Audience Research in a 'Post-Media' Age? 2015

25-27 June 2015 conference "Audience Research in a 'Post-Media' Age?"

Reflections on media-centric and non-media centric approaches to researching audiences in the 21stcentury

ECREA Audience and Reception Studies Conference 2015
25-27 June 2015, University of Tartu, Estonia

Deadline for submission: 15th April 2015. Notification of acceptance: 25 April.

As media environments diversity around us, and audiences continuously commute across a range of different communicative spaces, encompassing a wide variety of platforms, the centrality of media and its texts in our analysis of audiences has started being questioned. There is a strong argument for retaining a focus on texts (and their interpretation) at a time when it is only too easy to claim that texts are far too fluid, far too many and far too ambiguous now for 'text' to be retained as a basis of interrogation in audience studies. Audiences continue to interpret, listen, receive, produce and share texts and therefore, the media continues to be central in our endeavour as audience researchers. On the other hand, a new wave of research in our field argues for a non-media centric approach to audiences, where there is a shift of focus from the interpretation of specific texts to the spaces occupied by audiences, to audiencing being analysed not in response to a particular genre or format, where the focus on media and reception is replaced by a focus on spatiality and practices outside of the space in front of the television screen. This conference seeks to bring together scholars who advocate a retention of focus on texts and interpretation with scholars who ask for a non-media centric approach to the field.

We are looking for abstracts from both sides of the media-centric and non-media centric approaches to audience research. Abstracts could be theoretical reflections, methodological reflections or conventional presentations of well-theorised empirical work, as long as the topic relates to the theme of this conference. Some potential areas we are looking to address include, but are not restricted to:

• Non-media centric theoretical approaches to audiences
• Text-centric theoretical approaches
• New media, audiences and the role of ‘text’
• Spaces, places, urban geographies in relation to being audiences
• Advertising and audiences
• Cities and audiences
• Ethics, morality and audiences in an age of converged media
• Tourism, global flows and transnational audiences
• Meta reviews or birds’ eye views of the field
• Empirical and theoretical papers

Keynote speakers

Prof. Triin Vihalemm, University of Tartu, Institute of Social Studies

Prof. Louise Phillips, University of Roskilde, The Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Dialogic communication

Conference fee is 55 Euros. This includes conference materials, coffees lunch and dinner during the conference.

More details and registration HERE.