Dear colleagues, 

Below is a call for papers for a conference on Media Change and Social Theory to be held in Oxford next September. We'd be grateful if you could forward these details to relevant networks and to anyone you think might be interested. Our apologies if you also encounter this message on other circulation lists.

Best wishes,

Dave Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (The Open University UK)

on behalf of the conference committee

 

 



Media Change and Social Theory



A major international conference organised by the ESRC-funded Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at The Open University and The University of Manchester (in association with the Centre for Media, Culture and History, New York University)



Venue: St Hugh’s College, Oxford



Dates: 6-8 September 2006



Confirmed plenary and keynote speakers: 



Annabelle Sreberny (School of Oriental and African Studies, London)



Daniel Hallin (University of California San Diego)



Faye Ginsburg (New York University)



Karel Williams (The University of Manchester)



Liesbet van Zoonen (University of Amsterdam)



Nick Couldry (London School of Economics)



Philip Schlesinger (University of Stirling)



Purnima Mankekar (Stanford University)



Tony Bennett (The Open University)



 



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. 



Abstracts for papers and panels by 31 March 2006 to [log in to unmask] (300 words per paper maximum, please indicate preferred strand)



Conference committee: Marie Gillespie, David Hesmondhalgh, Jason Toynbee, Farida Vis, Helen Wood 



www.cresc.ac.uk <http://www.cresc.man.ac.uk/events>  or put CRESC in your search engine



CRESC directors: Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Karel Williams



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Understanding Media, the new Open University media course and book series: http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/courses/da204



www.openupusa.com/understandingmedia



http://mcgraw-hill.co.uk/openup/ou