| The field of media studies has always grown in response to social and technological change, from the dynamics of the late 19th century to those of today. Just as urbanization, industrialization, and the mass audience were shaped and aided by everything from telegraph, railroad, and automobile to newspapers, movies, and radio, today new digital technologies, networks, and systems of interaction are shaping new social formations, from communities and politics to business, information, culture, and entertainment. These new configurations are networked as well as massed, interactive and iterative as well as presentational, distributed as well as accumulative, decentered as well as centralized, and international and global as well as local and national.
To address these issues the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University will host a conference Exploring New Media Worlds: Changing Technologies, Industries, Cultures, and Audiences in Global Context to address these issues, February 29 to March 2, 2008.
This conference will set a new agenda for media studies in new media worlds, generating new dialog, and making a critical difference in the field. The historical compartmentalization of media studies into different approaches, often in different academic departments, has left the field poorly prepared for the new dynamics. Such nominal fields as mass communication, journalism, broadcasting, telecommunication, and policy studies have each developed their theories, methods, and habits of thought in reference to only some media, parts of the communication process, and historical and cultural contexts. Compounding that fragmentation, the media are of increasing concern to scholars in many other areas of communication scholarship, from rhetoric to health to organizational communication, each bringing their own agendas and methods. The Exploring New Media Worlds conference will generate a discussion that ranges across all media and modes of communication, bringing scholars together from each approach, addressing the changing configurations of media in social life in historical and global contexts.
We are (a) inviting a group of the most prominent scholars in media studies to address these issues as keynote speakers, paper presenters, and discussants; (b) organizing roundtable discussions that bridge areas of work within media studies and between media studies and other parts of the communication field (see below for examples); and (c) presenting competitively selected papers organized into thematic panels. The call for papers invites reports of new research, position-taking conceptual essays, and discussions of media and telecommunication policy. We will solicit both international and historical comparisons.
A unique feature of the conference will be invited discussants. In addition to keynote speakers and those who respond to our call for papers, we are identifying a group of scholars to invite into the discussion. These include: younger scholars recommended by our keynote speakers, colleagues, and the planning committee; senior scholars primarily known for their work in other areas of the discipline, such as rhetoric, health, or organizational communication, whose work addresses the media; scholars representing each approach to media studies and component of intellectual diversity in the field to supplement the results of our call for papers; and journal editors, acquisitions editors, and other key decision makers. Travel grants are also available for graduate students.
The conference will produce tangible products as well as intellectual influence. We plan to publish the best papers from the conference in special issues of journals or an edited book and are initiating relevant discussions. It is via this published work as well as the influence of the intellectual conversation that the conference will have the best chance to achieve its goal of setting a new agenda for scholarship in new media worlds.
|
