Archive for October, 2015

CFP: 3rd International Celebrity Studies Conference: Authenticating Celebrity

October 19, 2015

3rd International Celebrity Studies Conference: Authenticating Celebrity

June 28-30, 2016
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam
http://celebritystudiesconference.com/

Routledge, Celebrity Studies Journal, and the University of Amsterdam are pleased to announce the third Celebrity Studies conference. The conference will take place in Amsterdam, June 28th-30th, and will be organized by Gaston Franssen, James Bennett, Hannah Hamad, Su Holmes, and Sean Redmond.

The 3rd International Celebrity Studies Conference will be themed on the question of ‘Authenticating Celebrity’. This subject will run through our plenaries and form a strand running throughout the conference. 

Drawing on the strength of the CSJ editorial team, the conference welcomes submissions from a broad range of disciplines that generate new ways of thinking and understanding celebrity: from film, television, literary, digital media and theatre studies through to psychology, sociology, politics, and business studies.

We invite abstracts for individual 20-minute papers or pre-constituted panels of 3 x 20-minute papers on any topic related to the conference theme.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
• David Giles, University of Winchester
• Joke Hermes, University of Amsterdam/Inholland University of Applied Sciences
• Jo Littler, City University London
• Alice E. Marwick, Fordham University
• Ginette Vincendeau, King’s College London

A Special Issue of the best papers from the conference will be published inCelebrity Studies in 2017. Stipends to help with conference costs will be awarded for the best PhD abstracts submitted.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Celebrity and the experience of authenticity
• Sincerity and stardom
• Committed celebrity
• The phenomenology of fame
• Authenticating celebrity and gender, race, class, ethnicity
• Reality-tv celebrity
• Audience and affect
• Representations of talent and genius
• Fame in virtual reality
• Socializing celebrity
• Online authenticity
• Disingenuous and/or exposed celebrity
• True fans/anti-fans
• Trusting celebrity
• Gossip culture
• Celebrity hoaxes
• Celebrity facts, celebrity fictions
• Sport stars, performance and authenticity
• (In)sincerity and political celebrity
• Memory and celebrity authenticity.
• The will to truth: stories of the celebrity self
• Auto-ethnography and reflections of the real
• Fandom and the search for celebrity authenticity
• Celebrity pilgrimages
• Illness and celebrity
• Marketing authenticity
• Celebrity do-gooders and ambassadors
• Documenting the celebrity
• Rock idols and rebellion

Deadline for abstracts: November 6th, 2015 (250 words, plus a 50 word biography)

Successful abstracts will be notified by: December 11th, 2015

Enquiries/abstracts to: celebritystudies@gmail.com

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CFP: Revisiting Audiences: Reception, Identity, Technology

October 12, 2015

Revisiting Audiences: Reception, Identity, Technology

9th – 10th, June 2016

Second MFCO Early Career-Graduate Conference hosted by the Department of Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand

Featuring: Associate Professor Sean Redmond (Deakin University, Australia) & Associate Professor Catherine Fowler (University of Otago, New Zealand)

Conference conveners: Owain Gwynne and Kevin Fletcher

We are surrounded by media texts – films, television shows, songs, comics, videogames to name but a few. With the growing range of technologies at our disposal, our relationships with media texts and practices are continually evolving, opening up new avenues for inquiry into audiences and reception research. What do these texts mean to us? How do they shape our lives and experiences? Rather than merely receive the texts they encounter, audiencesexperience texts, not as commodities, but as instances of intense emotional or affective engagement. Texts shape our understanding of the world and the ways we experience it – they make us laugh, cry, think and dream. They delight and infuriate. They have the power to help us create realities, to relive the past, or to stir us to action and activism. Our everyday interactions with media take many forms and range from identity performance on social media, to nostalgic attachments, and to fandoms. This conference is interested in new ways of making sense of these special relationships between texts and audiences, taking into account how such textual interactions are situated culturally, transnationally and historically.

This interdisciplinary conference invites papers to address the ways in which audiences receive, create, engage withand experience texts. Papers that address (but are not limited to) new approaches to the following topics / questions are welcome:

·  Youth audiences – How might younger audiences engage with texts in different ways than older audiences? Does new media affect generational engagement?

·  Fandom – What does it mean to be a ‘fan’ of something? How are different fandoms enacted / performed, including in an academic context? What is the distinction between research and fandom?

·  Celebrity culture – How does contemporary celebrity culture inform industrial shifts in media production and consumption? What are the racialised and geographical dimensions of celebrity and star production?

·  Paratexts – How do people take up paratexts (e.g., trailers, prequels, conventions)? How do paratexts construct frameworks of expectations or redefine the meanings of the primary text?

·  Relocating moving images – How are accepted models of viewing and reception changed by the ‘relocation’ of cinema in art galleries, museums, public and private spaces?

·  Audience research and methodologies – What new research and technological developments are being employed in the study of audiences? How do new technologies such as eye tracking, virtual and augmented reality contribute to reception studies?

·  Affective audiences – How do debates about embodiment and cognition offer new ways of understanding viewer engagement with texts in both domestic and theatrical contexts? How does phenomenological research intersect with moving-image culture?

·  Audiences and intellectual property – What is the audience’s role in contributing marketing labour to media companies in the contemporary global copyright regime? How do fan-activists use copyrighted texts to promote counter-hegemonic interests?

·  Audiences and space – What is the role of space in fandom, cinephilia and telephilia? How do diasporic people engage with texts from the ‘homeland’?

·  Old versus new media in audience studies – How does the focus on new media displace the continuing importance of old media for audiences? Does engaging with ‘old’ media through new media platforms complicate that engagement, and if so how? What do ‘new’ media forms reveal about ‘older’ audience practices?

The conference is free for accepted presenters and open to interested attendees. There will also be a masterclass led by Associate Professor Sean Redmond on June 8, and a workshop on audience study methodologies by Dr. Rosemary Overell. The masterclass and workshop are also free but are open to a limited number of participants. For more information on the masterclass and the workshop, and how to register, please contact the conference conveners below.

Presenters at Revisiting Audiences will be offered the opportunity for a refereed publication in Working Paper Series in the Department of Media, Film and Communication’s flagship journal (http://www.otago.ac.nz/mfco/research/otago040229.html)

Please contact the conference conveners with any enquiries and / or expressions of interest. Abstracts of about 200 words with an accompanying bio of no more than 50 words should be submitted as an email attachment in Microsoft Word to the conference email address: mfco_ecg@otago.ac.nz by April 15, 2016. A response to all submissions will be sent by May 1, 2016

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CFP: Kick Starting Media: Cultures of Funding in Contemporary Media Industries

October 6, 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

Kick Starting Media: Cultures of Funding in Contemporary Media Industries

One-Day Conference: 9 June 2016

Media Futures Research Centre, Bath Spa University

Held at Bath Spa University, Newton Park Campus, Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN

Confirmed keynotes:
Professor Gillian Doyle, University of Glasgow
Dr James Cateridge, Oxford Brookes University

With recent threats of change to the BBC’s future public funding regime, not to mention news of the British broadcaster’s former Top Gear presenters signing to subscription-based streaming service Amazon Prime, the subject of new media funding models and their impact on how audiences can – or should – consume media has become a point of public discussion. Trends such as crowdfunding and co-creation – where producers and audiences share responsibility for financing and producing media – as well as subscription-based platforms like Netflix and video-on-demand services such as iTunes have all made media more sharable and personal, but all of these trends and services also raise further questions about the funding priorities, strategies and policies in the arts, media and culture sectors. It is thus timely to take stock of the cultures of funding in contemporary media industries, and this conference provides a platform for analysing the impact of these contemporary funding cultures, be it on texts, audiences, technologies or industries.

Recent public debates over funding in the media industries seem tied to the impact of digitalisation, which has provided a catalyst for change in terms of how media is now produced and consumed across multiple platforms. As such, basic business models for funding media are changing. While digitalisation is seen to have redefined ideas of ownership amidst shifts from a top-down corporate-driven model to a more bottom-up consumer-driven model (Jenkins 2006), how is such a shift continuing to shape the type of media now being financed? Moreover, how are digitised media interfaces – bringing greater individualised choice for media audiences (Tryon 2013) – impacting funding patterns and creative imperatives for such media? What is the impact of convergences and the need to spread content across multiple platforms on license fee funding? Equally, emerging digitalised funding models such as co-creativity raise questions about entrepreneurship in the media but also about unequal power structures as audiences may come to function as free labour (Scholz 2013; Smith 2015). In what ways, then, might such blurring of power structures redefine basic notions of media funding? And how do different media industries now orchestrate, manage and perceive the turn towards crowdfunded, video-on-demand or co-created content as business models of the future?

To address these questions, the conference organisers invite proposals for 20-minute papers from both researchers and media practitioners. As well as exploring the broader questions above, proposals can be on, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Contemporary film funding (e.g. Hollywood franchise-based models of financing, independently-financed productions, crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, public/private sector film financing, etc)
Contemporary television funding (e.g. subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, public service/license fee funding models, new sponsorship models, product placement, TV promo companies, video-on-demand services such as iPlayer, etc)
Contemporary videogame funding (e.g. co-creation, social media gaming production, etc)
Contemporary comics and book funding (e.g. digital/motion comics, online publishing trends, etc)
Contemporary music funding and new economic models (e.g. live-touring, streaming, downloading platforms such as iTunes, etc)
Contemporary advertising and transmedia funding (e.g. social media marketing, online apps, intermediary agency funds, branded entertainment, etc)
Impacts of contemporary funding practices on audiences (e.g. exploitability of co-creativity, crowdfunding as fandom, fan-fiction, binge watching, etc)
Impacts of contemporary funding practices on media texts (e.g. changing narrative formats, participatory content, etc)

A Special Issue devoted to the conference theme of ‘Funding in the Convergence Era’ will be published in The International Journal on Media Management in February 2017, co-edited by Matthew Freeman and journal editor Bozena Mierzejewska. Conference speakers will be invited to submit their papers to this Special Issue for consideration.

Please send proposals (300 words plus a 100 word bio) to Dr Matthew Freeman (m.freeman@bathspa.ac.uk) by no later than15 January 2016. Delegates will be informed of acceptance by mid-February 2016.

This event is part of the Media Futures Research Centre ‘Economic Futures’ 2015-16 programme of activities at Bath Spa University.  

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