[Air-L] CFP: New Perspectives on Media Production Spaces

Scott Rodgers rodgers_scott at hotmail.com
Mon Aug 18 07:50:34 PDT 2014



CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Proposed Thematic Panel for GeoMedia 2015: Spaces and Mobilities in
Mediatized Worlds (http://geomedia.se/)

 

New Perspectives on Media Production Spaces

 

By no means have media production spaces been
ignored in academic research. Analyses of media production have often been
anchored to specific settings, for example the studio in television production
studies, the newsroom in journalism ethnographies, or the loft-style office in
creative industries research. Yet in many ways these traditions sit uneasily
alongside the sorts
of media spaces that emerge through recent attempts to theorise media in terms
of ‘practices’. The value of work on media practices has been to emphasize the highly
contingent interweaving of media into ‘everyday life’,
a process which is fluid, indeterminate, and non-media centric. Yet, such work has
overwhelmingly centered on the spaces of media consumption. Media production
spaces, by contrast, are theorized as institutionalised, closed-off, strategically
coherent and medium-specific. The geographies of media production, in other
words, are often implicitly assumed to inhabit a different level of analysis. 

 

This
thematic panel aims to offer new perspectives that trouble the dichotomy
between the geographies of media production and everyday mediation, and particularly
how the former is often seen as institutionalized while the latter mundane. To
begin with, what counts as media production is up for grabs, for example in the
erosion of producer/audience distinctions, the loosening of medium specificity
in the wake of digitalization, or in the dispersal of media production sites. At
the same time, there are conceptual reasons to challenge the idea that media
production spaces are centers of power. This session will explore the indeterminate
spaces of media ‘production’ and their contingent negotiation with,
anticipation of and even subjugation to the spaces, values and sensibilities of
everyday life. 

 

Papers might
address the above themes via the following topics:

 

·        
Affective/emotional
dimensions of media production spaces/places

·        
The social
spaces of professionalized media fields and their material geographies

·        
Localized
geographies of film/television/music/gaming production and post-production

·        
Code/software
spaces and media production

·        
Sport spaces
and media production

·        
The urban
habitus of media professionals and semi-professionals

·        
Site-specific
encounters of media and non-media people

·        
Spaces of
‘produsers’, ‘prosumers’, ‘citizen journalists’ and other non-professional
media contributors

·        
Time/temporality/timeliness/rhythm
and media production spaces

·        
Media
producer anticipations/constructions of audience/user geographies

·        
Architectural/infrastructural
environments of media production

·        
Cultural
policy and the governance of media production

·        
The body as
site of media production

·        
Practices of
media space branding

·        
Below the
line media production spaces

 

The above
list is indicative rather than exhaustive – proposals on other topics still
within the above broad session theme will be gratefully received.

 

If you are
interested in proposing a paper for this panel, please send an abstract between
200-250 words to both Helen Morgan Parmett (Helen.MorganParmett at wwu.edu) and
Scott Rodgers (s.rodgers at bbk.ac.uk) by
no later than 15 September 2014.

 

Following the GeoMedia 2015 conference, we plan to propose the papers
from this panel (or a development thereof) for a special theme issue in a
refereed journal in media and cultural studies.

 

 

 		 	   		  


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