The Fan Studies Network

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