Mediatization in Transcultural and Transnational Perspectives
The Workshop of the ECREA TWG “Mediatization”, to be held at Goldsmiths, University of London, 30th to 31st March 2012
Mediatization has become more and more a core concept to describe present and historical media and communicative change: If media become part of ‘everything’, we can no longer see them as a separate sphere but must develop an understanding of how the increasing spread of media communication changes our construction of culture and society. In such a perspective, mediatization is used as a concept to describe the long-term process of sprea- ding different technical media and the linked interrelations between media-communicative change and socio-cultural change. So far, studies of mediatization have primarily been occupied with social and cultural transformations in Western cultures and societies, but processes of mediatization are also visible in other parts of the world. Mediatization may, however, display different dynamics and have other consequences in different cultural and social contexts.
The aim of workshop "Mediatization in Transcultural and Transnational Perspectives" is to discuss whether mediatization constitutes a global process of change, and, if yes, where the inequalities and dissimilarities of this process are located. Additionally, it can be expected that mediatization is not the same everywhere. Therefore, there might be differences but also similarities between cultures and nations in the process of mediatization. This said, mediatization becomes part of comparative media and commu- nication research, not only in a current but also in an historical perspective: We must think about what the (trans-)cultural and (trans-)national differences are and how to compare them. Also there is a need to do this in a postcolonial and non-western perspective. And, finally, there is the challenge of doing comparative work to separate out different aspects of mediatization.
For the Call for Papers click here
The Workshop is organized by the ECREA Temporary Working Group "Mediatization" together with:
- the Priority Programm "Mediatized Wolds (www.mediatizedworlds.net)
- the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK (http://www.gold.ac.uk/media-communications),
- the Department of Media and Communications, LSE, UK (http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media(at)lse/Home.aspx)
- the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, Germany (http://zemki.uni-bremen.de)