This page is devoted to announcing events of interest to anthropologists working on media issues.
If you have any events of this nature that you wish to publicise, please send all relevant details to Sigurjon Hafsteinsson
(email: sbh(at)hi.is, please replace the (at) with @).
(Because the documents are in PDF format you need Acrobat Reader to download and read them.)
MEDIA PRACTICES AND CULTURAL PRODUCERS
EASA Media Anthropology Network Second Workshop
Barcelona, Spain, November 6-8, 2008
Abstract
The workshop addresses media practices and the arenas of cultural production in the context of the "new media" landscape. In broad terms, the workshop will inquire into the leading theoretical and methodological perspectives for doing anthropological research on digital mediated practices and their implications for the understanding of people's interaction with media. The aim is to explore the circulatory flows of media practices and in particular, how digital technology use is changing media culture, cultures of media circulation and the very definition of cultural producer.
Anthropological and ethnographic studies of media have been largely focused on analyzing reception of media products (television, radio, press and film) and media consumption related to domestic appropriation of technologies. There is also a wide body of research devoted to the study of the political dimension of alternative and indigenous media. However, there has been a separation between media and Internet studies, and between the analysis of media reception and practices of self production, such as family photography or home video. Current digital media practices urge scholars to examine self production contents and media flows from a broader perspective that cross-cuts divisions between public and private, media corporative products and people releases, home production and cultural industry, political activism and domestic affairs. The workshop aims to become a locus for discussing innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that deal with such interwoven practices of media production and consumption.
The workshop will address questions like: how is self production entering circulatory matrices of media and power? How does cultural production itself become a practice of reception or consumption? What are the implications of understanding audiences as cultural producers? Do new media practices redefine the role of cultural producers? Are self production and content sharing new cultural forms of media production? What are the cultural implications of people's media productive practices? Rather than an uncritical celebration of people's empowerment, this workshop encourages exchange of research experiences about ways of doing ethnographic research by following social networks and the circuits of new media practices.
Key note speakers
Elizabeth Bird (University of South Florida)
Don Slater (London School of Economics)
Dorle Drackle (University of Bremen)
Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Coordinators
Elisenda Ardèvol
Open University of Catalonia
Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson
Coordinator of the European Association of Social Anthropologists Media Anthropology Network
Organization Committee in Barcelona
Begonya Enguix
Edgar Gomez Cruz
Adolfo Estalella
Studies of HumanitiesUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya
Gemma San Cornelio
Toni Roig
Studies of Sciences of Information and CommunicationUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya
Program of the Workshop
Paper Abstracts of the Workshop
List of the Workshop Participants
Venue
Drassanes
University of Catalonia (UOC)more info: http://www.uoc.edu/symposia/easa
MEDIA,TECHNOLOGY, AND KNOWLEDGE CULTURES: ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ISSUESOF DIVERSITY, MUTUALITY AND EXCLUSION (W071)
10th EASA Biennial Conference 2008: Experiencing diversity and mutuality
Ljubljana, Slovenia
26 to 30 August, 2008
Convenors:
Cora Bender (University of Bremen)
Corabender(at)aol.com (please replace the (at) with @)
Ian Dent (University of Cambridge)
Ian.Dent(at)iandent.com (please replace the (at) with @)
Discussant:
Dorle Dracklé (University of Bremen) dorle.drackle(at)s-hb.de
(please replace the (at) with @)
Abstract
In the recent years, many scholars in the field of media anthropology have pointedout the necessity to study media as technology, in order to further decenter the textual content of media in favor of their social context. However, what do we mean by technology? This workshop intends to inspire the reception of recent debates in anthropology and related neighboring disciplines which have expanded the perspectives on technology vastly. Science and technology studies, material culture studies, ecology and environmentalism, medical anthropology, and anthropological studies of cyberspace and technoscience, contribute to a much better understanding of technologies not only as sets of material devices, but as complex, negotiated arrangements of agents, social practices, cultural imaginations, and circulating things. Abandoning older 'ballistic' concepts of technologies as physical tools having an 'impact' on cultures, research into the dynamics of technoscience suggests that much of what constitutes technology in a given situation is the outcome of politically interested media discourse producing models of diversity, mutuality and exclusion. Nevertheless, every technological orthodoxy produces its heterodoxy, as well. Unpacking the 'black box' of technologies, therefore, means to look at different opposing ways of how technology is culturally constituted by and in the media, how media-related practices configure and re-configure technology, and how technology and cultural imagination interplay.
Possible fields of exploration may include, among others: Symbolic appropriationsof technologies as 'techno-totems'; media, technology and the body; technology andminority claims; technology and indigenous media; media practices and technological ideologies; technologies, moral regimes, and joy; technologies and the reconfiguration of nature-culture boundaries; technologies andnationalism; technologies and imagined communities; technology and creativity;entertainment; media technology and gambling; technologies and representations of thepost-human; visual cultures of technology; technology, media and empowerment;technology and the construction of the subject.
See also theWorkshop homepage
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA PRACTICES WORKSHOP (W013)
9th EASA Biennial Conference: Bristol, UK
September 18th - 21st, 2006
Convenors:
John Postill (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
jpostill(at)usa.net (please replace the (at) with @)
Birgit Bräuchler (Asia Research Institute, Singapore)
birgitbraeuchler(at)gmx.net (please replace the (at) with @)
This workshop will explore the current state of the anthropological study of media practices and what directions it may take in future (an EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop).
Abstract
In recent years, anthropologists have taken a great interest in the study of media. A plethora of ethnographic studies, three media anthropology readers, one historical survey of this research area and the EASA Media Anthropology Network are some examples of this growing interest. Although this area of research is marked by a high degree of theoretical and empirical diversity, most anthropologists working in it concentrate their efforts on the study of 'media practices', including practices of visual representation, telework, TV production and consumption, news making, radio drama, biomedicine, online dating, web forums, cyberactivism, e-government, blogging and text messaging.
Drawing on these kinds of case studies, this workshop is aimed at exploring the current state of the anthropological study of media practices, and what directions it may take in future. Contributors may wish to address questions such as: What do we actually mean by 'media practices'? What are the key theoretical and methodological problems attending their study? How do different theories of practice aid or hinder anthropological analyses of media practices? In what ways do different media practices overlap with one another and with non-media practices? How can we begin to map and theorise the bewildering diversification of media practices in recent years?
Accepted papers:
What do we mean by 'media practices'?
Mark Hobart (School of Oriental and African Studies)
Finding our subject: media practice,structure and communication (PDF, 240 KB)
Daniel Taghioff (School of Oriental and African Studies)
'Speaking of practice': knowledge, fear, and music in an Ojibwa community
Cora Bender (University of Bremen)
The power of news: anthropology and the observation of local news-makingpractices
Ursula Rao (Institut für Ethnologie, Universität Halle)
Foreign correspondents/ foreign newsproduction
Angela Dressler (University of Bremen)
Media anthropological reflections on the writing of history in the case of the Danish Muhammadcartoons
Peter Hervik (Malmø University, Sweden)
Ethnography and communicative ecology: local networks and the assembling ofmedia technologies
Don Slater (London School of Economics)
Internet and changing media practices in West Africa
Tilo Grätz (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle)
The online nomads of cyberia (PDF, 337KB)
Alexander Knorr (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen)
Game pleasures and media practices(PDF, 160 KB)
Elisenda Ardèvol, Antoni Roig, Gemma San Cornelio, Ruth Pagès and Pau Alsina(Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Anthropology at the movies
Stephen Hughes (School of Oriental and African Studies)
The third space of television viewers
Sanja Puljar D'Alessio (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research)
For a list of accepted paper proposals see
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa06/easa06_panels.php?PanelID=27
For further information on the conference see
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa06/index.htm
For a report on the workshop in German language see
http://technikforschung.twoday.net/topics/Konferenzberichte/
For further information on this workshop, please contact
John Postill (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
jpostill(at)usa.net (please replace the (at) with @)
Birgit Bräuchler (Asia Research Institute, Singapore)
birgitbraeuchler(at)gmx.net (please replace the (at) with @)
The discussions within the workshop continued on the mailing list of the Media Anthropology Network within the scope of ane-seminar (PDF, 60 KB).
EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop:
Using anthropological theory to understand media forms and practices.
29 November to 20 December 2005
Organised by Sarah Pink (Loughborough) and John Postill (Staffordshire)
on behalf of the EASA Media Anthropology Network
The three stages of this part-online workshop will be:
29 Nov. to 6 Dec. e-workshop (part 1) (PDF, 374 KB)
9 Dec. Loughborough University workshop (Photo Gallery)
15 Dec. to 20 Dec. e-workshop (part 2) (PDF, 190 KB)
Workshop Programme
10.00-10.20 Introduction Sarah Pink (PDF, 82 KB)
10.20-10.40 Speaker 1: Nick Couldry (LSE) (PDF, 82 KB)
10.40-11.00 Speaker 2: John Postill (Staffordshire) (PDF, 108 KB)
11.00-11.20 Speaker 3: Dorle Dracklé (Bremen) (PDF, 95 KB)
11.20-11.40 Speaker 4: Brian Street (King's) (PDF, 104 KB)
11.40-12.00 Break
12.00-12.20 Speaker 5: Graham Murdock (Loughborough)
12.20-12.40 Speaker 6: Tom Wormald (Manchester) (PDF, 144 KB)
12.40-1.00 Speaker 7: Elisenda Ardevol (OU Catalonia) (PDF, 134 KB)
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-2.10 Intro to the working groups
2.10-3.10 Working groups
3.10-3.30 Tea
3.30-4.30 Presenting group findings and final discussion
