Stockholm 2008 - Audience Section Call for Papers

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 15 FEBRUARY 2008!

The Audience Section welcomes reports on contemporary audience research practices, projects and findings. In addition the Section proposes the following themes for inclusion at the Stockholm Congress, and encourages presentations and panels that address them.

Audience action and global and media divides
Studies of organised audience action point to the significance of new forms of ‘mass production’ – production by the masses rather than for the masses, and production for micro-managed consumption rather than mass distribution. Since digital media facilitate both the sequestration of information and the policing of access to it through regimes of site membership, subscription and hierarchies of access, new divides are developing within the global public sphere that require urgent examination. It is becoming clear that the challenge for audience activism is to address an agenda that extends its brief beyond the argument for access to production rights and infrastructure. Papers that address the inequality of access and strategic action to remedy it are welcomed in addition to papers that examine the problems lurking in the surveillance and control of the digital environment.

The Intertext and hybrid audience formations
The strategic complementarity of print and broadcast media and digital media has facilitated the deployment of new intertextual forms and the emergence of hybrid audience formations. These formations exist between the realms of broadcast and digital media. They both create and consume the textual worlds of these very different media and produce new hybrid communication environment. In solidarity with the Popular Culture Section of ICA, this theme resonates with a panel organised by Cornel Sandvoss, Melissa Click and Nina Hunteman for ICA 2008, aiming to continue the debate and to explore audience theory and research in the realm of intertextual studies.

Audience research: theory and practice
This theme aims to provide an opportunity for collegial debate about the relationship between theories of mediated communication and audience research practice. The focus will be on theories of audience engagement, the challenges of empirical audience research, and the interdependence of theory and practice in studies of audiences. Reflections on theory and methods, and the relationship between them are welcome.

Important Submission Information

Guidelines for Submitting Abstracts

Abstracts should include the following:

• Presenter’s name             
• Institutional affiliation        
• Email address             
• Paper Title         
• Keywords (no more than five)
• Key texts (no more than five)        
• The Abstract
• Word files only please! – PFD files are not acceptable.

Selection Procedure
All abstracts submitted to the Audience Section will be blind refereed by the Section’s Panel of Referees. You are urged to bear this in mind in preparing your abstract, and encouraged to refer to a small number of key sources that have particularly influenced you research and/or writing in the presentation of your abstract.

Word files only: It is the responsibility of the Section Chair and Deputy Chair to remove identifiers for purposes of blind refereeing, and also to prepare a final program for submission to the conference organisers. PDF makes this too difficult, so word files only please.

Abstracts will be refereed during February 2008. The Section’s program for the conference will be prepared by the Section Chair and Deputy Chair in early March and presenters will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their abstract on 31st March, 2008.

Section Chair:
Associate Professor Virginia Nightingale,
University of Western Sydney, Australia
v.nightingale[AT]uws.edu.au

Deputy Chair:
Dr Brian O’Neill
Dublin Institute of Technology
Brian.oneill[AT]dit.ie

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