CALL FOR PAPERS: VIRAL/GLOBAL Popular Cultures and Social Media: An International Perspective
Conference organised by the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)
Keynote Panel
- Nancy Baym
- Emily Keightley
- Dave Morley (TBC)
- Tony D Sampson
- Paddy Scannell
This interdisciplinary conference aims to examine how and why everyday popular culture is produced and consumed on digital platforms. There is increasing interest in studying and discussing the linkages between popular cultural and social media, yet there exist important gaps when comparing such cultural phenomena and modes of consumption in a global, non-west-centric context. The conference addresses a significant gap in theoretical and empirical work on social media by focusing on the politics of digital cultures from below and in the context of everyday life. To use Raymond Williams’s phrase, we seek to rethink digital viral cultures as ‘a whole way of life’; how ‘ordinary’, everyday digital acts can amount to forms of ‘politicity’ that can redefine experience and what is possible.
The conference will examine how social media users engage with cultural products in digital platforms. We will also be assessing how the relationship between social media and popular cultural phenomena generate different meanings and experiences.
The conference engages with the following key questions:
- How do online users in different global contexts engage with viral/popular cultures?
- How can the comparative analysis of different global contexts help us contribute to theorising emergent viral cultures in the age of social media?
- How do viral digital cultures redefine our experience of self and the world?
We welcome papers from scholars that will engage critically with particular aspects of online popular cultures. Themes may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Analysing viral media texts: method and theory
- Theorising virality: new/old concepts
- Rethinking popular culture in the age of social media
- Social media, politicity and the viral
- The political economy of viral cultures
- Memes, appropriation, collage, virality and trash aesthetics
- Making/doing/being/consuming viral texts
- Hybrid strategies of anti-politics in digital media
- Viral news/Fake news
- Non-mainstream music, protest, and political discussion
- Capitalism and viral marketing
PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION
This one-day conference, taking place on Wednesday, 13th of September 2017, will consist of a keynote panel and panel sessions. The fee for registration for all participants, including presenters, will be £40, with a concessionary rate of £15 for students, to cover all conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs.
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS
The deadline for abstracts is Monday 10 July 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by Monday 17 July of 2017. Abstracts should be 250 words. They must include the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal address, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter. Please send all these items together in a single Word file, not as pdf, and entitle the file and message with ‘CAMRI 2017’ followed by your surname. The file should be sent by email to Events Coordinator Karen Foster at har-events@westminster.ac.uk
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