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Transnational Mediascapes Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline for applications: February 28 th, 2013

In recent years, quite some progress towards a transnational point of view on historical processes and on contemporary developments has happened in the fields of television and sound studies – both finding shared theories, methodologies, and analytical tools, and identifying useful case studies and histories.

The conference Transnational Mediascapes: Sound and Vision in Europe will take place at the Department of Media and Performing Arts of the Catholic University of Milan on May 14th-15th, 2013. The conference is organised in association with Ce.R.T.A. – Centro di Ricerca sulla Televisione e gli Audiovisivi and ALMED – Alta Scuola in Media, Comunicazione e Spettacolo. Abstracts are invited for contributions to the two main topics of the conference:

Day 1: Transnational Television: Towards a Comparative TV History
Day 2: Transnational Soundscapes: Sound and the Media in Europe

Media studies have been forced by convergence, digitization and globalization to look beyond the traditional structure of national media systems, histories and habits, and to begin to analyse their phenomena according to a wider, and more complex, point of view. On one side, they have started to reconstruct the global flows of information and entertainment, the basis of a “mainstream culture” that unifies – at least partially – different geographical, political, social and cultural areas. On the other, they have begun to follow media products and trends in their complex paths across various countries and macro-regions, underlining both the differences and the deep similarities in shapes and meanings, in production processes as well as in consumption practices.

Day 1 – Transnational Television: Towards a Comparative TV History

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, May 14th, 2013

Following the comparative approach to European television established by recent works as Jonathan Bignell and Andreas Fickers’ A European Television History (2008) and Jérôme Bourdon’s Du service public à la télé-réalité. Une histoire culturelle des télévisions européennes (2011), the focus on trans-nationality in television is one of the most compelling and current challenges for TV studies. If the medium is still deeply national in many aspects, in fact, digitization and globalization include TV into wider multi-national exchanges of ideas, formats, programmes, genres, trends, and also viewing practices.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Jérôme Bourdon (Tel Aviv University), John Ellis (Royal Holloway, London), Peppino Ortoleva (University of Turin). There will be also the presentation of the latest issues of View. Journal of European Television History and Culture and Comunicazioni sociali.

Abstracts are invited for contributions to the conference that seek to compare television histories, genres, trends, production, and distribution practices across different countries and regions, in Europe as well as in the rest of the world, offering a wide approach on methods, theories and case histories.

Topics can include:

  • The (im)possibility of a transnational history of television;
  • Definitions and methods for the comparative approach;
  • Public Service Broadcasting, Commercial TV and Pay TV across different countries;
  • Logics of broadcasting in different countries;
  • Production practices in different countries;
  • Scheduling practices in different countries;
  • TV brands in different countries;
  • Genre definitions and redefinition in different countries;
  • Textual evolutions in different countries;
  • Consumption practices in different countries;
  • Transnational circulation of TV products;
  • Production and consumption macro-areas (i.e. European Community, English-speaking countries);
  • Original research findings on single case histories across two or more nations.

Scholars from all areas of TV and media studies are invited to submit proposals for contributions. Each speaker will have about 20 minutes of speaking time. Proposals (250 words, written in English, French or Italian), along with short biographical notes and key bibliographical references, are due by February 28 th. Submissions should be sent to Attilia Rebosio. Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than March 10 th.

Day 2 – Transnational Soundscapes: Sound and the Media in Europe

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, May 15th, 2013

In post-WWII Europe, popular culture began to relate to a wide range of mediatized practices, at the centre of which the growing music industry essentially revolutionized the media- and soundscapes we live in. This already convergent network expressed a wider social change towards modernity, mobility, new gender relations, that could also be felt as a generational shift. For us today it seems likely to have been the place for the building of individual and collective life histories, allowing an interpretation in terms of personal and collective memories and cultural heritage.

In order to begin a reconceptualization of such cultural practices, we are in need of more information concerning the historical background, the modes of production and the industrial strategies, the textual and paratextual output and the patterns and ways of consumption that characterized the crucial encounter between audio-visual media and popular music, gathering different methodological perspectives as much as comparing different national or transnational trajectories.

As a consequence, the aim of this symposium is to explore from a comparative perspective, European popular culture in its crucial journey towards mediatization from 1945 to the Seventies, as an exemplary trajectory for its seemingly excessive foregrounding of music and sounds within the national film, radio and television cultures and the transnational mediascape. Topics of papers may include:

  • popular music and media industry
  • European Media industry vs American media industry
  • amplification and high fidelity;
  • audiovisual performance and the canonization of popular forms;
  • national/transnational pop music and culture;
  • popular music in film, radio and television;
  • cross-media singers and performers
  • stardom and fandom.

Confirmed keynote speakers are: Franco Fabbri (University of Turin), Andreas Fickers (Maastricht University), Wolfgang Mühl-Benninhaus (Humboldt Universität Berlin). Scholars from all areas of media and popular music studies are invited to submit proposals for contributions. Each speaker will have about 20 minutes of speaking time.

Proposals (max. 250 words, written in English, French or Italian), along with short biographical notes and key bibliographical references, are due by February 28 th. Submissions should be sent to Attilia Rebosio. Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than March 10 th.

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