The Fan Studies Network

6-8 January 2016

Canterbury Christ Church University

Theme: Communities

Deadline for proposals: 8 September 2015

We are pleased to invite you to submit abstracts, panel proposals and 
posters for the next Annual MeCCSA Conference, to be held 6-8 January 
2016 at the School of Media, Art and Design, Canterbury Christ Church 
University, Canterbury, UK.

The theme of the MeCCSA 2016 is ‘Communities’. We invite papers and 
panel proposals that address this theme, examining how we might advance thinking on for example: communities in the digital age; communities and the commons; communities and cultures; communities on the margins; local and community media; politics and policies of communities; community engagement and cohesion; inclusion and exclusion in communities; communities and the past; media, cultural and communication practices of different types of communities.

We also welcome scholarly papers, panels, practice contributions, film 
screenings, and posters across the full range of interests represented by MeCCSA and its networks, including, but not limited to:

·         Film and television studies and practice

·         Radio studies and practice

·         Cultural and media policy

·         Representation, identity, ideology

·         Social movements

·         Women’s Media Studies

·         Disability Studies within media studies

·         Approaches to media pedagogy

·         Children, young people and media

·         Diasporic and ethnic minority media

·         Political communication

·         Methodological approaches

·         MeCCSA subject areas as disciplines

Confirmed plenary speakers

Confirmed speakers that will participate in keynote panels include:

·         Professor Mark Deuze, University of Amsterdam

·         Professor Jeremy Gilbert, University of East London

·         Dr Peter Lewis, London Metropolitan University

·         Professor Robin Mansell, London School of Economics

·         Sara Moseley, Distinguished Visiting Fellow and Development 
Director, Cardiff University

·         Jeremy Seabrook, Author and Journalist

·         Professor Helena Sousa, University of Minho

·         Hilary Wainwright, Journalist and Researcher, Transnational 
Institute

·         Professor Claire Wallace, University of Aberdeen

Submission guidelines

Abstracts of up to 250 words should be submitted by 8 September 2015 through the conference website (http://www.meccsa2016.co.uk/). We also welcome panel proposals and these should include a short description and rationale (200 words) together with abstracts for each of the papers (150-200 words each including details of the contributor), together with the name and contact details of the panel proposer. The panel proposer should co-ordinate the submissions for that panel as a single proposal.

Practice

We actively support the presentation of practice-as-research, in particular when there is insufficient time to present a complete work during parallel sessions. We are therefore providing a dedicated 
presentation space to display practice artefacts including screenings, 
computer-based and multi-screen work (where possible). For displaying  practice work, please include specific technical data (eg duration, format) and an URL pointing to any support material when submitting your abstract.

Conference contacts:

Website: http://www.meccsa2016.co.uk/

Email address: meccsa2016@canterbury.ac.uk

Twitter: @meccsa2016

We look forward to seeing you in Canterbury!

About MeCCSA

MeCCSA is the subject association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education. The field encompasses the study of audiovisual and print media including film and TV; journalism; radio; photography; creative writing; publishing; interactive media and the web. The field also includes higher education for media practice and 
practice research – film and TV production, journalism practice, and the use of new, digital information technologies in the arts, entertainment, 
social media and gaming. For further information please see: 
http://www.meccsa.org.uk/

About Canterbury

Canterbury is an important historical city in the south east of England, one hour by train from London. The conference will be held on the main 
campus of Canterbury Christ Church University, which is part of the 
Canterbury UNESCO World Heritage Site. The University has offered degrees in media and related subjects since 1980.  The School of Media, Art and Design currently provides undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in media and communication, journalism, film, television, radio, animation, photography, digital media, web design, graphic design and fine and applied art. The School has a strong ethos of theory-practice interchange and an interdisciplinary research culture. The School runs the Centre for Research on Communities and Cultures and is a leading player in the Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts.

CFP: Convergence: Special themed issue
Vol 22, no 3 (August 2016)

Connected Viewing: Multi-Platform Media in the Digital Era
Guest Editors: Jennifer Holt and Karen Petruska

This special issue aims to bring together researchers from film, television, internet, and game studies to examine evolving trends in connected viewing, an evolution in how screen media is created, circulated, and consumed. Specifically referring to a multi-platform entertainment experience, connected viewing also relates to a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked
communication with traditional screen media practices. This special issue will explore connected viewing as a crucial frame through which we can understand contemporary media in the digital era.

Connected viewing is more than digital distribution, for it encapsulates the broader ecosystem in which digital distribution is rendered possible
and new forms of user engagement take shape. Connected viewing is as much about the aesthetic and social experience of second-screen media as it is about the intermediaries that deliver content to mobile devices and the gatekeepers that regulate access. It also extends to those firms and
individuals operating outside of the mainstream who are looking to create
innovative connections to the digital, global, and mobile audience.

This call for papers invites contributions that focus on the evolving economics, technologies, regulations, texts, and audience practices of
connected viewing. Possible topics may include digital distribution
technologies and platforms; global markets and audiences; the economics of connected viewing; web series and transmedia content; data collection and
privacy; cloud technologies and internet infrastructure; network neutrality, internet governance, and other regulatory issues; audience engagement and fandom.

Contributions on the following questions are welcome, but we are open to any substantive inquiry:

**What are the historical continuities that limit or expand the landscape
for digital media innovations?

**Legacy companies today compete not only with each other but also with new entrants like Netflix and Amazon. How is the struggle between these
companies transforming traditional media practices?

**What innovations has connected viewing brought to the production and
circulation of content, especially across platforms? How has this affected
creative labor?

**What are the emerging business models driving connected viewing, and how might these impact audience practices and priorities (i.e. in terms of
digital divides, affordable content, privacy protections, etc.)?

**What are the most dynamic connected viewing developments in Latin American, Asian, European, or emerging economic markets?

**Do “independent” companies have a competitive advantage in the connected viewing market for either film, TV, or games?

**What audiences have the advances of connected viewing left behind,
particularly considering racial, gender, class, and age differences? Alternatively, how have audiences pushed connected viewing practices forward in ways media companies have not?

**How is connected viewing transforming ideals of the public sphere and community life?

Research articles will be in the range of 6,000-8,000 words and all submissions should be formatted in the SAGE Harvard reference style.

We are also interested in publishing interviews of 3,000-5,000 words with
connected viewing creators, intermediaries, distributors, etc. If you are interested in conducting an interview for this issue, please email the editors with a brief description to determine suitability.

Please send submissions of full papers to the editors by 31 July 2015. All
correspondence and submissions to Karen Petruska (k.petruska@gmail.com).

You can read more about Convergence: The International Journal of Research
into New Media Technologies here: http://con.sagepub.com/.

ECREA Audience and Reception Studies Conference 2015

25-27 June 2015, University of Tartu, Estonia

Deadline for submission: 15th April 2015. Notification of acceptance: 25 
April. Conference Fee – 55 Euros.

As media environments diversity around us, and audiences continuously 
commute across a range of different communicative spaces, encompassing a wide variety of platforms, the centrality of media and its texts in our 
analysis of audiences has started being questioned. There is a strong argument for retaining a focus on texts (and their interpretation) at a time when it is only too easy to claim that texts are far too fluid, far too many and far too ambiguous now for ‘text’ to be retained as a basis of interrogation in audience studies. Audiences continue to interpret, listen, receive, produce and share texts and therefore, the media 
continues to be central in our endeavour as audience researchers. On the other hand, a new wave of research in our field argues for a non-media 
centric approach to audiences, where there is a shift of focus from the interpretation of specific texts to the spaces occupied by audiences, to 
audiencing being analysed not in response to a particular genre or 
format, where the focus on media and reception is replaced by a focus on 
spatiality and practices outside of the space in front of the television screen. This conference seeks to bring together scholars who advocate a retention of focus on texts and interpretation with scholars who ask for a non-media centric approach to the field.

We are looking for abstracts from both sides of the media-centric and non-media centric approaches to audience research. Abstracts could be theoretical reflections, methodological reflections or conventional presentations of well-theorised empirical work, as long as the topic relates to the theme of this conference. Some potential areas we are looking to address include, but are not restricted to –

• Non-media centric theoretical approaches to audiences

• Text-centric theoretical approaches

• New media, audiences and the role of ‘text’

• Spaces, places, urban geographies in relation to being audiences

• Advertising and audiences

• Cities and audiences

• Ethics, morality and audiences in an age of converged media

• Tourism, global flows and transnational audiences

• Meta reviews or birds’ eye views of the field

• Empirical and theoretical papers

Keynote speakers

Prof. Triin Vihalemm, University of Tartu, Institute of Social Studies

Prof. Louise Phillips, University of Roskilde, The Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Dialogic communication

Additional session: Young scholars’ short intensive course: Analysing 
Dialogue, Participation and Power.

Around the conference, prof Louise Phillips and prof. Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt will also host a designated young scholars seminar looking at the questions of dialogue, participation and power where the focus will be on prof. Phillips’ Integrated Framework for Analysing Dialogic Knowledge Production and Communication (IFADIA) which combines Bakhtin’s dialogue theory, Foucauldian discourse analysis and elements of Action Research and STS. The focus on the course will be on theorising and analysing forms of participation in terms of IFADIA’s Bakhtinian and discourse analytical approach. The framework will be introduced during lectures and then students’ PhD projects will be discussed through a focus on how to analyse the co-production and negotiation of meanings in different contexts that co-constitute/shape processes of meaning-making. Event is open to all interested young scholars from across and around communication studies interested in the issues of dialogue, power and communication. If you wish to include your PhD project in the discussion, please submit short project abstract via the conference submission form http://goo.gl/Fqzo74

There is no additional fee for Young Scholars course.

Formats for submission

Please submit abstracts up to 200 words by 15th April on our conference 
paper submission portal available at this link: http://goo.gl/Fqzo74.

Notification of acceptance/rejection will be made by 25th April.

Best regards,

Ranjana, Pille and Jakob (ARS Section Management Team)

Local organisers: University of Tartu, Institute of Social Sciences: 
Ragne Kõuts, Inga Kald, Ene Selart,Katre Sakala and Kristel Vits.

Conference fee is 55 EUR and this includes conference materials, coffees 
lunch and dinner during the conference.

Location

The conference will take place in the University of Tartu, Institute of 
Social Sciences (http://www.yti.ut.ee/en). The sessions of the conference 
will be located at the historical building of Institute of Social Sciences, in the very heart of the beautiful downtown of Tartu (http://www.visittartu.com/), in the walking distance of number of 
hotels and restaurants.

The nearest airport in Tartu has direct flights to Helsinki, the biggest Estonian airport in Tallinn is 2.5h bus ride or 2 hour train ride away, but bus connections also provided access to Riga airport.

We are soliciting contributions for the new Routledge Companion to Adaptation.  The book is under contract, and publication is expected in late 2016 or early 2017.

As a Routledge Companion, this book will offer a wide-ranging overview or perspective on current critical approaches and discourses as well as develop new perspectives as and when appropriate. It will still include source-oriented studies, such as novel-to-stage, film-musical-to-stage-musical etc., but it will go beyond the confines of such parameters by structuring itself around adaptive attitudes, processes and histories. Thus, instead of focusing entirely on the rather limiting and limited singular case-study approach so common in Adaptation Studies to date, its emphasis will be on the “big questions” of adaptation, the history of adaptation, and on adaptation as scholarly practice.

We are looking for contributions under the following headings:

Historiography
This section will broadly fall into two sections: the history of adaptation, and adaptation as historiography.  Proposals which deal with one of the following are particularly welcome:

·         Adaptation in a pre- and post- copy-right context (for example, an analysis of stage adaptations pre-1886-Berne Convention)

·         Adaptation and changing notions of the author and authorship

·         Adaptation and the concept of the original

·         Adaptation and the archive

·         Marginalisations of adaptation histories

·         Critical history of attitudes toward adaptation as a creative form

·         Massive texts and/as adaptation

·         Defining adaptation as a function of History

Geography
This section will address adaptation in terms of global politics and power relations. Proposals which fall under the following headings, and include an assessment of non-western practices, are particularly welcome, as are investigations of the relationship between first, second and third world flows of adaptation:

·         Mapping of adaptation activities in terms of political hegemonies

·         Mapping of adaptation activities in terms of ideological hegemonies

·         Mapping of adaptation activities in terms of cultural hegemonies

·         Adaptation of / in space and place

·         Adaptation and notions of diaspora

·         Cultural adaptations and adapting culture

·         Defining adaptation as a function of place

Identity
Adaptation changes identities, but may also be described as a function of Identity-building. Adaptations are shaped by individual, often idiosyncratic choices, but are also crucially determined by contexts of identity politics and cultural ideologies (and in turn intervene in these fields). This section invites contributions that address the interplay of adaptation and identity on a variety of classic sociocultural levels (nation, ethnicity, class, gender, age).Furthermore, this section will question the binary established between source and adaptation and instead, investigate text as a site of multiple identities:

·         Adaptation, nation and heritage

·         Adaptation and ethnicity

·         Adaptation and class

·         Adaptation and acculturation

·         Gendered adaptation

·         Idiosyncrasy and adaptation (originality)

·         Age and adaptation (identity formation, youth, young adult markets, other age groups)

Technology
Adaptation must be, necessarily, intertwined with and embedded in uses and displays of technology. This section aims to investigate the relationship between adaptation and technology not only with regards to specific adaptions but also whether and to what extent the nature of technology available shapes the process, the product, and the reception of adaptation.

·         Defining adaptation as a function of technology

·         Adaptation in temporal (i.e. novel, drama, moving image) and spatial arts (i.e. photography, painting, installation)

·         Stage technologies and adaptation (puppets, opera, laterna magica, shadow play etc.)

·         Adaptation, intermediality and media specificity (adaptation as transcoding)

·         Intramedial adaptation ( screenwriting, illustrated books, poetry-into-novel, drama-into-poetry, pastiche, simplified versions, bowldlerisation, censorship))

·         Adaptation and transmediality (social media, franchises, crossing media borders, ekphrasis, filmed theatre, ‘theatred’ film)

·         Adaptation and serialization (serialized novels, TV)

·         The sounds of adaptation (radio, audiobooks, music)

Adaptation and new visual cultures (videogames, graphic novels)

Reception

All adaptations are “receptions,” from one perspective, but this section of the book will focus specifically on the structuring and de-structuring consequences of recognizing that adaptations exist only in their reception and recognition. 

·         Defining adaptation in terms of reception

·         Adaptation as ‘enacted reception’

·         Familiarity and recognition

·         Adaptation and memory

·         Adaptation of scholarly or critical contexts

·         ‘Phantom’ adaptations

·         Fan fiction and film as adaptation

Please, send a 300-500 word abstract toadaptationcompanion@hotmail.com no later than 17 April 2015.

If your proposal is accepted for inclusion in the Companion, you will be notified during May 2015. We expect the chapters to be submitted in September 2015 with an aim to publish the Companion by 2016/17. A more detailed time-line will be made available to authors once their proposals have been accepted.

With best wishes from the editorial team, Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs and Eckart Voigts

The cinematic release of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) has already garnered speculation, derision and debate equal to its highly controversial source text, E. L. James’ homonymous trilogy. Its alignment with mass media, a predominantly female audience and mainstream cinema make it a concurrently anticipated and abhorred rich contemporary text. Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media thus invites papers which will interrogate this adaptation from a plethora of new perspectives including industry, text and reception analysis.

Focuses may include, but are not limited to:

* Adaptation Studies
* Audience Studies
* Comparative film analyses
* Criticism analyses
* Genre and Formalism
* Fans and Fan-Fiction
* Kink, BDSM and Sexual Politics
* Pornography Studies
* Publicity, promotion and paratexts
* Psychoanalytic textual analysis
* Queer Theory
* Social Networking and the Blogosphere
* Star Studies

Authors are expected to familiarise themselves both with the pre-existing literature on Fifty Shades, and with the submission guidelines available at:

Submission Guidelines

Considering the timeliness of this topic, the deadline for submissions of 6-8k papers accompanied by 250 word abstracts and 150 word bios is April 30th 2015 for publication this year. Submissions should be emailed to assistant editor Sarah Taylor-Harman at Sarah.Harman@brunel.ac.uk.
Inquiries and expressions of interest are also welcomed.

Intensities is a peer reviewed open access online journal. www.http://intensitiescultmedia.com

June 16, 2015 at Middlesex University London

Keynote by Mary Celeste Kearney (University of Notre Dame, USA), author of Girls Make Media

Girls and women are arguably producing more media than ever before. As bloggers, vloggers and “tweeters”, filmmakers, television showrunners, web designers, game developers, and musicians – to name only a few – girls and women are active contributors to contemporary media production cultures. Yet, recent incidents such as Gamergate point to the continuous precarious positioning that girls and women occupy as both amateur and professional media producers within a context shaped by what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2015) has recently called “popular misogyny.” What is at stake for female media producers within this context? How do identities such as gender, race, class, age, sexuality, nationality, and ability shape one’s participation in production cultures? How are gendered neoliberal imperatives to be constantly productive informing who is producing media and what these media texts look like? And in what ways are girls and women mobilizing media production as an activist strategy to challenge sexism, racism, classism and other social inequalities across local, national, and international contexts?

We are seeking papers for a one-day symposium that aims to examine these questions and explore girls’ and women’s production of a wide range of commercial and alternative media texts.

Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Historical analysis of girls and women as media producers

• The production and circulation of feminist and activist media texts

• Gendered labour in media industries

• Methodological approaches to studying production cultures

• Relationship between gender, media production, and neoliberal entrepreneurship

• The politics of media production training programs

• Female media producers across global media networks

• Participation in digital media cultures

This one-day symposium, featuring a keynote lecture by Mary Celeste Kearney (University of Notre Dame, USA), will be held at Middlesex University in London UK on June 16, 2015. It will serve as an opportunity for discussion and networking for feminist media scholars focusing on production cultures prior to the Console-ing Passions Conference in Dublin from June 18 – 20. This event is organized as part of Middlesex University’s FemGenSex Research Network and the Media Department’s Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster.

Please submit abstracts of 250-words and a 50-word bio by March 15, 2015 to Jessalynn Keller (j.keller@mdx.ac.uk), Feona Attwood (f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk), and Mariam Kauser (m.kauser@mdx.ac.uk).

We are pleased to invite submissions for the second issue of SERIES, a new international open access journal on TV serial narratives. The main focus of the journal is to promote a global discussion forum and an interdisciplinary exchange among scholars engaged in research into TV serial narratives. SERIES encourages methodological innovation in academic research, providing new contributions for a better understanding of the narrative, technological, economic, social and cultural impact of TV serial dramas. Articles should deal with television series, web series and/or telenovelas. According to that we will welcome submissions on every topic related to TV serial narratives for our second issue. 

In addition, a relevant issue at the moment seems to be the size of serial production that now more than ever have been so diverse and manifold. New broadcasters/producers and new forms of fruition are outlining a scenario in which the size of the series have become particularly important, also in determining the performance of the product in terms of ratings/advertising/sponsors/product placement, etc. Papers devoted to the study of this topic will be specially welcomed.

If you are interested in this call for papers, please send your full manuscript before June 30, 2015. The deadline for the editorial work (open and peer review process, editing and improvement of articles if needed, etc.) is September 30, 2015. Expected publication date of the issue: November 2015. 

For more information about the journal, please visit the website: http://seriesjournal.org