An enticing conference will be taking place this September at the University of Zagreb, organised by Seija Ridell, Simone Tosoni and Zlatan Krajina. Rather sadly, I won’t be able to go as it directly coincides with our undergraduate induction day, which I can’t miss this year. Not only would it have been nice to present and perhaps organise a session at the conference; I imagine it would have been a welcoming first visit to Croatia. The full details are posted below, and conference updates will be posted on the ECREA Temporary Working Group page on Media & the City.

ECREA TWG MEDIA & THE CITY 2015 CONFERENCE

Urban Media Studies: Concerns, intersections and challenges
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, 24–25 September 2015

Confirmed keynote speaker: Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory, Dept. of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University.

Call for papers and panels

Media related practices are grounded in the city – where the majority of human population today lives – and media as both technologies and representations pervade nearly all aspects of urban living, cutting through diverse forms of public appearance, community, control, resistance and habitation.

As a result, none of the established perspectives in media studies, whether that of democracy and participation, production and technology, representation and use, or belonging and identity, can claim to have an exhaustive understanding of their problematics without appreciating the urban context. In the same way, no urban process can be fruitfully tackled without taking into account the involvement of media and media related practices.

Yet, despite being closely – though unevenly – entwined, from small towns to megalopolises, the two complexes, media and the city, have remained disjointed in the scholarly analyses. In fact, it can be argued that for media scholars in particular, the city has remained a terra incognita.

Wishing to revive the initial enthusiasm in media studies, which started as an interdisciplinary endeavour, Urban Media Studies conference aspires to provide a dialogic space for disciplines interested in mediated urbanism. We also hope to stimulate critical reflections on the challenges of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries. Thus, though speaking from the position of media studies, we invite submissions from scholars who work in all relevant fields that interface with the key issue of media and the city. These include, but are not limited to, such fields as urban geography, urban sociology, architecture, anthropology, science and technology studies, visual and sound/auditory culture studies, sociology of the senses, and other related subfields.

We specifically welcome submissions which deal with the following themes and approach them with an interdisciplinary curiosity – as potential intersections between two or more fields of research:

Historical connections between urban studies and media studies
Urban spaces and media practices
Urban sociality and media
Mediation of urban daily life
Media, architecture and urban design
‘Media cities’ as production clusters and complexes
Performing and audiencing (in) the mediated city
Media, urban power, resistance and conflict
Media, gender and the city
Media, ethnicity and the city
Urban spaces of media consumption
Urban law in the digitally sustained cities
Mediated urban sensescapes
Urban, outdoor and ambient advertising
Fashion as urban communication
Urban gaming
Journalism and the city
The city as a mediated ecosystem
Urban mediation and spatial negotiations
Methodologies of urban media studies
Teaching about media and the city

We welcome both individual and multi-authored abstracts, and full panel proposals (with four presentations; 15–20 minutes per presentation). In the case of panel proposals, the candidate chair should provide a title and a short general description of the proposed panel, together with the abstracts of all presenters.

In addition to conventional academic presentations of original theoretical, methodological and/or empirical research of any of the above or other related themes, we encourage practice-based presentations, like urban films and documentaries, sonic projects and other exploratory artwork that probe issues of media and the city.

Abstract proposals (300 words) for presentations and panels, together with short bios, should be submitted to mediacity.twg@gmail.com by May 1st, 2015. Authors will be informed of acceptance by June 1st, 2015.

The conference will also feature a special dialogic plenary where participants from different disciplines will be invited to share views on their work in the context of media and the city.

As part of our commitment to stimulate interaction between scholars from different disciplines, we shall also be organising a guided urban exploration of Zagreb’s industrial, modernist/utopian architectural heritage, and post-industrial urban developments.

A selection of papers will be published in an edited book and/or in a journal special issue.

Conference fee is 50 Euros for ECREA members, 70 Euros for non-members. The fee will cover conference materials, and coffee and lunch both days.

Any queries should be sent to conference organizers Seija Ridell (University of Tampere, Finland), Simone Tosoni (Catholic University of Milan, Italy) and Zlatan Krajina (University of Zagreb, Croatia). Please use the conference e-mail address: mediacity.twg@gmail.com.

OBS. For the conference updates, please follow the Media & the City websites on http://twg.ecrea.eu/MC/ and https://www.facebook.com/mediaandthecity