In each Newsletter leading up to the conference, we will highlight eight different preconferences and postconferences that have been planned for London. This month, learn more about China and the New Internet World, Governance Through Communication: Stakeholder Engagement, Dialogue, and Corporate Social Responsibility, Global Communications and National Policies: The Return of the State?, 10 Years On: Looking Fowards in Mobile ICT Research, New Histories of Communication Study, New Media, Old Media, Social Media: Changing South Asian Communications Scholarship, Beyond the Brand, and Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and Communication. To learn more information about these and other preconferences, visit https://www.icahdq.org/conf/2013/confdescriptions.asp.

China and the New Internet World

Sponsored by Taylor and Francis/Routledge

Time:  Friday, 14 June; 10:00 – 16:00
Location:  Oxford Internet Institute, U of Oxford
Cost:  $50.00 USD
This preconference will focus on the rising prominence of China as one of the most important developments shaping the global implications of the Internet, and related information and communication infrastructures and policies. This is one aspect of a larger shift in the center of gravity of Internet use across the globe in which the major growth is increasingly in Asia and the rapidly developing economies of the Global South, such as BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. What are the developing contours of a ‘New Internet World’ and what difference with they make for policy and practice?

Call for Papers:  Short abstracts of proposed papers due by 1 February 2013, and completed papers due by 1 May 2013. All abstracts should be sent to events@oii.ox.ac.uk.

*For more information on the call for papers, please visit https://www.icahdq.org/conf/2013/chinanewinternet.asp.
Contact:   William H. Dutton (william.dutton@oii.ox.ac.uk)

Governance Through Communication: Stakeholder Engagement, Dialogue, and Corporate Social Responsibility

Time & Place:  June 15: Edinburgh, Queen Margaret University, Centre for Dialogue
June 17: London, City University of London, Cass Business School
Cost:  Participation may be in either or both events (see below). Discounted rate for those participating in both events: $145.00 USD

This two-part pre-conference investigates the topical question of governance, focusing on the role communication expertise and practices play in the way in which the idea is constructed and enacted by government and business organizations. We focus on three themes — stakeholder engagement, dialogue, and corporate social responsibility — which have become prominent in recent years in public and expert discourses about business, government, and their relationships with those they perceive as stakeholders.

In the first part, we will explore dialogue and stakeholder engagement in relation to policy and societal impacts.  We aim to generate reflection on the way in which these concepts have been utilized in a wide range of organizations and contexts and ask questions about the nature of change they may have contributed to.

The second part of the conference will focus more closely on corporate contexts and legitimacy by critically examining key assumptions about corporate social responsibility (CSR). Here keynote speakers will lead the reflection to encourage a critical discussion of the way in which CSR has been and could be deployed to respond to questions of (business) legitimacy, ethics and governance (www.csrandcommunication.com).

Submission deadline: extended abstracts 1 February 2013.

*For further details find us on https://www.icahdq.org/conf/2013/confdescriptions.asp.

Global Communications and National Policies: The Return of the State?

Time:  Sunday 16 June; 8:45am – 5:30pm
Location:  Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster Regent Street Campus
Cost:  $65.00 USD

There has been much discussion as to whether forces associated with globalization (economic, political, cultural) weaken the capacity of nation-states to regulate media institutions and media content, or whether national governments remain key players in shaping the media environment, media corporations responding to the legal and policy frameworks they deal with at a national level, and claims about media globalization have been overstated. These debates intersect with the shift towards convergent digital media, with the associated rise of user-created content, multiplatform content distribution, and moves from the mass communications paradigm that dominated 20th century media policy.

This 1-day preconference event will consider the relationship between global communications and national policies from a multidisciplinary perspective, incorporating global media studies, political economy, technology studies, and law and policy studies. There are confirmed speakers from 16 countries, and papers address these questions from European, Asian, Latin American, North American, Africa and Australian perspectives.

Contact:   Terry Flew (t.flew@qut.edu.au)

10 Years On: Looking Forwards in ICT Research

Sponsored by the Communications and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Time:   Sunday, 16 June; starts at 8:30 until Monday, 17 June; ends at 13:00.
Location:   London School of Economics and Political Sciences, Media and Communication Department
Costs:   $115.00 USD

Mobile communications are by no means new when we think in terms of walkie-talkies or car telephones but the hand held digital voice and data mobile communications that now populate our always on connected lives have only become omnipresent in the last 5 years. Ten years ago, when the first ICA Mobile Communications preconference workshop was held, Twitter was unheard of, Wi-Fi virtually nonexistent and mobile phone subscriptions a fifth of their present day numbers. Nowadays mobile ICTs are no longer merely mobile phones nor do they just involve communication between people. Instead mobile devices like smart phones, tablets or laptops use many convergent technologies (3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Television etc). How can this experience of, and exponential global growth in, mobile ICTs inform our ideas about the future?

In this preconference workshop we should like to understand more about the implications of this fast moving mobile world both on the social practices of the users of mobile information and communications technology as well as, in keeping with the main ICA conference theme, on the ability of researchers to deliver reliable and effective research material. This 10th Mobile Communications ICA preconference provides a chance to take stock, reflect on and look forward to developments in research in this field over the next few years. This will include discussing the general expectations and aspirations of an invited panel and exploring the future research implications of contemporary studies to be reported at the conference. We anticipate many diverse topics which will be linked through the common thread of looking forwards in mobile communications perhaps also providing material that may help set a future research agenda.

*Please visit the website for more information: http://icamobile.org/2013/.

Contact:   Dr. Jane Vincent (j.vincent@surrey.ac.uk)

New Histories of Communication Study

Sponsored by the Communication History Interest Group of ICA, the Communication History Section of ECREA, and the Communication History Section of IAMCR

Time:   Sunday, 16 June - Monday, 17 June; 9:00 - 17:00 (both days)
Location:   London Metropolitan U
Cost:   $130.00 USD (professors), $90.00 USD (students)

This preconference seeks to broaden, internationalize, and advance the history of the fields of communication study as a family of overlapping configurations and practices. It aims to bring together scholars from ICA, ECREA, IAMCR, NCA, and select rhetoric societies in an effort to stoke new, cross-national and cross-field conversations about the study of communication in long and broad historical perspective. It aspires  to push the empirical and theoretical boundaries of histories and pre-histories of the field by attending to overlooked research areas, emerging conceptual orientations, and new axes of understanding and comparison among distinct  traditions cutting across communication, media studies, cultural studies, journalism, and rhetoric, among other fields—and across institutional, intellectual, social, cultural, discursive, and material history.

Contact:   David W. Park (park@lakeforest.edu)

New Media, Old Media, Social Media: Changing South Asian Communications Scholarship

Sponsored by ICA Communication Law and Policy Division, the U of Pennsylvania, Jamia Millia Islamia, Shiv Nadar U, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the U of London, and Florida State U

Time:   Sunday, 16 June; 9:00 - 20:00 and Monday, 17 June; 9:00 - 15:00 (two-day conference)
Location:   Khalili Lecture Theatre (Russell Square), School of Oriental and African Studies, U of London
Cost:   $75.00 USD

Across South Asia, media and communications sector expanded dramatically in the last two decades, fuelling new forms of mediated politics and public cultures, and new linkages with global communication and media networks. First of its kind to focus exclusively on South Asian media, this preconference showcases most recent scholarly work on media growth and communications policy in the region and their significance for broader communications scholarship. It is a major meeting point for scholars studying South Asian media and communication, and an opportunity to review and advance communications research and training in the region.

Contact:  Stephen D. McDowell (steve.mcdowell@cci.fsu.edu)

Beyond the Brand

Time:  Monday, 17 June ; 8:00 – 16:30 
Location:  London School of Economics
Cost:  $75.00 USD

A vital shift in contemporary communication is related to the ways in which interpersonal and public communication have been (re)located and transformed in increasingly promotional contexts. One index of this transformation is the ubiquity, polyvalence, and assumptions of branding. The “work” of the brand is to act at once as representation and object, communication and control, market and media.
As concept, metaphor, technology and communicative logic, brands are part popular culture and part commerce, part personal and part collective, part rationality and part affect. They appear to be everywhere even as they effectively seek to hide their origins.

What resources do scholars have to get “beyond the brand”? How can we come up with more effective and trenchant definitions and analytical tools to overcome brands’ seeming ubiquity, and to defuse the apparent power of branding in language and in practice? The goal of this preconference is to develop resources and strategies in four thematic areas: brands and methods/critique; brands, knowledge, and surveillance; brands and communities of resistance (locally and transnationally); and brands and industrial/institutional change.

Contact:  Devon Powers (devon.powers@drexel.edu) 

Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and Communication

Sponsored by ICA Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division

Time:   Monday 17 June; 8:00 - 17:00
Location:   Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, U of London
Cost:   Standard $130.00 USD; Students $65.00 USD

This preconference brings together a very wide range of perspectives on media and communication (e.g. media history/archaeology, audience studies, political theory, software studies, science and technology studies, digital aesthetics, cultural geography, urban studies, etc) to reflect explicitly on the phenomenological groundings of their work on media. The phenomenological thinking to which participants might connect will be broad-based, ranging from core thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre to those with looser affiliations to phenomenology per se, for example Arendt, Bergson, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Garfinkel, Ingold, Latour, Whitehead and Harman. The overall aim is to go beyond a mere congregation of media phenomenologists. Instead, the preconference will encourage critical reflection on what various readings of phenomenology might offer media and technology studies that other approaches cannot. Conversely, it will also welcome reflections on the limits of phenomenological approaches in philosophical, theoretical, political and empirical terms.

*Preconference website http://conditionsofmediation.wordpress.com/

Contact:  Dr. Scott Rodgers (s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk)