Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association’s (MeCCSA) annual conference will set off in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in just a few days. Hosted by Northumbria University, the event will span from Wednesday noon to Friday afternoon. This year’s theme is “Generations”, widely interpreted. Several of the sessions on offer should be of interest to journalism scholars. Below are JRN staff’s picks.
[spoiler title=’Show picks for Wednesday’]
15.15 – 16.30 Journalism Discourse I, chaired by Mel Gibson in room 025
Caroline Bainbridge: From “cheesy” to “sleazy”: psycho-cultural perspectives on the shifting paradigms of gender, power and authority in the wake of revelations about 1970s BBC stars
Jennifer Birks: Reports of the death of capitalism have been greatly exaggerated: shifts in neoliberal discourse in news about capitalism 2007-2014
Aileen Marron: Framing the “McCarthy Report”: Irish print media representations of the public sector during the financial crisis
16.45 – 18.15 Changing Technologies, chaired by Jonathan Mack in room 011
Katherine Champion: Print is dead, long live print: adapting to survive within the magazine publishing sector
Jeroen Dera: Pioneering the non-print: two generations of book reviewers in the sphere of new media
Daithi McMahon: Old dog, new tricks: can social media help youth radio stations grow their audience?
[/spoiler]
[spoiler title=’Show picks for Thursday’]
10.00 – 11.15 Media and Older Age, chaired by Rosie White in room 012
Tricia Jenkins: Digital storytelling and representations of older people
Deborah Jermyn: “Don’t wear beige – it might kill you”: reclaiming visibility in Sue Bourne’s Fabulous Fashionistas
Claire Mortimer: Alive and kicking? The politics of female ageing in post-war British film comedy
11.45 – 13.00 Journalism Discourse II, chaired by Milly Williamson in room 008
Katy Parry, Simon Popple and Nancy Thumin: Forces-scarred: assessing contemporary military experience in the media
Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova: Six murders, an abducted journalist and a homeless kitten: Russian independent journalists in the heat of the Ukrainian conflict
Anne Dawson: Are the young informed enough to vote?
15.00 – 16.15 Digital Divide I: Theoretical Perspectives, chaired by Massimo Ragnedda in room 012
Simeon Yates, John Kirby, Eleanor Lockley and Susan Potts: Digital cultural capital
Ralph Schroeder: A Weberian analysis of global digital divides
Grant Blank and Darja Groselj: A Weberian approach to understanding internet use
Massimo Ragnedda: Weber and the digital divide: class, status, and power in the digital
Marloes Jensen: Does the internet exacerbate or narrow a democratic divide? An exploration of the democratic potential of the internet by Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy
[/spoiler]
[spoiler title=’Show picks for Friday’]
10.15 – 11.30 Digital Cultures, chaired by John Downey in room 011
Alexis Weedon: Augmented reality storytelling, from book to mobile
Elke Weissman and Hannah Savage: The tribalisation of cultural needs: highrise and notions of the populist
Helen Kennedy and Rosemary Lucy Hill: Seeing data: how do people interact with data visualisations?
12.00 – 13.15 Technologies and Generations II, chaired by Peter Golding in room 025
Nicoletta Vittadini and Francesca Pasquali: Generational media consumption habits: a cross-national study
Jo Wachelder: Playing with technology: lifecycles, biographies and generations
Caroline Mitchell: Women’s radio archives in the digital age: communicating across generations
[/spoiler]
Further information about the event, including full program and presentation abstracts, can be found online here. The event’s Facebook-page is found here. The official Twitter account is @MeCCSA2015 and the hashtag for the event #meccsa2015.
Edited on 6.1.2015 10.26 (+2GMT): Staff’s picks were reformatted to a collapsible view for easier reading. A link to Twitter’s hashtag-search and the name of the event’s Twitter-account were added for convenience.
Edited on 6.1.2015 10.33 (+2GMT): The title of the article was changed for a more content-descriptive one. The original title was “Conference on media changes and continuities, live in a few”.