Tag: Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture

CFP Chinese Media Histories: From the Telegraph to the Internet

Call for Papers
Special issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture
Volume 7, Issue 3, Fall 2016:
Chinese Media Histories, from the telegraph to the Internet

Guest Editors:
– Gabriele BALBI, USI-Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland)
– Changfeng CHEN, Tsinghua University (China)
– Jing WU, Peking University (China)

Media history has largely focused on North American and single European countries’ media and, among them, especially on the history of broadcasting. This special issue aims to enlarge media history under two perspectives. Geographically, it aims to enlarge “classic” borders focusing on China and it would like to reconstruct the development, the role, and the controversies of Chinese media over time. Temporally, starting from the 19th century, this issue adopts a longue durée approach and, besides broadcasting, aims to integrate communication technologies such as printing press, telegraphy, telephony, photography, movie industry, digital media, and other media. This would help to enlarge classic media history into plural media histories and to bring attention to complex interrelationships between media and modernization process in China since the 19th century.

Articles for this special issue ‘Chinese Media Histories’ could, for example, address the following ideas:
– Which are the “constitutive choices” (Star 2004) that built Chinese media systems?
– Which was the impact of Western technologies and polices over the development of Chinese media system?
– How did new media technologies, institutions and practices influence the process of modernization in China’s social, cultural and political life?
– Which is the role of Chinese media history in the international media history? To what extent the history of Chinese media system differs from Western ones?
– How can history help in better understanding the media in China today?

Contributors can come from a wide range of disciplines: media and communication studies, telecommunications, political economy, political sciences, cultural studies, social history, geography of communication, and others. The three editors would like to collect papers broad in theoretical analysis and even informative in empirical case studies, in order to provide to European readership a comprehensive and maybe didactical issue on the development of the media in China in the last two centuries. Papers will be also selected with this scope in mind.

Submissions of no more than 7.000 words in length are to be original, scholarly manuscripts formatted according to Intellect House Style guidelines.

Notes should appear as endnotes and cited works listed in alphabetical, then chronological, order in a separate ‘References’ section at the end of the article. Submissions should be in Microsoft Word .doc/.docx format ONLY and sent as e-mail attachments to the guest editors.
All inquiries should also be addressed to Professor Gabriele BALBI.

Deadlines:
– abstracts of 250 words can be submitted until 15 December 2015
– accepted authors will have to submit the full papers by 15 April 2016
– the issue is scheduled for publication in Autumn 2016.

About the journal
Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture recognises the interdisciplinary nature of the fields of media, communication and cultural studies. We therefore encourage diverse themes, subjects, contexts and approaches: empirical, theoretical and historical. Our objective is to engage readers and contributors from different parts of the world in a critical debate on the myriad interconnections and interactions between communication, culture and society at the outset of the twenty first century.

Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal that aims to encourage the development of the widest possible scholarly community, both in terms of geographical location and intellectual scope in the fields of media, communication and cultural studies. We publish leading articles from both established scholars and those at the beginning of their academic careers.

Media’s toxic knowledge

CFP for a special issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture

Special Issue topic:  Media’s toxic knowledge: How information (does not) shapes our perception of social uncertainty

Editors: Rita Figueiras, Catholic University of Portugal
Carla Ganito, Catholic University of Portugal

Bravely into the hotbed of uncertainties, as Zygmunt Bauman introduces his 2007 book: ‘Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty’, is what this special issue aims to do by discussing social uncertainty and the media. What is here being entitled media’s toxic knowledge is related to what commonly is referred as (mis)information both produced by and circulating in the media. This is the starting point for a three-step approach. First by displacing ‘toxic knowledge’ from the media logic into media social setting; second by approaching social uncertainty as a self-fulfilling prophecy; and third, how this is a matter of democracy understood in its broader sense. In contemporary society, uncertainty has become a mechanism for organizing and understanding social experience (Mythen and Walklate, 2006). According to Giddens (1990), Luhmann (1998) and Bauman (2000), uncertainty, doubt, tension and liquidity are structural in our societies, which find expression through the media that are both an expression of de-contextualization and globalizing tendencies of modernity, as well as instruments of those trends. According to Luhmann (1992: 75), the media have the ‘ability to aggregate and disaggregate the environment’. The novelty and celerity by which themes continuously succeed them, in a ‘communicative network self-dynamically reproduced’, gives continuity to the ‘need for discontinuity’, means that thematization is a set of rules for attention and not for deciding or for taking action (Luhman, 2004). Therefore, the media de-characterization and continuous re-shaping of social problems reflect, first and foremost, modernity’s fluidity. And as Bauman says (2000: 1), descriptions of fluids are all snapshots that need a date at the bottom of the picture. Hence, speed, immediacy and treatment of social problems as de-contextualized epiphenomena, fragmented and rootless seem inevitable.

In this framework, this special issue aims at intertwining a set of diversified researches, regarding different cultural contexts; objects of analysis; news, entertainment, online forums, public opinion survey; media analyzed: radio, television, Internet, mobile phones; and methodological approaches: quantitative and qualitative.
Topics of interest for this special issue include but are not limited to:
–          Media Economy;
–          New Media;
–          Health Communication;
–          Media History;
–          Political Communication
–          Culture & Media

Timing, length, style
Please send articles by the 3rd of October 2011 to ritafigueiras@ucp.pt and carla.ganito@ucp.pt. Articles will be evaluated by the editorial committee and anonymously by external referees. The maximum length is around 6000 words.

About the journal
Interactions recognizes the interdisciplinary nature of the fields of media, communication and cultural studies and we therefore encourage diverse themes, subjects, contexts and approaches; empirical, theoretical and historical. Our objective is to engage readers and contributors from different parts of the world in a critical debate on the myriad interconnections and interactions between communication, culture and society at the outset of the twenty first century.
It is our intention to encourage the development of the widest possible scholarly community, both in terms of geographical location and intellectual scope and we will publish leading articles from both established scholars and those at the beginning of their careers.
Particular interests include, but are not limited to, work related to Popular Culture, Media Audiences, Political Economy, Political Communication, Media Institutions and Practices, Promotional Culture, New Media, Migration and Diasporic Studies.

More information is available at:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/page/index,name=journalresources/
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=165/