Call for Papers – Rethinking the mediatization of politics

05.09.2013

Call for Papers – for the Workshop of the ECREA TWG Mediatization "Rethinking the mediatization of politics", 25-26 April, 2014 in London

The mediatization of politics was the very beginning of mediatization research: In the 1990s and the years following, mediatization was mainly discussed as the adaptation of 'media rules' or 'journalistic logics' to the field of politics. Following this, most of the early theorising of mediatization was related to this kind of research. However, since then the field of mediatization research has opened widely. This makes it possible to rethink the mediatization of politics in a wider frame than previously possible. The basic idea of the workshop is to re-open the discussion on the mediatization of politics by linking it more closely to questions of government/governance and governmentality.

Politics is much more deeply influenced by mediatization than original conceptualisations implied: Not only the patterns of journalistic news production are important for reflecting the mediatization of politics. We also have to bear in mind that the whole way of (public) political opinion-forming increasingly refers to information and decision-making processes that are based on technical media. Such a statement does not only reflect more recent developments like "open data" approaches or "e-government", for example. Already in the 1970s, political decisions referred to computer-gathered information and technologicallybased communication networks. At the same time, various new forms of activism as well as citizenship became an important counterpoint to traditional forms of politics - and again they are highly mediatized. If we want to understand the mediatization of politics, we also have to take such changes in government/governance and governmentality into consideration.

The workshop takes place at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

For further Information please visit the website of the ECREA TWG "Mediatization".

The Call for Papers can be downloaded here.