CFP: Multilingualism and Journalism in the Era of Convergence
Edited by Lucile Davier (University of Geneva) and Kyle Conway (University of Ottawa)
Technological convergence, or the blurring of lines between formerly distinct media, has had a tremendous impact on the work journalists do. For one thing, it has contributed to the processes of globalization that have brought people into greater contact with cultural others. For another, it has made it possible for an ever smaller group of corporations to control an ever larger share of the media. As a result, journalists must become proficient with more aspects of production (combining video, text, and images) while reporting on a wider range of people and cultures and responding to the economic pressures that come with the concentration of media ownership.
This book will look at the ways journalists are making sense of and adapting to this changing environment. It will focus on those moments when they gather information in languages that their audiences do not speak. It will ask, what technologies do they use as they collect information, transform it into a story, and disseminate it to their readers, viewers, and listeners? It will examine questions of translation in the broadest possible sense-from the re-expression of bits of speech or text in a different language, to the rewriting of partial or complete news stories, to the explanation of how members of a foreign cultural community interpret an object or event.
The editors would like to invite submissions from a range of disciplines such as communication, translation studies, and sociology. Potential questions authors might address include (but are not limited to):
Platforms:
– In what contexts do journalists indicate that a source spoke or wrote in a different language?
– What modes of translation (e.g., subtitling, voice-over, etc.) do journalists use?
– Do journalists favour different modes of re-expression on different platforms?
– What strategies do they adopt for cross-platform or multimodal distribution?
– How do they adapt the same news story for multiple formats?
– Do ideas of newsworthiness vary depending on the platform?
Social implications:
– How visible are multilingual contexts for audiences?
– Do convergence phenomena contribute to the globalization or the localization of news?
– What are the implications of journalists’ practices for how audiences perceive cultural others?
To propose a chapter, please send an abstract to multilingualism.convergence@gmail.com. Abstracts should be 500 words long and submitted as .odt, .doc, .docx, or .rtf files. Proposal deadline: January 15, 2017. Initial acceptances sent: February 15, 2017. Deadline for full articles (6,000-8,000 words): May 31, 2017.
Dr. Bardhan’s teaching interests include intercultural/international communication, public relations and critical media and cultural studies. In her research, she particularly focuses on identity/difference/culture, diversity and inclusion, globalization and postcolonial theory. She teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses and has been awarded the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award in the Department of Communication Studies at SIUC three times. She advised the department’s Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) chapter for 10 years.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 