International Symposium
Wallenberg Foundation, Lund University and University of Westminster
Wednesday 4th May 2016, Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, London
Preceded by the seminar Media Industries and Engagement Tuesday 3rd May (CAMRI seminar series)
Organisers Annette Hill and Jeanette Steemers
How do people engage with media such as television drama, twitter feeds, or reality entertainment? Media engagement is a broad term for research into how we experience media content, artefacts and events, from our experience of live performances, to social media engagement, or participation in media itself. Media engagement offers a rich site of analysis for exploring the dispersed connections across industry contexts, cultural forms, and audience experiences.
This symposium provides a platform for research on new terms of media engagement. We want to understand industrial contexts for engagement, including performance metrics, production practices and policy discourses. And we want to understand people’s shifting and subjective relations with media as live audiences, catch up viewers, illegal users, citizens and consumers, fans and anti-fans, contestants and participants. Media engagement thus encapsulates research on audiences, fans or producer-users, and the ways these different groups co-exist with those making content and driving policy and politics. The aim of the symposium is to investigate how industrial contexts, producers and audiences co-create, shape and limit experiences within emerging mediascapes.
We welcome research that relates to the following areas of enquiry for media engagement:
- Industrial contexts for engagement: production practices, policy discourses and stakeholder coalitions
- Empirical production and audience research: quantitative and qualitative methods and practices
- Audience experiences and engagement: affect, emotion and passion
- Fans and anti-fans: labour and fan practices
- Unmeasured audience: informal media economies and illegal practices
The conference includes a combination of invited speakers and open panels. Confirmed speakers include Professor Göran Bolin (Södertörn University, Sweden), Professor Raymond Boyle (Glasgow University, UK), Professor John Corner (Leeds University, UK), Professor Annette Hill (Lund University, Sweden), Professor Jeanette Steemers (University of Westminster, UK), Dr Paul Torre (University of Northern Iowa, USA), Professor Anne Marit Waade (Aarhus University, Denmark). The symposium is connected with the Media Experiences project, a production and audience study of television drama, documentary and reality entertainment based at Lund University, in collaboration with Endemol Shine Group, and funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (http://mediaexperiences.blogg.lu.se/).
Please submit abstracts of 300 words in English by 23rd March 2016 to Jose Luis Urueta (jose.luis_urueta@kom.lu.se). There is a registration fee of 25 GBP.
For information about the CAMRI seminar series see www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars
Tuesday 3rd May
Media Industries and Engagement
CAMRI research seminar 5-7pm, Boardroom 309 Regent Street, London
Speakers: Julie Donovan (Formats Consultant), Annette Hill (Lund University), Jane Roscoe (Head of London Film School), Douglas Wood (Group Director of Research and Insight, Endemol Shine), Chair Jeanette Steemers (University of Westminster)
This panel focuses on media engagement within the industry. The panel takes the form of a dialogue between industry and academic researchers involved in a collaborative project on production and audience research on engagement (funded by the Wallenberg Foundation and in collaboration with Endemol Shine Group). Panel speakers from the film and television industry, and academic researchers working on audience engagement, discuss how media engagement is multi-faceted, working across political and public spheres, policy and industry sectors, audiences and popular culture.
CAMRI seminar series www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars