Workshop of the ECREA TWG Mediatization
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 technologically-
based 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. Additionally, there is a need to analyse deeply how mediatization changes the practices of doing politics.
Based on such considerations, we invite submissions on the following topics (theoretical as well as empirical):
- Contributions that analyse the mediatization of political decision-making,
deliberation and policy-generation.
- Studies on the mediatization of government/governance as well as
governmentality.
- Studies on mediatized citizenship, (grass-roots) transnational movements
and other forms of extra-parliamentary and identity politics.
- Historical studies on the mediatization of politics and policy.
- Theoretical reflections on how to extend or deepen our understanding
of the of mediatization of politics and policy.
We encourage contributions on mediatization from different academic perspectives. Please send your abstracts (not more than 300 words) by Wednesday, 15th January 2014 to one of the organisers (Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp). Responsible for the review is the whole organisation team (Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, Stig Hjarvard, Friedrich Krotz, Kristina Riegert).
Please visit the ECREA TWG “Mediatization” web page for further information:http://www.mediatization.eu/
This Workshop of the ECREA TWG Mediatization is organised in cooperation with:
- Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics& Political Science
- Priority Research Program “Mediatized Worlds”
- Research Network “Communication figurations”