Struggle and Resistance in Media and Communications: Structure versus Agency?

Date: Friday 19 June 2015, 09:00–18:00

Extended deadline for abstracts: Friday 10 April 2015

Struggle and resistance against established and emerging hierarchies and hegemonies constitute one of the central themes in contemporary media and communications research. On one hand, struggle and resistance broadly constitute newsworthy content in the framework of media production practices. On the other, media are themselves used as tools of protest and participation by individuals, groups, and movements actively engaged in modes of struggle and resistance against power in various manifestations. Further, media as discursive and material social forms have long been subject to diverse challenges and contestations in their own right.

Explorations of this power/resistance dialectic are often considered analytically by drawing upon the opposition or dualism of structure and agency. To what extent do structure and agency serve as a useful heuristic for considering the sorts of questions posed by current scholarship in media and communications?

​This symposium seeks to provide a forum for PhD students to engage with questions of struggle and resistance, or structure and agency, as they pertain to the media and communications landscape. We invite PhD students to explore these issues as they relate to the following topics:

▫   News, journalism and political communication

▫   Media technologies, big data and surveillance

▫   Communications labour and forms of work

▫   Agency, resistance and forms of protest

▫   Media regulation, institutions and globalization

▫   Media, ICTs and development

▫   Research approaches in media and communications

Submissions can be works in progress, provocative ideas or engaging questions as well as completed research in the form of papers, posters or photograph displays.

The symposium is particularly geared towards PhD students in the early stages of their research. The emphasis will be on thoughtful discussion with fellow PhD students, along with feedback from leading academics from the Department. This year’s keynote speech will be given by [log in to unmask]"> Dr Bart Cammaerts.

For any submission, please send an abstract with title (150–200 words) to: [log in to unmask] by Friday 10 April. Please include your name, university, department, year of study, email address, and category of your submission (paper, poster, or photograph display). 

Those invited to present will be notified in the third​ week of April.