The 2^nd International Conference on Scandalogy is calling for paper proposals. The event will take place at the University of Bamberg, Germany, on the 29^th and 30^th of March 2018. According to the organisers, “a publication of selected articles is planned.”

The conference theme is “Cultures of Scandals – Scandals in Culture”. The organisers invite specifically two kinds of submissions: theoretical works on the concept of “scandal cultures” and case studies from different countries.

Paper abstracts must be submitted by the end of September 2017, and acceptees will be notified by the end of November.

The full call for papers is available on the conference website.

This Call for Papers invites submissions for the 2nd International Conference in Scandalogy: “Cultures of Scandals – Scandals in Culture”. With this overarching theme we attempt to consolidate two perspectives. On the one hand, we invite theoretical papers that help to shed light on the concept of scandal cultures. On the other hand, we are interested in case studies that illustrate the dynamics of scandalization in specific countries or cultures.

How certain actions lead to public outrage is an indicator for the specific scandal culture of a society (Hondrich 2002). For instance, sex scandals can end political careers in the USA. The recent case of Anthony Weiner illustrates this point. Nevertheless, the case of Silvio Berlusconi shows that there is a different “Mediterranean scandal culture”. In Germany power scandals as well as misconduct concerning German history and political culture are characteristic types of scandals (Esser & Hartung 2004). However, it appears that scandal cultures are mutable − although by a long process.

In 2016 we witnessed the rise of Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States, which could be seen as a turning point for our concept of scandalization: His racist and misogynist comments and his insults against minorities in general have not weakened him as a political actor. Does this mean we are witnessing a transformation of scandal culture in the USA? If so, what are the reasons for this and what are the consequences for dealing with future scandals and affairs?

Trump’s actions on the campaign trail cannot only be explained by intentional self-scandalization (Haller 2015), as the leaked audio footage of the notorious “Access Hollywood“-tape illustrates. Yet this particular case has shown that the logic of sex scandals in American politics is partly defunct. How can this drastic shift in this particular political scandal culture be explained? Has the moral code of American politics changed?

Arguably, in this context the rise of social media has transformed the economics of media attention. Trump’s tweets garner enormous publicity but do not appear to be explainable as strategic patterns of communication. However, Trump’s deliberate provocations produce more attention than the latest revelation about collusions with Russia. New media appears to affect the way that scandals can be mediated (and diverted) in public discourse by communicators of the journalistic and the political sphere. But has traditional reporting on scandals lost its effectiveness?

These examples show that the research of scandals lacks sufficient theoretical models which help conceptualizing variables of the journalistic, political, and cultural spheres to explain the process of scandalization. The analysis of cultures of scandals invites such theoretical approaches. We would like to see additional contributions that investigate the overlapping, differentiation, and cross-pollination of cultures of scandals. In short, we would like to know: Why does an action become a scandal in a specific country, while it is not being scandalized in another?

A number of studies deal with this question in a particular context and explore scandals in culture: So far, case studies have shed light on scandals and scandalization in Scandinavian countries (Allern & Pollack 2012; Herkman & Matikainen 2016; Ekström & Johansson 2008), in Great Britain (Thompson 2000), in the USA (Entman 2012), in Germany (Hondrich 2002; Esser & Hartung 2004), and in Switzerland (Haller 2015). Our call invites further contributions, also from other countries, that analyze scandals through case studies and on an empirical basis.

We are interested to bring the practitioners’ perspective into the academic field as well: Often, journalists are limited to describing and criticizing scandals instead of reflecting a potential lack of response by the public. One may argue this deficit could be alleviated if academic research and journalism would be more sensitive to characteristics of specific cultures of scandals. Therefore, we also invite submissions that are not limited to the academic field but deal with aspects of scandals and media.

Information on Paper Submission:

Abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Please include an additional short biographical note of no more than 150 words.

As the selection of abstracts will be peer-reviewed anonymously, we ask contributors to include a separate title page containing title, author/s, affiliation/s, and the address, phone, fax, and e-mail of the first author.

All submissions will be evaluated on relevance and originality, clarity of research purpose, grounding of theoretical and methodological approach, focus, and organization.

A publication of selected articles is planned.

Please email abstracts to andre.haller@uni-bamberg.de or hendrik.michael@uni-bamberg.de by September 30th 2017.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the end of November.

University of Bamberg
Department of Communication Studies
Bamberg, Germany
29-30 March 2018

The the sixth biennial conference “Future of Journalism 2017: Journalism in a Post-Truth Age” will be held on Thursday 14 and Friday 15 September 2017, at Cardiff University, United Kingdom. The event is hosted by the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC). Keynote speakers of the conference include Guy Berger (UNESCO), Linda Steiner (University of Maryland), Silvio Waisbord (George Washington University) and Claire Wardle (First Draft). We picked a few sessions from the vast programme of the conference:

Ammina Kothari and Andrea Hickerson are studying how journalism educators are revising their teaching curriculum to address two changes: automation of storytelling through algorithms and bots and the proliferation of fake news. Thursday, 14:00-15:30.

Karin Boczek, Gerret von Nordheim and Lars Koppers looked at journalists’ use of expert sources during a ten-year period (2006-2015) in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. Thursday, 16:00-17:30.

Axel Bruns studies the concept of echo chambers using data tracking interactions between 4 million Twitter accounts in Australia. He investigates whether there is evidence for the existence of echo chambers. Friday, 09:30-11:00.

Neil Thurman and Richard Fletcher research the transitions of newspapers to online-only editions, looking at the 2016 change by the UK newspaper The Independent, and how the transition affected its popularity and audience behvaiour. Friday, 11:30-13:00.

Swati Maheshwari studied media’s self-censorship of one the biggest corruption scandals in India. The author identifies macro-level changes in the political power structure and the neo-liberal architecture of the media as well as the internal dynamics of the journalistic field, interviewing 25 journalists on the case. Friday, 14:00-15:30.

You can find more information on the conference website. Also the full programme is available (pdf file). The official hashtag is #FoJ2017.

Editor’s note: Turo Uskali of Journalism Research News is also attending the conference, presenting a paper.

Picture: The main building of Cardiff University by Stan Zurek, public domain

Se a narrativa e a sua construção tem sido um tema que a última década dotou de particular visibilidade, o modo como essa construção se interliga com os media e a tecno-mediação, gerando uma cada vez maior hibridização de géneros e formatos, bem como inegáveis implicações cognitivas tanto na perspectiva da criação como da recepção, são motivos mais que suficientes para justificar a continuada pertinência deste colóquio. Este é o 4º encontro – depois de se ter iniciado na Universidade do Minho em 2014, passado pela Universidade Católica Portuguesa em 2015 e pela Universidade do Porto em 2016, este ano cabe à Universidade da Beira Interior a oportunidade de promover uma reflexão e discussão conjuntas em torno deste tema tão claramente multifacetado.

Entre os seus objectivos, estará também realçar a relação fenomenológica, perceptiva e emocional que, na contemporaneidade, tão claramente detectamos na estrutura narrativa dos conteúdos, respectiva formatação e transmissão mediática e mediada. Esta análise e questionamento tornam-se prementes num universo cuja progressiva predisposição para a introdução de mecanismos de gamificação, misturando e nivelando facto e ficção, não só modela a recepção, como promove uma potencial consciência distópica por parte de públicos e audiências em relação aos conteúdos veiculados, em detrimento da credibilidade e legitimidade que, no passado, foi condição desses formatos narrativos e dos meios a que estavam e estão associados.

Nesse sentido, a Organização convida à submissão de propostas de comunicação originais cujo enquadramento temático possa partir de perspectivas tão diversas como:
• Narrativa e Comunicação;
• Narrativa no cinema, videojogos, arte interativa, intermedia e transmedia;
• Estudos de narratologia (poéticas, correntes, estilos, géneros, modelos narratológicos);
• Elementos e mecanismos narratológicos (premissa, conflito, ações, personagens, relações entre personagens, tempo, espaço…);
• Novas poéticas e estruturas narrativas (modelos não-lineares e multilineares, hibridismo);
• Papel da narrativa na cognição e na organização do conhecimento;
• Narrativas históricas, sociais e políticas (análise dos mitos, métodos historiográficos, discursos da identidade coletiva e da alteridade, utopias e distopias sociais, etc.);
• Lugar da narrativa na estética e teoria da arte;
• Espaços diegéticos;
• Ontologia da narrativa;
• Papel do criador e do espectador/recetor/utilizador;
• Narrativa e emoção;
• Desenvolvimento da narrativa (criatividade e aplicação de modelos narratológicos);
• Outras que contribuam de forma clara e argumentada para a relevância e contexto do debate pretendido.

Submissão de Propostas / Envio do Artigo Completo:
A submissão das propostas deve ser feita através do e-mail call.narrativamediacognicao@labcom.ubi.pt, indicando Título da Proposta, Temática Geral (a partir da lista indicada acima), Nome(s) do(s) Autor(es), Categoria Profissional, Filiação Institucional e e-mail(s) de contacto, anexando o ficheiro em versão .docx, .doc, .rtf ou .odt.

O resumo (abstract) da apresentação deve ser submetido até 31 de Agosto 10 de Setembro e ter um limite de 2000 caracteres. As apresentações deverão ser preparadas para 15 minutos, sugerindo-se os formatos PowerPoint, o OpenOffice ou Prezi mas não sendo obrigatório. As propostas aceites para comunicação virão a ser publicadas em livro de Actas, com ISBN e ISSN, não sendo obrigatório o envio do artigo completo nos casos em que o(s) autor(es) não o deseje(m).

Os participantes que desejarem enviar artigo completo devem fazê-lo até à data de 30 de Novembro, para o mesmo e-mail call.narrativamediacognicao@labcom.ubi.pt, devendo o texto ter até 30000 caracteres (resumo e bibliografia não incluídos), e ser enviado também em formato .doc, .docx, .rtf ou .odt (não serão aceites textos enviados em .pdf).

Caso contenha imagens, as mesmas devem ser enviadas separadamente em .jpeg, gravadas com indicação do apelido do autor principal e numericamente de acordo com a ordem do seu aparecimento no texto (ex: Costa_001.jpeg). O texto deve conter indicação dessa referência, no local pretendido para inserção de cada imagem, acompanhada da respectiva legenda.

Datas Importantes
Submissão de Propostas de Comunicação: até 31 de agosto 10 de Setembro
Notificação de aceitação: até 20 de setembro
Data limite para envio do artigo completo: 30 de Novembro

Comissão organizadora:
Francisco Merino (UBI – LabCom.IFP)
Luís Frias (UBI – CIC.Digital)
Nelson Zagalo (UM – CECS)

Comissão científica:
André Barata (UBI – LabCom.IFP)
Bruno Mendes da Silva (UALG – CIAC)
Catarina G. Moura (UBI – LabCom.IFP)
Carlos Caires (UCP – CITAR)
Daniel Ribas (IPB / CITAR – UCP)
Fátima Chinita (IPL / ESTC)
Fernanda Bonacho (ESCS / IPL- ICML / UNL / FCSH – CIC.Digital)
Filipe Luz (ULHT)
Filipe Martins (UP / ESMAE – Instituto de Filosofia)
Francisco Merino (UBI – LabCom.IFP)
Guilhermina Castro (CITAR – UCP)
Herlander Elias (UBI – LabCom.IFP)
Jorge Leandro Rosa (UP – Instituto de Filosofia)
Jorge Louraço (ESMAE)
Jorge Palinhos (UM – CECS / ESAP – CEAA / UCP – CITAR)
José Bidarra, (UAb / CIAC)
Né Barros (UP – Instituto de Filosofia / balleteatro / ESAP)
Nelson Zagalo (UM – CECS)
Patrícia Gouveia (UL – FBA)
Paulo Nuno Vicente (UNL / FCSH – iNOVA MediaLab)
Valentina Nisi (UM – M-ITI)

Contactos
Colóquio Narrativa, Média e Cognição
4 Out 2017
Auditório da Biblioteca
Universidade da Beira Interior
Covilhã Portugal

Organização:
narrativamediacognicao@labcom.ubi.pt

Submissão de Propostas / Envio do Artigo Completo:
call.narrativamediacognicao@labcom.ubi.pt