Dear Meccsa Members


Please find the final CFP for this event (scroll down - deadline 22nd January) and the keynotes/special sessions (immediately below) - thanks to those who have already submitted papers ... we will update you after the 22nd


The conference is organised by the Media Discourse Group within the Leicester Media School, De Montfort University, UK


Keynotes, Speakers and Special Sessions:

Gill Phillips, Director of Legal Services at the Guardian

Richard Wilson, Investigative Journalist on BBC Newsnight

(roundtable with Dr Richard Danbury, De Montfort University)


Leonardo Custodio, University of Tampere

‘Overcoming challenges to legitimacy in public space: the case of favela media activism.’

Dr Leonardo Custodio is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research,

 University of Tampere, Finland.

Leigh Landy, De Montfort University

‘(Il)legality and Sampling Culture: Art is about challenging society, isn’t it?’

Professor Leigh Landy is Director of the Music, 

Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University.

Stuart Price, De Montfort University

‘Damage to Catalonia? State power and notions of democracy from May 1937 to October 2017’  

Professor Stuart Price Leicester Media School, De Montfort University


Legality/Illegality:

rules, regulations and resistance

Abstracts of 250 words to [log in to unmask] 

by 22nd January 2018

This peer-reviewed Conference examines the ways in which various types of human expression and activity (economic, cultural, and political) are influenced, both by popular notions of legitimacy (combining our understanding of everyday normative standards with an often-imprecise sense of what is actually lawful/unlawful), and by the actual sanctions and/or rights enshrined within existing legal systems and forms of precedence (operating at the national and/or supranational/transnational level).

We welcome critical overviews of the relationship between legality and illegality (i.e. theoretical interventions that address the conceptual and practical interdependence of these terms, under the general rubric of ‘the law’), the alteration over time of notions of legality (where, for instance, an activity once thought legitimate may lose that status, and vice versa), specific case-studies of public controversies, the public mediation of the legal system or of law enforcement (through, for example, cinematic or televisual texts), the fascist Right’s attempt to manipulate liberal notions of freedom of speech, illicit state surveillance of dissenting individuals and groups, and the debate over ‘states of exception’. 


Specific fields of enquiry and useful topics may include but are not confined to the following:

Performance rights and intellectual ownership within the ‘neo-liberal’ work environment 

Freedom of speech, violence and anti-fascist activity

Questions over the obligation of news organisations to pursue the truth in a ‘post-truth’ politics

The ‘moral right’ to break or disregard oppressive laws

Arguments over the legalisation of drugs

The historical reconstitution of the law

Questions of sexuality and the state

Transnational legal obligations and Brexit

The Dance Culture and ‘illegal’ or non-commercial parties

Issues in investigative journalism

Fan adaptations of copyrighted texts

Transnational, national or region-specific events that test the parameters of legality


Stuart Price
Professor of Media and Political Discourse
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