co-organised by the Communication and Democracy section, Gender
and Communication Section and YECREA
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. (Oscar Wilde)
Scandals and the moral outrage they invariably provoke are not
new,
but the networked synoptic viewer society that we have become
makes
scandalitis more permanent, more global and above all a highly
profitable business for media organisations. The advent of
crowdsourcing, Web 2.0, blogging, CCTV, mobile phones with video
capacity and an ever more hungry media eager to produce scandal
and
direct moral outrage has resulted in not only celebrities and
politicians being the object of scandal, but ordinary people
caught
doing something morally condemnable are increasingly thrown into
the
media frenzy as well, while police brutality has become easier to
expose through so-called sousveillance or 'inverse surveillance'
-
watching those that watch. In politics, the fostering of a culture
of
scandal and the mobilisation of moral outrage has very much become
a
core activity in political journalism and an essential part of
(negative) campaigning by political parties/candidates and civil
society. Unsurprisingly, sex scandals involving male or female
politicians or other celebrities remain of particular interest to
the
media and the public at large. These are often based on a
moralistic
agenda advocating heteronormative monogamy whilst constructing a
sense
of normalcy. A gender divide can also be observed in moral
standards
being projected on women and men. This symposium aims to bring a
critical perspective to the way scandals are mediated, produced,
consumed, and how they increasingly feed a polyoptic society
whereby
everybody is watching and watched by everybody.
We invite paper and panel proposals related to the central theme
of
the symposium, including (but not limited to) the following
topics:
*
Political journalism and
scandal
*
Mediation of
political scandals through new media
*
Political campaigning
and scandal
*
Privacy and the
surveillance society
*
Celebrity, scandal and moral
outrage
*
Violent protest and moral outrage
*
Sex, morality and
scandals
*
Gendered scandals
*
The concealment of
scandal
*
Peer2Peer surveillance and
micro-scandals
*
Individual meaning,
appropriation and the audience of scandals
*
The political economy of scandals
*
Methods and
strategies of mediated scandalisation
*
Historical accounts
of scandals and mediated moral outrage
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor John B. Thompson and Dr. Jo
Littler
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 26 July 2011
Abstract Submission:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msmo2011
Contact email:
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