[Air-L] Call for panel papers ECREA 2020

[Delia Dumitrica]

Dear colleagues,

I am seeking contributions to a panel for the Communication & Democracy section at the European Communication Research and Education Association ECREA 2020 conference. If interested, send a 500 words abstract by December 19, 2019 to dumitrica at eshcc.eur.nl<mailto:dumitrica at eshcc.eur.nl>

PROPOSED PANEL: Representing activism in popular culture
This panel is particularly - but not exclusively – interested in mapping the representation of contemporary forms of activism, from Occupy and the Arab Spring to hashtag movements such as MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Fridays for Future in popular culture. Contemporary activism’s creative use of digital mediation for self-representation and grassroots mobilization has itself commanded the attention of cultural producers as a herald of a revitalized polis (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2018).

While the news coverage of activism – and particularly protest – is a rich research problematic, work on the symbolic construction of activism across novels, films, documentaries, advertising, memes, songs, art installations, etc. is largely missing. Such cultural texts contribute to the shared political imaginary by informing public values and social identity, proposing shared cognitive maps for political sense-making, and discussing public norms (Curran, 2011). Furthermore, by rhetorically constructing popular memory of and arguments about past activism, such texts perform a long-term shaping of our political imaginary (Borda, 2010; Edgerton, 2001; Griffin, 2003).

The panel’s interest in the portrayal of activism in popular culture is driven by questions such as: What tactics and strategies of civic action are legitimized across these texts? What civic subject positions are constructed? To what extent do they participate in the constructing engagement as an individual gesture? How do they construct trust in democratic politics and in the political prowess of digital technologies?

References
Dumitrica, D., & Bakardjieva, M. (2018). The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers. Media, Culture & Society, 40(6): 817–837.
Borda, J.L. (2010). Women Labor Activists in the Movies: Nine Depictions of Workplace Organizers, 1954-2005. McFarland.
Curran, J. (2011). Media and democracy. London: Routledge.
Edgerton, G. (2001). Television as historian: A different kind of history altogether.  In Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P. (Eds.). Television histories: Shaping collective memory in the media age (pp. 1-16). Lexington, University Press of Kentucky.
Griffin, C.J.G. (2003). Movement as memory: Significant form in eyes on the prize. Communication Studies, 54(2): 196-210.

Dr. Delia Dumitrica
Assistant Professor
Media & Communication
Erasmus University Rotterdam