Call for papers
2nd ANNUAL CONFERENCE: 6-8 SEPTEMBER 2006
CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT
"Media Change and Social Theory"
6-8 September 2006
St Hughs College
The University of Oxford, UK
This conference aims to bring together media scholars and social theorists to try to push forward media theory. We need to enrich the intellectual resources we draw upon to understand the media. To do so, critical work on the media needs to engage much more intensively with social and political theory than it has in recent years. For example, important work in the following areas has barely been addressed in most media studies:
- Critical theory – the contemporary Frankfurt School and Anglo-American resonances
- Field theory – Bourdieu, his associates and those influenced by them
- Governmentality and neo-Foucauldian approaches to discourse and institutions
- Actor network theory
- Theories of democracy, deliberation and difference
In other areas, pioneering work has been carried out but needs further extension and development:
- Revisions and elaborations of notions of the public and the public sphere
- Critical media anthropology, especially ethnography
- Feminist theory: politics and identity in the era of Butler and beyond
- Critical political economy of the media
- Theories of self, subjectivity and society
We welcome papers that address these and other areas of media and social theory, across the following conference strands:
- Media politics: political communication, journalism and the role of the media in the contemporary polity
- Media histories: empiricism, historicism and the illumination of the present
- Media spaces: nations and transnationalism, regions and localities
- Media economics: from neo-classical models to gift economies and cultural commodities
- Media and power: is ideology a moribund concept; can we talk about a field of media power?
- Media and culture: representation, pleasure and identity
However, we should emphasise that an engagement with theory need not imply a neglect of empirical material, and we welcome papers that explain how particular empirical projects might contribute to the theoretical enrichment of media scholarship.
Deadline for abstracts for papers and panels: 31 March 2006 to cresc@manchester.ac.uk (300 words per paper maximum, please indicate preferred strand).