Media, War & Conflict Fifth Anniversary Conference

11-12 April 2013

Royal Holloway, University of London

250 word abstracts to Lisa.Dacunha@rhul.ac.uk by 10 October 2012.

Media, War & Conflict’s fifth anniversary conference will be held on
11-12 April 2013 at Royal Holloway, University of London. The conference is open to scholars, journalists, military practitioners and activists from around the world.

Keynote speakers confirmed so far:

* Jamie Shea, NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges
* Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania
* Cees Hamelink, Emeritus Professor of International Communication at the University of Amsterdam and Emeritus Professor for Media, Religion and Culture at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

The journal was first published in April 2008, bringing together international scholars and journalists from the fields of political science, history, and communication, and military, NGO and journalist practitioners. The aim was to map the shifting arena of war, conflict and terrorism in an increasingly mediated age, and to explore cultural, political and technological transformations in media-military relations, journalistic practices and digital media, and their impact on policy, publics, and outcomes of warfare. The fifth anniversary conference offers the chance to showcase the best research in this field while also taking stock of how the field has developed and identifying the emerging challenges we face.

We invite papers on a range of topics, including:

* Contemporary and historical war reporting
* Changing forms of credibility, legitimacy and authority
* Media ethics in the coverage of conflict
* The role of citizen-users and social media in conflict
* Terrorism, media and publics
* Intelligence operations and media
* Digital and cyber warfare
* Media and conflict prevention, peacekeeping and post-conflict scenarios
* Photo and video journalism in wartime
* War and conflict in popular culture
* The power of the visual and other modalities
* Commemoration and memorialisation of war and conflict

The deadline for abstracts is 10 October 2012. Please submit 250-word abstracts and author-affiliation details to Lisa.Dacunha@rhul.ac.uk.

Television for Women: An International Conference

Where: University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
When: 15th-17th May 2013
Keynote Speakers: Charlotte Brunsdon, Christine Geraghty, Kathleen Karlyn and Lynn Spigel

At the culmination of the AHRC-funded project, A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-89, the project team (Dr. Mary Irwin, Dr. Rachel Moseley and Dr. Helen Wheatley (Warwick), and Hazel Collie and Dr. Helen Wood (De Montfort)) are organising a three day conference which seeks to open up and internationalise debate about the past, present and future of television programming for women. Whilst television has traditionally been identified as a 'feminised' medium, because it is apparently 'domestic, passive and generally oriented to consumption, rather than production' (D'Acci, 2004), there are still significant gaps in our knowledge of the relationship between television and women. We are therefore interested in hearing from scholars about television programming made for and watched by women viewers throughout the history of broadcasting and in the contemporary period, and would welcome both other researchers writing about the UK and those offering comparative work overseas. Whilst our project has worked to fill in some of the some of the gaps in the history of women’s television, outlining significant moments in our research period, specific programme types, genres and scheduling slots which have become significantly marked as feminine, we know that there are many more gaps to fill, and hope that this conference will be a further step towards this.

Potential topics:
- Rethinking broadcasting histories: where have women’s programmes and viewing practices been left out?
- National histories of programming for women. Is ‘TV for Women’ a global phenomenon?
- Female audiences: speaking to them, mapping their tastes and interests.
- Institutional/production perspectives on addressing the female viewer: how have broadcasters envisaged ‘what women want’?
- Questions of gender and genre.
- Representation of women and women’s concerns and cultural competences on television (as addressed to the female viewer).
- Feminist (and post-feminist) address and representation on television.
& - Significant programme makers/teams/production companies in the production of television for women: is TV for women TV by women?
- Channels for women in the multichannel age: Lifestyle, Living, etc.
- Archiving issues that relate to women’s TV culture.
- Analyses of magazines and TV ephemera (listings guides, women’s magazines, promotional materials, etc.) and their address to the female viewer.
- Other media, other screens: histories of women’s radio, the female viewer and social media, women viewers on multimedia viewing platforms, which consider their connection to television etc.
- Understanding female TV fandom.
- The question of generation: how do women remember and relate to television differently at different life stages.

Abstracts of c.250 should be sent toHelen.Wheatley@warwick.ac.uk  by 12th October 2012. Pre-constituted panels of three speakers may also be submitted, and should include a brief panel rationale statement, as well as individual abstracts.

Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture – A Two-Day Conference

8-9 March 2013, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham and Strawberry Hill House, UNITED KINGDOM
Proposals due 30 October 2012

Confirmed Speakers:
• Michael Snodin (The Victoria and Albert Museum)
• Prof John Bowen (University of York)
• Prof Allan Simmons (St Mary's University College, London)

www.smuc.ac.uk/gothic

This conference, held in the Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill, west London, will interrogate the many and varied cultures of the Gothic that were largely set in train by the owner of this mansion, Horace Walpole, in the mid-eighteenth century. As Walpole’s projects well exemplify – an aesthetic rebellion against a classical orthodoxy, which nonetheless looked implicitly to the restoration of some former social order – Gothic’s cultural poetics have always been difficult to place politically.

To what degree have Gothic tendencies in Literature, Art, Architecture and Screen Media been participants in, adjuncts to, contesters of, or alternatives to cultural and political mainstreams, and how might such relationships be assessed by historians and critics? If Gothic was the Enlightenment’s naughty child, to what extent is its rebelliousness mental or political, and is it ultimately co-opted by the order that it appears to resist?

This is a multi-disciplinary conference, and proposals for papers are invited in response to such questions in the fields, amongst others, of literature, screen media, art, architecture and popular culture. Participants will be offered the chance to see Horace Walpole’s Gothic mansion, now resplendent in its recently-renovated state, and to dine there during the conference. Preference will be given to papers that are suitable for an enthusiastic amateur audience, as well as specialists in the appropriate field.

A bursary will be offered to cover conference fees for the best proposal by a postgraduate student.

Call for Papers
200-word proposals for papers of 20-25 minutes, should be sent, by 30 October 2012 to:

Jessica Jeske
School of CCCA
St. Mary's University College
London TW1 4SX
jessica.jeske@smuc.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 8240 4040
More Information About the Conference and Strawberry Hill House

www.smuc.ac.uk/gothic
www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk

Claire Leighton
Community Development Officer
Strawberry Hill House
268 Waldegrave Road
Twickenham
TW1 4ST
E:claire.leighton@strawberryhillhouse.org.uk
T: +44 (0)20 8744 1241

Peter Howell
Senior Lecturer in English
St. Mary's University College
London TW1 4SX
E:peter.howell@smuc.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 82404124