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From: Daniel Makagon <[log in to unmask]>

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Conference

Communication and the City: Voices, Spaces, Media
14-15 June 2013

Urban Communication Foundation & Institute of Communications Studies,
University of Leeds

In association with:
ECREA Media and the City Temporary Working Group

Conference website:
http://www.pvac.leeds.ac.uk/communicationandthecity/

The Communication and the City Conference is an international two-day
event hosted by the Institute of Communications Studies at the
University of Leeds. The aim of the conference is to bring together
researchers and practitioners from a variety of national contexts to
discuss questions of urban communication across academic disciplines
and professional fields.

OVERVIEW

By middle of this century 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in
cities, and it is in cities that we find major centres of political,
economic, creative and ideological power. For these reasons, in recent
decades an increasing number of scholars have come to see cities as
powerful texts and contexts for communication research. Drawing from
across the humanities, the social sciences and the arts, urban
communication has become established as an interdisciplinary field in
its own right. Within communication studies, scholars have adopted a
variety of approaches to the study of the urban environment. These
include social interaction and organizational outlooks, rhetorical and
discursive frameworks, and technology and media studies. While it
remains vital to keep pursuing distinct lines of inquiry about the
city within and beyond communication studies, we believe that it is
also crucial to foster a sustained dialogue among the various
perspectives that inform scholarly, practice-based, institutional, and
professional endeavours in the field of urban communication.

CONFERENCE THEMES

We invite submissions that address one or any combination of these
three broad questions:

1) What are the ‘voices’ that animate contemporary cities? How do
different identities, groups, cultures, and constituencies interact,
intersect and/or compete in mediated and non-mediated urban contexts?

2) What are the communicative dimensions of urban ‘spaces’ in their
own right? How does space mediate specific ideologies and
subjectivities, and how is urban space constructed and communicated as
place?

3) What is the role of the ‘media’ in relation to both the symbolic
and material existence of cities? How do both traditional and new
media contribute to representing and experiencing, but also financing
and structuring the urban environment?

We are interested in submissions that address these questions through
various lenses, including technology, policy, aesthetics, and
social/cultural/artistic/professional/political practices. In this
regard, we welcome a range of theoretical, critical, empirical, and
practice-based papers on any of the following topics:

•       The communication of cultural and social differences in the
city (e.g. gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, political and
religious beliefs) along with the communication dynamics of related
negotiations, divides and conflicts
•       Identity politics, intersectionality, and intercultural
communication in the city
•       Political, countercultural, and social movements in the urban
environment
•       Power and urban space (e.g. urban regeneration, segregation,
gentrification)
•       Aesthetic, semiotic, rhetorical and discursive dimensions of
urban spaces and places, including visual, material, aural, sensorial,
and multimodal dimensions
•       Urban space and the communication of memory, heritage, tradition
•       Spaces of production, consumption and/or citizenship
•       The relationship between urban, suburban, and rural spaces
•       Representing and communicating the city (e.g. tourism and
travel media, city and place branding, cinematic and televised urban
spaces)
•       Media and technology usage in cities and their role in the
experience of urban space (e.g. geo-location, new public and private
spaces, augmented reality)
•       The presence and impact of media and communication technology
in the urban environment (e.g. new forms of “media architecture”,
security/surveillance technologies, urban screens)
•       The relationship between cities and the media, cultural, and
creative industries (e.g. strategies of attraction of media companies
into cities, impacts on communities and urban landscapes, connectivity
and infrastructure, the local/global nexus)

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Please submit abstracts for 15-minute papers by email to
[log in to unmask] no later than NOVEMBER 30, 2012.
Abstracts should be in English and include a title, your contact
details (name, mailing address, email) and a description of your paper
(400-500 words). The conference committee will begin reviewing
abstract submissions immediately after the deadline. Notification of
acceptance will be FEBRUARY 1, 2013. Send your abstract as a Word
document or in the body of your email.

PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION

In order to help your early planning for the conference, we have
organized the basic programme structure for the conference (see
conference website). This outline shows the start and finish times of
the conference, the main social events (lunch and reception), as well
as tea/coffee breaks. A business meeting for the Urban Communication
Foundation and the ECREA Media and the City Temporary Working Group
(all conference participants welcome) is also scheduled for the
afternoon of June 15.

Official conference registration will begin on February 1, 2013. In
order to be included in the final programme the deadline for presenter
registration is April 1, 2013. The full conference registration fee is
£60. There are some places available at a discounted rate (£30) for
students and unwaged individuals. There are also a few free places
available for presenters who reside in lower income countries
(http://data.worldbank.org/income-level/LIC) or lower middle income
countries (http://data.worldbank.org/income-level/LMC). Make sure to
indicate whether and how you qualify for a discounted or free
registration fee at the time of your abstract submission. As both
discounted and free places are limited, we cannot guarantee that we
will be able to accommodate all requests.

PUBLICATION PLANS

Conference co-organizers are planning to develop an edited volume and
a special issue of an academic journal based on the themes of this
international conference. The goal would be to publish the special
issue in 2014 and the edited volume by 2015. To this end, the
conference committee invites conference participants to submit
previously unpublished papers related to the conference themes which
may or may not be based on submitted conference abstracts.
Contributions should be of no more than 7,000 words in length. More
information about this volume will be made available just prior to the
conference. The expected deadline for submission of chapters for
review will be SEPTEMBER 30, 2013.

Daniel Makagon
DePaul University