forums and popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Our accompanying methodology is influenced by qualitative and quantitative content analysis and traditional qualitative thematic coding approaches. For example, researchers can identify the frequency of certain words and combinations of words and emojis, and semi-automatically code discussion items. The approach has already, for example, been used to understand maternity services and identify patient information needs via Facebook group generated data, and explore how gender and sexuality related cultures operate on Twitter. The tool and accompanying methodological paper will both be published open source as we see them as offering value to those interested in the analysis of the lived experience of digital media and culture which generally includes those with limited access to financial resources to use commercial tools. We also see value in the tool for those working in low resource settings around the world as well as community and voluntary organisations.

ABSTRACT. Soap operas and serial narratives have been part of the public imagination and media and popular culture landscape for some time now. They also have been a very lucrative television genre in the US and the UK. When they were in their prime, they were drawing millions of audiences and loyal fans into their stories. However, since the mid-2000s, soap operas began facing some challenges. Changing demographics, competition from other television genres and media forms, economic challenges and financial crises, and other social and cultural pressures negatively influenced the popularity of the genre and caused the decline in audience ratings. Due to these issues, several US-American networks canceled their soap operas. Although British soaps are still popular and produce healthy ratings, they also struggled with ratings during the late 2000s and the 2010s. The COVID-19 pandemic also presented several challenges to the genre and producers as they struggled to carry on their stories during the lockdowns and severe health conditions. In this paper, I turn my attention to the current status of soap operas. In this analysis, I closely examine the effects of COVID-19, social and political conditions, and economic pressures which are continuously threatening the future of the genre. In 2022, NBC ended Days of Our Lives’ network life and moved the show to its online platform, Peacock. The same year, the Australian soap opera Neighbours also aired its last episode. While these developments caused anger and disappointment for the loyal fans, they also posed serious questions about the future of the genre. Therefore, in this paper, I examine the state of the genre in the UK, US, and Australia to understand the genre and its future.

ABSTRACT. The meet cute is one of the most recognisable and important conventions of the romantic comedy genre. Originating from Classic Hollywood screenwriting vernacular, it has been theorised in terms of its narrative contours, but understudied in terms of its spatial and aesthetic dimensions; notably, its relationship to urban space. Within a larger project that considers the spatiality of the rom com through a global lens, it has become necessary to evaluate the impact of digital technologies as they test the boundaries of the traditional urban meet cute and its assumptions of public space. As an early adopter of digital innovations and internet use, Seoul has emerged as a uniquely modern romance capital where digitised urban aesthetics collide with a long-standing and prolific Korean rom com tradition. Comparing the pre-digital spatiality of 2001's My Sassy Girl, this paper will argue how the contemporary meet cutes of New Year Blues (2021) manifest a digital aesthetic while also expressing anxieties about the challenges digital technologies pose to the logics of encounter within public space. I argue that the digital aesthetic in this film speaks to a directly-linked globalised aesthetic, playing to Seoul's newfound position as a global romance capital and hotspot for Korean film and Kdrama tourism. Thus, their impetus to maintain 'traditional' spatialities of the meet cute in the face of digitisation is shaded by broader commercial desires for the Korean film industry to position Seoul as a contemporary successor to New York and Paris as the romance capital

ABSTRACT. As a self-confessed luddite who used a portable typewriter long after the availability of the personal computer (Baker, 2018, p. 38) British dramatist Harold Pinter’s non - linear approach to structuring dramaturgy was both ahead of its time and rooted in the past. This presentation will briefly examine the complex non - linear structures of Pinter’s adapted screenplays: The Go – Between (1971), The Proust Screenplay (1973),and Betrayal (1983). All three screenplays possess, what post - digital theorist Alan Cameron identifies, as “anachronic” narratives (Cameron, 2008). In them, Pinter demonstrates, that all time co - exists in the present, smashing hierarchical unities and deconstructing the linearity of ‘reality’. These “anti-illusive” (Brecht, 1950) structuring techniques also work to expose artifice, both within character and narrative construction, drawing on both past influences and at the same time anticipating the devices and forms of post - digital fractured narratives, most recently demonstrated by Oscar winning adapted screenplay, Florian Zeller’s, ‘The Father’.

ABSTRACT. The fundamental premise of post-millennial Hollywood blockbusters – mutation, transformation, transmogrification, shapeshifting – signal a new age in cinema that, both on cognitive and contextual level, operates on bodily alteration and the juxtaposition/superposition of diegetic and metadiegetic narrative layers. This new hybrid genre – combining computer game, virtual cinematography and live action – not only reshapes forms of cinema consumption, but also invites new approaches to (a hyperreal) narrative theory. Therefore, the paper interrogates the multiverse-dynamics of post-millennial Hollywood cinema by analysing the transformation of filmic texts and spaces into pure s(t)imulations during the film experience. With its main focus on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi 2022), the examination dwells on numerous other Hollywood productions, such as Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982), Crossworlds (Krishna Rao, 1996), Fantastic Four (Josh Trank 2015) and The Dark Tower (Nikolaj Arcel, 2017) in order to set up a new narrative theory to multiverse narration. The analysis focuses on the hyperreal quality of the frame/diegetic space – the very sign of simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1976) – that, while placing special emphasis on spectacle (stimulation) and diegetic jumps, erases the narrative itself (hyper-denarrativization). Applying Baudrillard’s concept to cinema, one can argue that the new age is fixated on the production of spectacle and commercial interest where, rather than craft narratives, filmmakers generate signs and codes that primarily reproduce themselves. By classifying cinematic work that prioritises pure simulation over the importance of narrative, - which the analysis calls hyper-denarrativisation – the paper intends to uncover a specifically post-human form of technological and spatial mediation that replaces the role of author with the non-human. Because this research is based on an investigation of technology, human experience and film narrative, the paper uses a post-phenomenological approach to visual studies (Idhe, 1993; Verbeek, 2015, Rosenberger and Verbeek, 2015), which combines both empirical and philosophical analysis to examine technology as a mediator between different universes.

ABSTRACT. The proposal analyses the relationship between media and disability from an ecological perspective (Bennato, 2018). Object of analysis is the corpus of scientific production "Report-media and disability" produced in the years 2005-2012 on which was conducted a thematic analysis with the following results: historical, semiotic and cultural evolution of the concept of disability; criteria of noticeability and gatekeeping; role of media representations in orienting the public opinion; citizenship of disability in the media space. The corpus signals an evolution in the terms of disability. A key to understanding this semiotic process is provided by Tullio De Mauro (2012), who states "[...] The laborious and arduous affirmation of these norms and their wide impact quickly made the word handicapped popular and [...] opened the way to negative and offensive uses." What remains of the discussion in the media representation? The emphatic, sensationalist and paternalistic tone (Fondazione Giacomo Matteotti, 2012). In the corpus, then, too many factors still play against the undiscussed assertion of a 'new citizenship' of disability in the media: habit (system, editors and public); professional routines (manifested in gatekeeping) (Fondazione Giacomo Matteotti, 2008). In addition to their function as fact-reporters, the media also play the role of 'polltakers': they provide indirect representations of the public's response to issues (Price and Roberts, 1987). An example is the Englaro case, which was reported as out-of-date information. The noticeability of the media event suggests the media's ability to propose (impose) the representation as 'real' to the reader/listener; Spiral of silence (Neumann, 1974).

ABSTRACT. Better health stories will benefit the common good by disseminating diverse and accurate information that embraces and destigmatises natural, though disruptive, bodily processes. Despite a perceived championing of health storytelling with short series like This Is Going to Hurt (2022) and It’s a Sin (2021), and long-form dramas Casualty (1986-) and Call The Midwife (2012-), many health conditions remain hidden and underdeveloped in British TV Drama. This directly affects public perceptions of real body stigma and taboos, significantly the portion of the population that is, and will be, living with a long-term health condition.

This paper examines contemporary screenwriting practices of constructing ill-health narratives for British Television Drama. There is a discernible effect of expectations that limit narrative liberty in these series, which can be challenged. Based on the PhD project aimed to explore limitations in practice and production, ‘Body Stigma and Representation: incorporating health taboos into screenwriting’, these restraining factors have come to the fore.

Having interviewed screenwriters, commissioners and producers of British television drama to uncover the underlying tension between creativity and constraint in producing drama, several themes have been identified. British narratives are restrained by a limited, permeating perception of time, logistics, and by fear well established by practice but yet to be confronted. In a Golden Age of TV Drama, ill-health is uniquely and totally unifying for audiences, and so it is imperative to include these narratives now.

ABSTRACT. Stereotypes about physical disabilities are some of the ways filmic narratives latently maintain and contribute to the discourse about disabilities. Considering film’s audio-visual quality, positive stereotypes about disabilities as much as negative stereotypes have potential damaging impacts on the self-identity and confidence of people with disabilities. In this paper, I employ the dispositive analysis of critical discourse analysis to identify and analyse stereotypes about people with physical disabilities in sample Nollywood films. It has become salient to identify and analyse patterns of stereotypes in Nollywood films given that the Nollywood film industry has been described by UNESCO as the second largest cinema in the world according to the number of productions. Thus, in view of the ubiquity of Nollywood films, and their popularity among film audiences, this paper aims to contribute to understanding how filmmakers employ stereotypes to maintain or contribute to discourses about disabilities and people with disabilities. Through this analysis, the paper offers initial recommendations on maximising the potentials of Nollywood for positive disability identity and disability advocacies especially in global south countries such as Nigeria, where Nollywood is located.

ABSTRACT. Self-editing, along with self-advertising where people display the filtered parts of their appearances became a major part of our lives. Although social media seems to unite people, actually keeps them apart by having gained the function of forming a 'connected seductive image' through converting the future and the rest of the inhabitants around it where authenticity lost its significance and competing to acquire 'the image' stiffened. However, the self around gaining inauthentic validations bred a narcissistic human, leading people to view identity as ‘a task to perform', making one fall into a quagmire.

The article surveys the problem of selective and strategic self-presentation on social media, and how a new culture of temptations is born where the feeling of jealousy is strengthened. Why do people envy and want to be envied? Is jealousy a learned feeling? Why do influencers create authenticity illusions? When have people started faking authenticity? What factors are involved in authentic communication? Has surveillance become some sort of pleasure? Have people connected around the same anxieties to hunt that 'seductive image' created by social media? The article which will analyze these issues from the perspective of the article of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction aims to locate ‘surveillance’, ‘self-editing’, and ‘jealousy’ as specific forms of concepts where interpersonal relationships are commodified, damaged, and ‘authenticity’ replaced itself with a reproduction of the universal appeal by the narcissist, rising the influencer economy and creating a new 'audience' in the contemporary social media landscape.

ABSTRACT. Visual social media platforms like Instagram are recognised as a mechanism through which individuals can capture, share, and preserve experiences. The ease through which these media can be accessed enables users to share and consume visual content constantly as part of their daily routine. The way in which content is stored and can be accessed continually makes individual and group reflection a key characteristic of these platforms, producing and enhancing feelings of nostalgia.

Fashion by its nature is cyclical but it is only now becoming possible to consider how social media impacts the resurgence of styles amongst those who first experienced these. With the rise of trends from the 90s and 00s, Millenial and Generation Z audiences (widely acknowledged to be the biggest users of these platforms) are seeing styles from their own lived past coming back to the fore. The resurgence of these trends both influences and coincides with the emergence of nostalgia accounts as a new genre of content creation on these platforms. Some of these accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers in a short space of time.

The proposed paper explores why and how users of visual media platforms engage with nostalgia accounts through a qualitative survey method using open questions and grounded theory analysis. The findings contribute to a broader understanding of visual platforms, which remain under researched, despite their recognised impact. Conclusions will be drawn around how shared collective memories and experiences can help individuals make sense of reality at times of uncertainty.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the visual communication of postfeminist ideology on TikTok, focusing on the popular trend ‘That Girl’. TikTok is a social media platform with significant influence on popular culture (Ling et al., 2022) and billions of users worldwide, mostly young people (Weimann and Masri, 2020). Through its affordances which allow users to share, edit, and remix short videos, TikTok enables and encourages users to mimic new forms of self-representation from other users in a series of processes which amount to what Zulli and Zulli (2020) refer to as an ‘imitation public’.

#ThatGirl first gained popularity in April 2021. In a ‘That Girl’ TikTok, young women invite their audience to “Come with me for a day of becoming That Girl.” These self-representations are striking in their visual similarity which centres health, wealth, and whiteness. ‘That Girl’ TikToks promote a regime of ‘clean’ eating, uncluttered spaces, exercise, and, above all, self-optimisation. Using a social semiotic framework influenced by work from Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and Jewitt and Oyama (2001), this paper aims to provide an insightful multimodal analysis of a sample of ‘That Girl’ TikToks in order to investigate the driving ideology behind the trend. As a result of this analysis, this paper argues that ‘That Girl’ is a postfeminist meme which is neoliberal in nature. This meme can therefore act as a case study for how TikTok’s algorithm contributes to, and influences, the circulation of postfeminist and neoliberal values typical of advanced capitalism among its young users.

ABSTRACT. Recent technological developments have had many implications for content producers and the emergence of new media, such as podcasting, has made the creation and distribution of content easier than ever before. Rapid changes in the media landscape, such as the ones that made podcasting possible, have also led to differences in the way we consume media and form relationships with media figures. Despite being on the rise with increases in both audience numbers and advertising revenue, numerous scholars have stated that podcasting has received insufficient academic attention. By using the insight gained from interviewing stand-up comedian hosted podcast users, this study aims to provide a better understanding of the medium, and in particular, the relationships between podcast hosts and users. Preliminary findings suggest that podcast users’ perceive their favourite hosts to be authentic, good at what they do and similar to themselves. The language they use points towards parasocial relationships which are long-term, one-sided relationships between media figures and users. Finally, the preliminary findings demonstrate different ways that podcast users can be influenced by their favourite hosts.

ABSTRACT. Listeners are central to the future success of podcasts. However, their habits are primarily studied through industry or regulatory body surveys. The academic study around listeners’ engagement and practice has been less prevalent as has qualitative engagement with them. Yet qualitative audience analysis enables understanding of the complexities of listening practices and why podcasts matter to audiences. Podcast scholars have tended to understand podcast listening through analysis of podcast texts and their producers or through survey data (Shultz and Hedder,2021; Sharon and Johns 2019; Spinelli and Dann, 2019). These studies develop some understanding of the listener's perspective insofar as it relates to the podcast host or text, while we know little about its relationship to their everyday life. Examining listening practices contributes nuanced understanding of the podcast audience. This paper, based on 35 semi-structured interviews, queried practices and routines of podcast listening, of self-identified podcast fans. It focuses on listening as part of multitasking, revealing that listening to podcasts while doing a range of tasks was often described as aiding focus and, in some cases, that the practical task aids the focus of listening. This finding builds on scholarship (Bottomley 2015, Perks and Turner 2019, Tobin and Guadagno 2022) that evidences practical, and often mobile, activities being linked to podcast listening. I argue that this can be understood as part of a wider set of focusing behaviours associated with podcast listening. The listener’s reflection on their everyday practice aids deeper understanding of podcast listening in a media rich environment.

Bottomley, A. J. (2015) Podcasting: A Decade in the Life of a “New” Audio Medium: Introduction, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 22:2, 164-169, DOI: 10.1080/19376529.2015.1082880 Perks, L. G. & Turner, J. S. (2019) Podcasts and Productivity: A Qualitative Uses and Gratifications Study, Mass Communication and Society, 22:1, 96-116, DOI: 10.1080/15205436.2018.1490434 Schlütz, D. & Hedder, I. (2022) Aural Parasocial Relations: Host–Listener Relationships in Podcasts, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 29:2, 457-474, DOI: 10.1080/19376529.2020.1870467 Sharon, T. & John, N. A. (2019) Imagining An Ideal Podcast Listener, Popular Communication, 17:4, 333-347, DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2019.1610175 Spinelli, M., & Dann, L. (2019). Podcasting: the audio media revolution. Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc., DOI: 10.5040/9781501328671 Tobin, S.J, Guadagno, R.E. Why people listen: Motivations and outcomes of podcast listening. PLoS One. 2022 Apr 6;17(4):e0265806. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265806. PMID:35385493; PMCID: PMC8985929.

ABSTRACT. Narrative podcasts blend both research and story- telling, and can be used as a tool of online activism to create social change as well as give voice to underrepresented groups (Fox & Ebada,2022). Experimental storytelling forms have emerged to suit the podcast space, such as Canadian producer Kaitlin Prest’s “Movies In Your Head” (McHugh,2016). Τhe reinvention of podcasting combines the rise of personal narratives coupled with older forms of literary journalism and set the tone for discovering new avenues of enquiry regarding interrelationship between sound and writing (Lindgern, 2016, Dowling & Miller, 2019, Llinares, 2018). The present research aims to explore how narrative storytelling shapes women identity. In particular the research will examine three women portraits (Beradine Evaristo, Helen Oxenbury and Yousatzai Malala) as they are being formed through words and music in the podcast Desert Island Discs by BBC 4. The study uses a combination of conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis and sound semiotics to study the interconnection among narrative storytelling, music and sound in podcasting, as well as the degree to which these elements interconnect and the ultimate impact that they have on the representation of the guests identity. Results show that Desert Island podcast is incorporating all the features of narrative storytelling such the character and the voice of the interviewee, the voice of the singers, the dialogues etc and this has a fierce impact on the identity of the podcast and the woman presented. In the case of Evaristo the podcast highlights her creative identity that is reflected in different fields (books, theater, writing, teaching etc) together with her search for her mixed-race identity. The essence of the sound semiotic analysis of the songs that Evaristo chose, lead to a black female voice that takes into account her ancestors and fights for her rights, a strong voice that is smooth and soft but at the same time vibrant and breathy.

ABSTRACT. The lines between disciplines or subject areas have rarely been more blurred than those between the nascent area of podcast studies and the more established arenas inhabited by scholars of radio.

Technical, theoretical and artistic innovation has enabled cultural and social transitions in both, and liminality continues to offer opportunities for original research questions to be explored.

This liminality is augmented by the ever-evolving possibilities of communication technologies and practices.

Podcasting exists on a spectrum from “reheated” radio to an “edgy” hinterland of practitioners and audiences adrift from other audio.

Many podcasts still sound like radio programmes despite their never having been radio programmes, despite podcasting having the potential to: diverge much further from radio; eschew radio’s codes and conventions; exploit emerging technologies in order to enhance storytelling; and offer audiences more intimacy and increasingly immersive experiences.

Immersive recording technologies such as binaural and ambisonic sound are being exploited, but practitioner and audience take-up lags behind the popularity of higher quality visual experiences.

My research argues and asserts that podcasting will not progress towards maturity until podcasts themselves:

move to ground more distinct from radio programmes;

develop new narrative forms;

and utilise more extensively the enhanced experiential and narrative possibilities of immersive audio technologies.

I posit that podcasting must establish its own identity, discrete from but complimentary to other audio media, by playing to its strengths and freeing artefacts from self-imposed strictures through greater exploitation of its existing intimate relationship with audiences through enhanced listener immersion in sound and story.

ABSTRACT. The Edinburgh Television Festival is one of the most significant events in the calendar of British television, taking place since 1976 over four days in August each year. Ahead of the 2023 edition, I was tasked with developing the inaugural edition of Reflections: A TV Foundation Review, the new publication produced in collaboration with The TV Foundation, the Edinburgh Television Festival charity, and Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. The Review aims to develop a new space for thoughtful, creative responses to the year of television, building on the festival’s reputation for providing opportunity for key industry figures to reflect on the past year of broadcasting and forecast what is to come. The 2023 Reflections edition was published online and in print in August 2023 for distribution at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Contributors were invited to produce pieces of reflective writing with additional scope for original formats e.g., illustrations, poems. This paper reflects on this process of crafting a new publication with an original scope for bridging the gap between industry and academic discourse on television, including its themes, distribution and impact. Reflections has grown out of a conscious intention to reopen festival and industry dialogue with academia to discuss the future of each, together.

ABSTRACT. Drawing upon a mixed discipline approach of sociological production studies and film studies auteur and audience theories this paper focuses on the core relationship(s) between authorship and contemporary industry practices emerging in the relatively new factual TV production role of the Edit Producer (EP). Using Turner’s three-process theory of power the paper examines how the often grey boundaries of power and responsibility impact the production process and the eventual final broadcast production in factual entertainment programming in the UK.

Drawing upon four expert interviews it outlines three main areas:

• The rise of this role as a ‘collaborative division of labour’ practice to increase efficiency, which has now seen recent spread and seepage of formerly lifestyle production practices into traditionally more ‘serious’ specialist factual programming processes.

• How these edit producer roles have been shaped by gender issues that have emerged through changing working practices for more nomadic producer-directors and to what extent these are visible in power relations in organisational practices as well as programming and editing decisions.

• Finally, the paper considers how ideas of gatekeeping and audience reception interplay with the complex notion of authority and authorship in the hierarchical relationships between EPs, editors and executive producers, and how they are eventually codified in real-world transmission royalties in today’s media industries.

It will close with questioning the efficiency of this industrial practice and suggestions for a wider ethnographic study on authorship in factual TV following development to transmission.

ABSTRACT. Abstract Studies of scholarly knowledge production have consistently found biases along racial (e.g., Chakravartty et al., 2018), gender (e.g., Mayer et al., 2018), and geographic lines (e.g., Demeter, 2020). Studying geographic disparities in scholarly knowledge production is particularly important if we want to create a more globally inclusive field that continually questions the power, meaning, and politics that guide our work (Wasserman, 2018). Yet, geographic biases are evident in whose scholarship is published, cited and included on syllabi (Chakravartty & Jackson, 2020; Demeter, 2019); which scholars are invited onto journalism editor boards and to edit special issues (Goyanes & Demeter, 2020; Ekdale et al., 2022); whose scholarship and broader contributions are recognized by professional associations (Ekdale, 2020; Hanitzsch, 2019) and whom is hired and retained in faculty positions (Hunter Wapman et al., 2022; Clauset et al., 2015). This project reviews recent scholarship on geographic disparities on scholarly knowledge production in journalism research. It then contributes a meta-analysis of geographic disparities in peer-reviewed journals with a specific focus on digital journalism research. Our analysis indicates that the same inequities found in academia broadly are replicated in the relatively new subfield of digital journalism. The theoretical and practical implications of our results for the study and practice of digital journalism in Africa and other developing parts of the world are also discussed

ABSTRACT. “Country music…is an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Once down the rabbit hole, an entire world awaits…” (Tichi, 1994, p.x).

Country music fandom in the UK is on the rise (Stanton and Schofield, 2019) and with this upward trend, there is also a rise in country music festivals and concerts where fan interactions take place at live events, rather than online. Country music festivals are unique, because they incorporate elements from other media based fandoms, but are entirely distinctive in the areas where it does not follow what might be considered ‘conventional’ fan behaviour. Quite often these festivals can act in a function to what Oldenburg (1999) calls the ‘third place’, which is an area that is not an individual’s home or work place, where people can gather as a community (Oldenburg, 1999).

Exploring country music festivals provides a unique opportunity to examine common behaviours of other media fandoms, such as cosplaying, ‘fans as family’ and building a community around shared interests. However, as country music is fairly ‘new’ in the UK, and is primarily represented in offline spaces, with very little user generated content, there is a rare opportunity to examine the personal and social engagement of a developing fandom. This paper will address the conference theme of connected futures by examining country music fan behaviours and consumption in the UK, it will also examine intersectionality and music festivals as a third place. This distinctive combination will provide useful insights on an emerging music fandom that both incorporates what is now seen as ‘typical’ fan behaviours, whilst also exploring behaviours that are completely unique to country music in the UK.

Bibliography:

Agbenyega, J. S. (2017). When Belonging Becomes Belonging: A Bourdieuian Theorisation. International Journal of Whole Schooling, 13(1), 5-16.

Booth, P., & Kelly, P. (2013). The changing faces of Doctor Who fandom: New fans, new technologies, old practices. Participations, 10(1), 56-72.

Duffett, M. (2013). Understanding fandom: An introduction to the study of media fan culture. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Fiesler, C., & Dym, B. (2020). Moving across lands: Online platform migration in fandom communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW1), 1-25.

Gray, J., Sandvoss, C., & Harrington, C. L. (Eds.). (2017). Fandom: Identities and communities in a mediated world. NYU Press.

Jenkins, H. (2019). Participatory culture: interviews. John Wiley & Sons.

Oldenburg, R. (1999). The great good place : cafés, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Stanton, A. L., & Schofield, J. (2019). In the round: the circular heritage of country music. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(10), 1034-1054.

Tichi, C. (1994). High lonesome: The American culture of country music. UNC Press Books.

ABSTRACT. The concept of ‘selling out’ has played a key role in popular music culture since the 1960s, when some forms of popular music began to be viewed as art, rather than mere entertainment. Used to describe the act of compromising artistic or political values for money or power, ‘selling out’ has been applied to musicians who are seen to put money before the music, go against their values, or change their creative vision for a chance at commercial success. From the 2000s, however, the use of the phrase ‘selling out’ was in decline, a reflection of the growth of promotional culture and its impact on popular music culture, artist strategies, and the ways we experience music listening. In this paper, I conduct a post-mortem examination of ‘selling out’, looking at business practices related to musicians’ revenue streams, contracts and promotion. With brand partnerships and commercial companies woven across music-making and related activities, artists who hope to make a living through music are given little choice but to participate in the promotional machine. Brands and advertisers have filled the space that selling out once occupied, with implications that suggest a worrying future for music and point to the value of policing commercialism in popular music culture. Could there be some life left in the body after all?

ABSTRACT. This study engages in a sociotechnical analysis of Facebook Journalism Project (FJP) and Google News Initiative (GNI) through a visual analysis of the formal and informal trainings offered by the two platforms, to understand the material means by which these corporations strive to engage journalists vis-à-vis their business models. Using affordance theory, we argue that interfaces of technological artefacts are manifestations of their implicit politics and ideology, given that affordances entail normative claims about what users should do. Even though there is ample evidence supporting a shift in newsroom norms based on audience metrics, this article focuses on the understudied other side of the equation, namely the technological infrastructure transposed to journalists through formal and informal trainings to trace its role in this shift. The main objective of this study is to uncover the direct interactions between platforms and news organizations via the various trainings suggested by FJP and GNI and encouraged by the affordances of their tools to promote certain behaviours, values and norms contributing even more to platform schooling (forthcoming, 2023). FJP and GNI are providing trainings to journalists through different methods of platform learning (e.g., personalization, quantification, and monetization). For this purpose, we first selected nine journalist-oriented tools provided by FJP and GNI, by performing a discursive interface analysis, and then collected 80 trainings offered by the tools in their official website. Findings indicate these trainings provided by the platforms in questions are encouraging specific journalistic norms to emerge, influencing measurable journalism currently in the making. These findings suggest a new form of platform schooling which, in addition to journalism schools and work environments transforms understandings of what is and what is not proper behaviour when practicing journalism.

ABSTRACT. Determining what constitutes ‘news’ is one of the most important aspects of the job of journalism educators. They play a key role in responding to changes in the news industry and shaping the next generation of journalists, which is why their understanding and construction of ‘news’ is worthy of exploration. And yet the voice of journalism educators is largely absent from the literature. This paper argues that by analysing such discourses in educational settings, it would help to identify how the term ‘news’ is constructed by those teaching the craft of journalism, and how those discourses contribute to establishing definitions in the wider journalism community. The lens of discursive psychology is applied, to enable an analytical approach to the discourses about ‘news’ among journalism educators by treating talk as a way of doing social business, and therefore an object of study in its own right. Metajournalistic discourse allows journalism educators to restate, construct, and challenge the status quo as they grapple with an ever-evolving industry and the concept of what constitutes ‘news’. Discourse analysis has been applied extensively to the output of ‘news’, but little has been applied to the discourses which ultimately bring that output into being. This paper is based on PhD research in progress, presenting preliminary findings from a number of interviews with journalism educators from the UK. The interviews enable journalism educators to reflect on their own use of the term ‘news’ within their pedagogy in the classroom.

ABSTRACT. This paper will present findings from our BA/Leverhulme funded project exploring the use of trigger warnings in teaching contexts in arts, humanities and social sciences.

Trigger and content warnings are increasingly part of public space. Potentially triggering content, including that related to gender-based violence, suicide, and racist violence, is flagged for audiences on social media, in festival programmes, through pre-broadcast announcements and, albeit unevenly, at academic conferences such as MeCCSA. This has raised questions about how to prepare students for potentially triggering content in the classroom, including in media disciplines. These questions have become more urgent in the context of Covid-19, which saw the increasing use of digital platforms and resources in teaching at the same time as students’ support networks were reconfigured, if not lost. What student-survivors actually need and/or expect in the classroom – whether on campus or online - has, however, rarely been investigated. Issues are complicated by the fact that in much public debate, trauma, distress and offence have been unhelpfully grouped together. Focusing on gender-based violence – and working in conjunction with Glasgow & Clyde Rape Crisis - this project gathers information on current practice across the UK and investigates staff and student-survivor experiences and needs, to ask what trauma informed curricula might look like.

In this paper we will report on the findings from our staff survey and focus groups with both staff and student-survivors, which are being conducted in the first months of 2023, and highlight recommendations of particular relevance to MeCCSA subject areas.

ABSTRACT. This paper seeks to explore the depictions of local food by Influencers in Scotland on the visual medium, Instagram. Local food movements and food discourses in general have become prominent on digital spaces yet there is little written on the stakeholders involved in the proliferation of these discourses particularly Influencers. Research has established Influencers as relatable, authentic users with high engagement and following rates. What remains to be explored is the analysis of the content they create online and their motivations behind it. Influencers are using the new technologies afforded by social media to share their food practices in Scotland, often working with local food businesses to promote local food and have amassed a substantial following in the process. This presents a unique opportunity to observe social and cultural practices previously undocumented before the growth of social media and explore how this medium can shape and transform social connections through content creation. Utilising multimodal discourse analysis, this paper highlights how the affordances of social media technology has popularised digital food activism and can bridge the spatial distance between producers and consumers through the connectivity of the digital realm. By observing the diverse practices of social media influencers online it is hoped that this paper can illustrate how the public engage with social discourses online and can also present the possibilities and potential dangers of social media influencing spatial food networks.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the connections between social media and eating disorders within those attending an eating disorder recovery programme (tastelife.org). Eating disorders encompass a wide range of food behaviours including anorexia nervosa, bulimia, binge-eating, and other eating disorders not otherwise specified. According to The Priory Group eating disorders are responsible for more loss of life than any form of psychological illness. Social media provides greater opportunities for social comparisons to occur as well as adding pressures regarding body image dissatisfaction. Individuals may seek out groups and posts that exacerbate an eating disorder such as pro-ana groups and follow lifestyle and food influencers. However, individuals can also seek out group support and positive posts on social media, seeking help anonymously and taking control of what they engage with. For those on the eating disorder journey, we found that social media plays an important role in their lives, whether through individual relationships, communities or through following celebrities or influencers. Clinicians and professionals involved in eating disorders should be engaging with social media to promote information and to dispel disinformation, and to act as a buffer against upward social comparisons.

ABSTRACT. The tradition of associating stories with agency is not novel as used by feminist. Clare Hemmings in Why Stories Matter (2011) analysed how feminists tell stories and why feminist storytelling should be explored. Hemming explored Western feminist storytelling with an eye to understanding the relationship between three dominant narratives: narratives of progress (looking back on the journey so far), narrative of loss (reclaiming the old days), and narratives of return (We can trace our steps). Hemmings similarly claims that the storytelling rhetoric of feminists are correctives- ‘’feminists have sought to tell other stories than dominant ones, pulling towards the corrective and the multiple’’(2011 pg 12,13).Similarly, scholars including Barcelos and Gubrium (2020) have posited on the potential of storytelling to draw out the embodied complexities of stories and highlighted the need for understanding the ways of understanding the lived experiences of women. Barcelos and Gubrium (2020) analysed digital and situated the strength of storytelling in documenting inequality issues, connecting stakeholders to community issues and facilitating the emergence of previously subjugated knowledges (Gubrium and Shafer 2014). Digital storytelling method was useful in paying attention to the lived realities of the research participants while conceiving them as resistant to social and cultural biases. Through exploring storytelling on gender inequality issues by Nigerian women on Facebook, my research trails these findings to situate African feminism and storytelling within global discourse of storytelling as a form of resistance to gender inequality issues. It progresses African Feminism studies from the preoccupation on patriarchy, woman, female subordination and gender order to a more nuanced focus of intersectionality and exploration of the gendered nature of digital spaces and identity production as a result of cultural narratives within these spaces.

Bibliography Barcelos, C., and Gubrium, A. 2020. Bodies That Tell: Embodying Teen Pregnancy through Digital Storytelling. Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol 43. Num 4. Available from Bodies That Tell: Embodying Teen Pregnancy through Digital Storytelling | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol 43, No 4 (uchicago.edu) Hemmings, Clare. 2011. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ilmonen, K., 2020. Feminist Storytelling and Narratives of Intersectionality. Journals of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 45, num 2. Available from Feminist Storytelling and Narratives of Intersectionality | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol 45, No 2 (uchicago.edu)

ABSTRACT. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the affective (Wright et al., 2022) and gendered (de Wilde and Parry, 2022) dimensions of environmental communication, this paper explores how sustainability influencers on Instagram construct personalised and ‘positive’ discourses of climate change and climate action. The research is based on thematic analysis of data from a qualitative digital ethnography of ‘zero waste’ Instagram, combining online and offline elements including observation at industry events and interviews with fifteen women who run sustainability Instagram accounts. Using the communicative affordances of Instagram influencing which foreground values of intimacy and authenticity, sustainability influencers offer small incremental and ‘achievable’ changes to daily domestic practices and consumer habits as the solution to threat of climate crisis. This is a kind of ‘collective individualism’ that positions widespread private lifestyle change as the route to social transformation (Humphery, 2010). Sustainability influencers’ affective labour (Woodcock and Johnson, 2019) projects centre on ‘cheering on’ their followers to make positive lifestyle changes, diverting climate anxieties by avoiding ‘doom and gloom’ narratives of climate breakdown. This approach also helps build affective affinities and connections with followers in a competitive influencer ecology. #zerowaste Instagram influencer accounts, then, present ‘magical femininity’ (Littler, 2017) both as an affective solution to a state of environmental emergency, and an entrepreneurial model of self-branding. While the paper takes a critical approach to the affective framing of climate crisis by sustainability influencers, the analysis remains attuned to the ‘analytical tension’ inherent to a feminist analysis of sustainability media, exploring the activist potential for a politics of feminist care within influencer accounts (de Wilde and Parry, 2022).

References Humphery K (2010) Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity. Littler, J. (2017). Against meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility. Taylor & Francis. Wilde, M. D., & Parry, S. (2022). Feminised concern or feminist care? Reclaiming gender normativities in zero waste living. The Sociological Review, 70(3), 526-546. Wright, S., Plahe, J., & Jack, G. (2022). Feeling climate change to the bone: emotional topologies of climate. Third World Quarterly, 43(3), 561-579.

ABSTRACT. Scholars of media and migration have long been concerned with the ways in which national media represent the issue of migration and the figure of the immigrant. More recently, the accelerating succession of global political and environmental crises driving migration flows raises the question of the ethical role media may play in representing both the issue of migration and the figure of the migrant to national publics (Halabi, 2022). As Georgiou notes, of the 2016 “migrant crisis” that marked the arrival of around a million refugees in Europe was marked by an intensely mediated discourse on the political, ethical and security implications of migrant arrivals (Georgiou 2018). Notably, extant scholarship has pointed to the widespread othering of migrants and refugees that dominates Western media, which tends to portray especially Syrian refugees as either “vulnerable outsiders” or as “dangerous outsiders (Georgiou and Zaborowski, 2017: 3), central to their portrayal is their outsider position vis-à-vis the national public of the host nation. As such, this study reflects on a media intervention conducted by the researcher, producing media content that emphasizes the history of forced migration in Scotland, and connects members of the public with their own history of forced migration during the Highland Clearances. It attends to how the production of media can minimize the intellectual distance between the national public and the newcomer migrant. I argue that through media products that connect the displacement and forced migration history of the host nation, the media could connect members of the public with their own family’s experience of forced migration and thereby provide a historical discursive framing of migration as an issue that affects national and newcomer individuals alike.

ABSTRACT. Since 9/11 there have been many textual analyses of Muslim representation in the anglophone media landscape but there is a lacuna in scholarship on contemporary collaborative Muslim diasporic production practices. Mapping out the recent history of minority television since the 1990s in the UK and the USA and following Herman Gray’s (2013) criticism on ‘representation as an end in itself’, we propose the lens of Worldmaking as a generative framework for grasping the potentials and limitations of such media work. Keeping an eye on the cultural power of anglophone, especially U.S.-American media networks as well as the algorithmic logics structuring contemporary broadcasting, the paper focuses on the emergence of transatlantic networks of Muslim media workers to investigate how they create Working Worlds and Fictionalised Worlds. Through this distinction, we are pointing at the relationship between new production networks, enabled by the rise of streaming platforms and social media, and new fictionalised imaginations of race, ethnicity, gender and religion. The meanings of diasporic identities have been nuanced and reworked in programmes such as We are Lady Parts, Man like Mobeen, Mo, Ramy, and Ms Marvel. We find that though these articulations are firmly embedded in the logics of neoliberal capitalism in the global media ecology, their creators form unprecedented working networks connecting different communities alongside their diasporic experience. Traversing genres, temporalities and spatialities in their multi-faceted fictionalised reel worlds, these creators foreground inclusive and connected possibilities inherent within our real worlds.

ABSTRACT. Before the mobile technology age, parental surveillance amounted to “ring me when you get there” or “be home by 10pm” (Livingstone, 2019). It was open and visible and seen as responsible parenting. With the adoption of mobile devices and tracking apps the ability for parents to constantly monitor their children is vast. From wearables for babies (smart babygros tracking breathing and motion, sending data to a device), to phone and smart watch tracking, eves-dropping devices (echo dot), or apps such as Life360 that create virtual boundaries alerting parents if a child leaves a geo-fenced area, parental surveillance is becoming big business. The boundaries between safety and protection versus surveillance and control are increasingly blurred.

Through semi-structured interviews with 15 parents of children in one of three age groups (0-7, 8-14,15-21) this research explores two key research questions: 1. What are the physical and emotional effects of parental surveillance? In line with the conference theme, family surveillance technology could simultaneously connect and separate, bridging physical distances, while potentially creating false reassurance, mistrust, anxiety or emotional voids. 2. How is the adoption of monitoring and surveillance technologies negotiation? Is the monitoring discussed and agreed, or is the child unaware? How and when does the surveillance stop? Does monitoring via technology adopted to protect a child and reassure a parent become an invasion of a young adult’s privacy? Are tracking apps removed when sons and daughters head to university, or leave to set up their own homes?

The paper will present preliminary findings.

ABSTRACT. Social media has profoundly penetrated into various aspects of daily activities and become an inseparable part of contemporary digital life. In China, social media has transformed into a multifaceted ecosystem, penetrating into the lives of more than 800 million users. Amidst this rapid development, the Chinese government has been constructing a giant citizen scoring system, the Social Credit System (SCS). It aims to assess and rate the “trustworthiness” (Chengxin) of Chinese citizens and allocate resources and punishments accordingly. During the interaction with social media, user online content generation and participation are datafied, which, in the context of the SCS, will be collected and used for governance purposes and affect their lives in profound ways. To investigate the potential implications of the SCS for online participation and participatory culture, this research obtained 417 online surveys and 47 interviews using snowball sampling. It finds that the SCS is likely to exert another spiral of self-discipline and self-censorship among users on top of the chilling effect induced by existing cyber governance and surveillance. The SCS may give rise to online performance or act, meaning that users are likely to modify what they are going to post on social media according to the (imagined) criteria of the SCS regardless of their personal preferences, habits, intentions and values for the pragmatic goal of nursing their SCS scores. Through online performance, users’ online content and participation will probably become less diversified, and the liberating and democratic potential of social media might be undermined.

ABSTRACT. Rational political deliberation is a key component of any functioning deliberative democracy. It demonstrates how public deliberation outputs unanimity without exclusion under conditions of pluralism (Lafont, 2009). However, such political deliberation requires constitutional protection to limit state penetration of society and to preserve citizens’ right of freedom of speech. This study investigates Omani online public sphere, as the center of the deliberative process (2011), to identify the influence of the Basic law on Omanis political deliberation and the political and communicational qualities utilized by Omani people in their deliberation of political issues. The study mainly asks: a. how does legal system structure state-society power relations within digital public sphere? and what influence do laws have on digital media realm and public political deliberation? To answer the research questions, Legal content analysis (LDA) is adopted to tackle the legal part of the study and investigate how do Omani laws structure state-society power relations and its impact on digital media realm. In addition, I combine Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and ethnographic methods to investigate the political deliberation within Sablat Oman. CDA is utilized to analyze selected political debates in Sablat Oman forum while semi-structured interviews with a number of Sablat Oman users are employed to further explore the impacts of Omani laws on digital media realm and public political deliberation.

ABSTRACT. July 1, 2021 was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); meanwhile the day also marked a climax of the nationwide craze of singing and performing 'red songs.' The 'red songs' (or formerly known as 'revolutionary songs') praise, compliment, and commemorate the CCP and the various revolutions led by the Party. This paper highlights the purpose and function of 'red song' singing through media and social media promotion in contemporary China. For China’s older generations, the 'red songs' commemorated China’s history of resistance to foreign conquest, revolutions against authority, and celebration of victory and helped generations of Chinese to overcome hardships and deprivations. What does it mean for young people who are unfamiliar with the past to engage with such a genre? How do the state-run media and social media platforms promote 'red songs' and its related 'red culture' of political propaganda? By drawing upon my research concerning the Chinese media and social media coverage of the 'red song' singing activities and my interviews with Chinese social media influencers and selected members of various choirs in China, this paper explores the reasons, significance, and receptions of the Chinese 'red songs,' as well as the role of the central government in promoting those songs.

ABSTRACT. The release of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare in January 2023 put the British royal family’s family dynamics under the limelight. More interesting than the family drama however is his ferocious critique of the UK press landscape. The monarchy and the media have always had a close relationship, with the monarchy using carefully orchestrated and controlled events to shore up support for the institution and hegemonic images of ‘the nation’. In return, the existence of royal correspondents gives this media coverage legitimacy in the wider media landscape (Clancy, 2022). Prince Harry first mentioned the ‘invisible contract’ in his interview with Oprah Winfrey. In his memoir and during the accompanying press tour, he intensified his media criticism, calling out both his family and British tabloids for an unhealthily close relationship. In return, many royal correspondents panned his memoir and aggressively focused on the family drama. As Prince Harry’s media criticism intensified, his critique of other forms of power structures decreased, most notably in his descriptions of racist incidents as ‘unconscious bias’. Drawing on the memoir itself, reviews and responses in the UK press, and social media reactions from British, this paper sketches out the ways in which discourses of power are constructed around ‘the media’ and ‘the monarchy’. More than celebrity gossip, coverage of the memoir highlights modes of governmentality in the UK, including the monarchy’s relationship to different, e.g. racialised forms of oppression. In turn, it reveals how UK press understand their role in holding the monarchy to account – or not.

ABSTRACT. The relatively low dividend of democracy and the spate of electoral malpractice such as the violence that characterize elections in Nigeria, brings to contention the suitability of democracy as a system of government for the nation. Studies have suggested that the media, influenced by political-bourgeoisie exploitation of tribal and religious diversity, fans the embers of disunity in the build-up to elections using political advertising. This study sought to examine selected political adverts sponsored by the two major political parties in Nigeria (The People’s Democratic Party and The All-Progressives Congress) during the 2019 elections. Anchored on mediatization of politics, the study employed critical discourse analysis to explore mediated representations of the candidates being portrayed and the subliminal messages disseminated by the adverts. In conformity with previous studies, this study observed that attack advertising was a predominant feature having subtle cues that poses a propensity to provoke intolerance amongst the supporter of both parties. The study concluded that the conspicuous nature of this anomaly suggests a rather poor regulation in the industry. It recommended a post-election review of the adverts disseminated in the build-up to elections and stern sanctions to both erring political parties and media organizations.

ABSTRACT. Subcultural theory frames small independent news providers as being on the margins of the local media sector. Theirs is a bricolage culture (Lévi-Strauss,1966) where they adopt a make-do-and-mend approach to eek out an existence, while providing their often ultra local audience with targeted content. The proliferation of new technologies, both open source and paid-for, has given them a fresh area to mine for resources. Interviews carried out over a seven year period, with the same UK local news providers, shows that they embrace technology. They repurpose existing technology or develop their own, to publish their stories and keep costs down. They have often been first-adopters, leveraging new technology better than the mainstream parent culture (Cohen, 1972). Interviews will be carried out during July 2023 to update details of participants’ use of technology. This will build on previous research, from a longitudinal study, to understand how their technology ‘diet’ has changed and predict where it is likely to take them in the future on their new-tech journey.

ABSTRACT. This paper will contend that we are moving towards the implementation of an increasingly synesthetic approach to immersive user experience based on interactions with indistinct zones of Neosomnambulism (Sampson, 2020). Along these lines, the paper explores the potential of immersive environments so technologised that we could speak of an inside-out virtual reality, and by doing so, opens up the possibility of new perceptual dimensions between brainwave stimuli and avatars without legs. As follows, the discussion draws on Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) as a way to connect the capacity for sensory delocalisation to the ability to convey telepresence and co-presence, central to the fruition of immersive environments. Moreover, the feelings of calm experienced in the tingles of ASMR, which subjects compare to falling asleep, provides an excellent example of Sampson’s 'user comfort zones' designed to be intuitively felt and tacitly grasped. These interactions are not only found in the realm of mindless scrolling, obsessive phone checking and the timeless time-sucking activity of hours spent on an app; they are new techniques of [neosomnambulistic] perception.

The paper shows how this type of simulation emerges from an enduring desire to imagine sensory infrastructures as subjective and mimetic as well as networked and autonomous, and serving as infrastructure for a contemporary impulse to increase media penetration and ubiquity. These are extended forms of capitalism which have colonised zones of friction between conscious and unconscious experience marked by the loss of a distinction between beta and alpha waves, between being awake and asleep.

ABSTRACT. Following the hype over VR in the last decade, many saw immersive journalism (IJ) as a promising innovation with great potential to shape the future of journalism. In mid-2010s both news media and technical companies invested in IJ in the hope of curating immersive platforms with rich contents and a wide audience base. However, this trend has not continued: since 2018 academics and media professionals record a decrease in the production of IJ. While studies highlighted the potential of IJ to create more emotional involvement and engagement with the news, the stagnation of output raises questions about IJ’s utility, benefits, and risks. This article studies how media professionals experienced IJ. What can we learn from the professionals’ working experience with IJ? What led to the stagnated IJ development and what needs to be solved?

This study holds interviews with media professionals with the experience of producing, directing, or implementing IJ. The interviews discuss professional experience, and the past and current situation of IJ.

The study results lead to a three-part comprehension of the current IJ development: 1) the content selecting procedures, where the differentiated understandings of IJ’s value and advantage confront the conventional news values; 2) the dilemma between larger productions for user satisfaction vs cheaper, more accessible technology for popularisation; 3) the difference IJ makes in the emotional labour in news production. Overall, we propose this paper as an up-to-date concentration of news media’s immersive work experience and an anatomy of the challenges IJ currently encounter.

ABSTRACT. ‘Patterns in Practice’ is a qualitative study focussed on understanding the cultural dynamics of machine learning (ML) shaping practice across contrasting domains - education, science and the arts. We consider in what ways do culturally situated beliefs, values and emotions interact to shape practitioners’ engagements with ML in different contexts of practice? And, in what ways do these cultural dynamics influence relations between different practitioners and people impacted by their work? In this paper, we present findings from the arts domain.

AI-generated art dates back to the 1960s. Renewed interest over the last twenty years has grown from the emergence of new AI art generators. This was fuelled by the rapid growth of data - images, sounds and text - available through the internet, increasing computing power and ML algorithm optimisation from ‘big tech’ investment. Within the creative industries this provoked a mix of excitement and scepticism. Arguably the current hype overlooks unjust ML techniques, and raises concerns around human-machine collaboration (authorship, privacy, forgery and discrimination). Equally, artists began critiquing AI as topics within their work to address these ethical concerns. This paper presents insights from the UK arts sector through thematic analysis of interviews and focus groups with artists, curators and commissioners spanning music, storytelling and visual art. This study prompts critical reflection on the aesthetic cultures and dynamics shaping AI tool adoption and ML pervasiveness within society. Generating a shared understanding within the arts sector, offers the opportunity for ML practitioners to consider alternative cultures of practice.

ABSTRACT. In recent years game engine software packages like Unreal Engine and Unity – free to download and with licencing policies designed to attract all scales of production, from solo-animators to blockbuster filmmaking – have become increasingly ubiquitous across visual media. Indeed, many scholars have associated their recent dominance with a process of platformatization and argued game engines stand as a bottleneck for a range of creative practices (cf. Jungherr & Schlarb, 2022).

In this paper I will look at the ongoing convergence of production modes in game engine technology through the lens of software literacy. Building on research I am undertaking within the UKRI Funded MyWorld R&D project I will interrogate the consolidation of skill-sets and production methodologies brought about by game engine platforms. Drawing on my own experience of skills-acquisition within Unreal Engine 5.0 I will analyse the tensions inherent to a software tool that enables multiple creative practices through a range of parametrized functions.

Game engines were built as suites of pre-programmed tools intended to solve problems common to digital game design. Now, with their vast libraries of pre-programmed and pre-scanned digital assets, their inter-operability and much-trumpeted utility, they will be vital components of any future media landscape. However, a reckoning with the technical defaults of game engine technologies is past due. This paper will conclude by focussing on the representational fallout of game engine’s functional reliance on automation (in, for example, Unreal Engine’s Metahuman tool) and make a case for the urgent critique of this new class of media apparatus.

ABSTRACT. My practice led research in filmmaking and screenwriting, currently explores the potential for creating meaningful dialogue with subtext, through the use of AI chat bots. The intended outcome is a feature length screenplay and film, with an initial ‘proof of concept’ short film, due for completion in summer 2023. This proposal is to present the short film alongside a case study paper, exploring the processes involved in creating a screenplay that is written in ‘collaboration’ with artificial intelligence. Using the recent preview release of OpenAI’s chatGPT, and the beta version of character.ai, initial results have demonstrated the limitations of the technology, where fairly sophisticated levels of engagement are required in order to avoid the overly expositional characteristics of preliminary responses. While further iterations have resulted in attempts at symbolism and metaphor, the question raised is whether continuous refinements can result in the creation of dialogue with nuanced subtext, and whether this can be relevant to the subjective intentions of the screenwriter, and subsequently the performances of actors. While the film form and the methodologies used employ the application of AI technologies and raise questions around authorship, the subject matter of the film has an agenda for cultural impact and social change, tackling mental wellbeing of men in Scotland, and themes of suicide and grief.

ABSTRACT. This paper looks at the findings of my PhD by Practice on provoking Reality Capture (3d scanning) into capturing materials and objects that normally evade the 3d scanner. Digital 3d scans are often viewed as “photorealistic” due to a striking resemblance to their original object. This can lead to associations between 3d scans and realist theories from photography (Bazin, 1960; Barthes 1980) and the computer-generated 3d model (Manovich 2001; Bolter and Grusin 2000). However, this scanned photorealism may be disrupted by certain materials and objects that challenge the 3d scanner to capture them. Uncooperative shapes, “unscannable.. stealth materials”, dark colours and fleeting reflections are usually avoided or mitigated by those working with 3d scanning to preserve an object’s resemblance – its representational realism (Shaw and Trossell 2014, p.25). Yet rapid democratisation of reality capture has led to artists and researchers pushing the boundaries of what scanning can do. The practice part of the PhD has embraced the creative opportunities presented by cheaper scanners such as smartphones. This paper will show different classes material and object captured for the PhD project. Scans of mirror and glass, solid-coloured surfaces, and cluttered interior spaces, all of which were found to be problematic for the scanner but revealed something new about the medium. The result is a curious aesthetic that sits between identifiable elements and abstract miss-readings, distortions and mirror spaces, prompting us to consider what the machine is really “seeing”, and to question the conviction of reality capture as photoreal medium.

References Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida. Reprint. London: Random House, 2006. Bolter, J. and Grusin, S. (2000) Remediation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Bazin, A (1960) ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly, Summer, 13(4), pp. 4-9. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1210183 (Accessed: 13 April 2022). Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Massachusetts Shaw, M. and Trossell, W. (2014), 'Digital Doppelgängers: Future Scanscapes', Architectural Design, 84(1), pp. 20-29. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.1698

Florian Stephens Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Doctoral Researcher University of West London

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how contemporary digital media is increasingly central to the selling, marketing and promoting of domestic cleaning products. During the COVID_19 pandemic there was a notable rise in women domestic influencers – the so-called ‘cleanfluencers’ (see also Casey and Littler, 2021). In this paper I argue that digital media represents a highly lucrative new form of advertising and product placement alongside the entrenchment of highly unequal gendered practices of domestic labour. Using the concept of consumer-citizens (Livingstone, 2007), I will show how ‘cleanfluencing’ reflects late modern discursive shifts in language of consumerism, especially around individual choice, empowerment and transparency which replaces the old language of governance and ‘educating’ housewives as labourers and consumers. Cleanfluencing is synonymous with the emergence of new consumer cultures whereby digital media is used to develop ‘friendly intimacies’ with followers who are encouraged to see themselves as ‘friends’ rather than consumers. Furthermore, we see that old, heavily gendered forms of domestic labour are repackaged as fun and joyful with products that promise to alleviate the domestic burden presented as offering ‘joy’, ‘happiness’ and ‘satisfaction’ and as an antidote to a ‘messy’ and chaotic world. The paper shows how these narratives coalesce and are endlessly reproduced on social media platforms to facilitate a highly lucrative trade in cheap, mass-produced products.

References

Casey, E. and Littler, J. (2021) ‘Scouring Away the Crisis: Mrs Hinch, the Rise of the ‘Cleanfluencer’ and the Digital Domestication of Neoliberal Anxiety’ In Sociological Review EPub ahead of print: https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261211059591

Livingstone, S., Lunt, P. and Miller, (2007) Citizens, consumers and the citizen-consumer: Articulating the interests at stake in media and communications regulation in Discourse and Communication 1:1, pp. 63-89

ABSTRACT. This paper presents findings from qualitative research into co-operatives in the creative industries in the UK. The Collective Responses to Covid-19: Cultural Work in Times of Crisis project aimed to explore the potential and challenges of co-operative work, and interviewed creative co-operatives in both the UK and the Netherlands to research methods of operation, the rationale behind choosing to set up as a co-operative, the positives and negatives of being a co-operative in the creative sector, how the Covid-19 pandemic impacted their operations, and how working as a co-operative might have made them more resilient to the pandemic. This paper focuses on conversations with the UK creative co-operatives.

In a sector where creative working is precarious and insecure (Gill & Pratt, 2008) and access to and progression in creative organisations is characterised by structural inequalities (Eikhof & Warhurst, 2013), co-operatives appear to offer a different – more collective, connected, and caring - way to work. In general, co-operatives are seen to be stable and resilient, particularly in weathering the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic (Mangan, 2021), as well as being built on values of democracy, joint decision-making, and ethical choices (ibid.) and offering greater control over the production and distribution of creative products (Boyle & Oakley, 2018). While co-operatives are seen to have the potential to improve creative working conditions, they also face challenges in terms of accessing finance, public perceptions, and business support (de Peuter et al., 2022).

This paper explores different reasons for choosing a co-operative business model in the creative industries, the advantages and difficulties of operating as a co-operative, notions of resilience, and hopes for the future. It argues that while the co-operative model might offer a more connected and collective future for cultural work, it is not unproblematic and perhaps does not provide all the answers. References

Boyle, D. and Oakley, K. (2018) Co-operatives in the Creative Industries. Manchester: Co-operatives UK. de Peuter, G., de Verteuil, G., and Machaka, S. (2022) Co-operatives, Work, and the Digital Economy: A Knowledge Synthesis Report, report for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Canada’s Future Skills program. Eikhof, D.R. and Warhurst, C. (2013) 'The Promised Land? Why Social Inequalities are Systemic in the Creative Industries', Employee Relations, 35(5), pp.495-508. Gill, R. and Pratt, A. (2008) 'In the Social Factory?', Theory, Culture & Society, 25(7-8), pp. 1-30. Mangan, A. (2021) Community and economic development: building back strong Bristol co-operatives. Final report. Bristol: University of Bristol.

ABSTRACT. Single mothers are a diverse group, even if mainstream media and policymakers have predominantly linked the category of ‘single’ or ‘lone’ mothers to those that raise the children alone without a partner or other support, maintaining a stigmatisation of single mothers that intersects with class, race and age-based partialities, and the binary of ‘problematic’ versus ‘good’ motherhood. Single mothers are becoming more visible in popular media, as well as in mediated and digital narratives, providing space for more heterogenous and potentially emancipatory storylines, often through depiction of female empowerment and resilience that focus on affluent mothers which I argue produces post-feminist and ‘post-class’ subjects. The empowered and resilient single ‘yummy mummy’ is successful, financially independent and sexually active. This paper examines digital narratives and storytelling on Tik Tok from as a form of self-expression and self-representation, a possibility of a reshaping of the hierarchies of voice and agency (Couldry, 2008: 11), mediated intimacies and socialities. Tik Tok as a platform has gained popularity, as a video-based communication practice based on hyper-narrativity (Wagener, 2019), a “memefication” of collective identities (Vizcaíno-Verdú & Adidin, 2017), and an exposure practice embedded in our everyday life. This paper draws on a systematic ethnographic fieldnotes of content as part of a broader scheme of shared memes and trends on communities of single mothers for the period of six months. How are the neoliberal manifestations of the individualist, autonomous, and desirable subjects expressed in Tik Tok narratives? How does the emergence of emancipatory (self)representations of sexual freedoms of the single mother function in the platform? And how are these communicated and shared in the lines of race, age, and class? The paper aims to extend existing literature on motherhood and digital media through the lense of single motherhood.

References

Couldry, N. (2008). Mediatization or? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. New Media & Society, 10(3), 373–391. doi:10.1177/1461444808089414

Vizcaíno-Verdú, A., & Abidin, C. (2022). Music challenge memes on TikTok: Understanding in-group storytelling videos. International Journal of Communication, 16, 883–908.

Wagener, A. (2019). Hypernarrativity, storytelling, and the relativity of truth: Digital semiotics of communication and interaction. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 147–169.

ABSTRACT. Studies of internet-based anti-masturbation communities and movements are a rapidly growing area of scholarship, and these communities have been examined for their users’ complex constructions of masculinity (Taylor and Jackson 2018), paradoxical masculine identifications (Hartmann 2021), and relationships both with and against incel and manosphere communities (Johanssen 2022), whose real-world outputs are often violent. However, little attention has been paid to these communities’ reactions to pornography consumption-as-experience. Working under the framework of online pornography consumption as a “network experience” (Holt 2021), one that is itself inherently sexual and, through algorithmic and Big Data logics, capable of influencing a user’s desire, this paper aims to investigate users’ responses to the network experience through their pornography consumption. This paper comprises a thematic discourse analysis of comments relating to elements of network experience across five of the most popular anti-masturbation communities on Reddit, including r/NoFap and r/SemenRetention. Data reveals users seek to disconnect from elements of the network experience as a means self-governance and in pursuit of an imagined “realness” both in themselves and in their interactions with others. Using these examples, this paper will further contextualise anti-masturbation communities against similar movements and open up new understandings of these users’ gendered relations, ideological motivations, and reactions to network experiences and their associated logics.

ABSTRACT. Amid widespread perceptions of a crisis of meaningful interpersonal communication in the post-digital, late capitalist era, this paper will focus on attendant changes in contemporary attitudes towards sexuality indexed by a popular cultural forms. As various studies show that sexual activity is dwindling in younger generations in (e.g. Herbenick et al 2021, focused on the USA), it is emerging as a cultural obsession. This paper will first give an overview of recent factors contributing to this state of affairs as manifested in the media-sphere, including the rise of online pornography and other digital distractions in today’s ‘attention economy’; the hyper-rationalising tendencies of neoliberalism more generally; the #MeToo movement; and the COVID-19 pandemic. To probe the cultural impact of such developments, the main body of the paper homes in on an emergent trend that sees depictions of physical intimacy as either irrevocably embedded in ‘soulless’ economies of exchange or else, more interestingly, a potential forum for radical transcendence of these dynamics. Drawing on films including Don Jon (2013) and Lady Chatterley (2022), television series from Normal People (2020) to It’s a Sin (2021) and bestselling novels from Fleishman is in Trouble (2019) to Fake Accounts (2021), the paper considers the implications of the twinned impetuses for cultural forms both to articulate fear of sex and to place it on a pedestal – in other words, the new status of ‘primitive’ sexual congress itself a site of authenticity to be desired but only rarely and fleetingly attained.

ABSTRACT. Social media offers us new and creative ways of connecting, creating community, accessing and sharing information, often across the globe. However, a wealth of academic literature cautions us against viewing social media uncritically through the rose-tinted glasses of democratisation. Drawing on the findings of a digital mixed methods study of the possibilities and problems of YouTube sex edutainment content to fill the gaps created by the consistent destabilisation of sex education content, this paper highlights that although social media provides benefits, it does not always offer an escape from the limitations of the offline world.

The study identified that the same cultural narratives that lead to the limitations of sex education in schools permeate our online environments and sex edutainment. Whilst YouTube position themselves as giving everyone a voice, the findings highlight that amplification is conditional. The very platforms that propose to connect us to the future are those that are sustaining the same values and censorship that have impacted sex education for decades, albeit through modern practices of demonetisation and algorithmic restriction.

How much can social media connect futures and revolutionise if the same culture is playing out on a different platform? The paper closes with suggestions of how we might work within these limitations to affect change, finding hybrid routes of resistance and disconnection to deliver the benefits this content form offers.

ABSTRACT. Throughout the text, it is argued that the algorithmic personalization of social networks increases the risk of symbolic annihilation of others and self-referential closure within the values and beliefs of the internal group. Following various authors - Habermas (2022), Han (2020) - globalization has allowed the formation of closed, inward-looking identity politics and imaginaries, unresponsive to dialogue and recognition of the other. Social networks provide users with the possibility of supporting and sharing other users' posts through "like", "share", and "retweet" buttons. Posts with the highest likelihood of being shared are those that trigger negative emotions, especially anger towards groups considered as opponents. This phenomenon is accompanied by a subjective self-perception of the group as an ideal community. To support this reality, we conduct a narrative network analysis of the fanpage of the Portuguese far-right political party "Ergue-te!". The sample includes 969 publications made by the party in one year – from 1 January 2022 to 1 February 2023 –, a period of reconfiguration of the political party. Preliminary results show that the party creates an idyllic vision of Portuguese history, particularly of its relationships with other peoples within the limits of the Portuguese Colonial Empire. At the same time, it develops strategies of demonization and stereotyping of the other, caricatured as the enemy and adversary of the purity of the group's identity. The self-praise of group identity and the demonization of refugees and emigrants thus emerge as two complementary macro frameworks of this group of Portuguese nationalists.

ABSTRACT. Non-educated and violent, dressed in a tracksuit, slasher hat, and armed with a bottle of Buckfast tonic wine; at the turn of the millennium, this was the stereotypical view of the working-class youth in Glasgow, it was the 'Ned.' In the early 2000s, Glasgow had a crime rate three times greater than that of London, and it was alleged that Ned Culture played a significant role in this. This spurious connection was cemented in a 2005 UN report that dubbed Glasgow, the ‘Murder Capital of Europe’. Refusing to acknowledge the socio-political and economic conditions that bred such culture, politicians and the media alike, scapegoated, criminalised, alienated and marginalised an almost entire demographic in the poor working-class youth of the city, who found themselves as the central focus of systemic violence, and moral panic. Central to this process were media representations of Neds - in print-media, television and film - Neds became an object of fear, mockery, disdain and desire. Through a lens of emotions and trauma, this paper considers the visual construction of Neds, and the lasting impact such stereotyping had on those who endured it. By considering the negative and problematic narrative that was perpetuated, and the type of headlines and imagery used, the paper will analyse who such narratives served, and why they were never challenged on a material basis.

ABSTRACT. Veganism is one of the fastest growing social and cultural movements of our time. The number of vegans in the UK grew fourfold between 2014-19, and some predict that a staggering 25% of the population will follow a vegan diet by 2025. Like much of contemporary social life, our experience of veganism is mediated by the social platforms, whose algorithms fuel antagonism and make veganism a new front in the online culture wars. Greggs bakery trades barbs with Piers Morgan over its vegan sausage roll, vegan influencers promote their virtuous lifestyles in the face of vitriol from proud, “real American” meat lovers, and vegan activist groups hijack sponsored posts from burger bars to denounce “carnism”. This paper, drawing on detailed content analysis, interviews and digital ethnography, maps the vibrant digital vegan ecosystem and argues that, with its deliberately provocative mode and interventions at the level of popular culture, digital vegan activism is tailor-made for the social media age. I ask whether digital veganism is best viewed as an individualistic practice mobilising market logics, an exercise in trying to challenge and transform human subjectivities and our relations with non human nature - or both. The presentation will feature images as well as ethnographic insights from my research.