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

[Scott Rodgers]

REMINDER: CALL
FOR PAPERS

 

Proposed Thematic Panel for GeoMedia 2015: Spaces and
Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds (An Interdisciplinary
International Conference Karlstad, SWEDEN, 5-8 May 2015, website: 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.