Call for papers: Centre for Critical Media Literacy conference – Dublin – October 20 and 21

The Centre for Critical Media Literacy aims to facilitate a range of media research, production, learning and community engagement, with a commitment to equality and diversity.

Its mission includes scientifically informed and timely studies of the changing technologies that underlie media.

The Centre for Critical Media Literacy will host a conference, ‘Critical Media Literacy: Who Needs It?’, on October 20th and 21st 2017.

At a time when ‘fake news’ and worries about social-media ‘filter bubbles’ dominate the media-talk agenda, does media literacy mean more than knowing the difference between InfoWars and the Irish Times?

What does it mean to foster critical media literacy, and whose interests should it serve?

How important are categories such as class, age, ethnicity and intellectual disability to the question of who has access to and agency in social flows of communication and information?

Keynote speaker on the evening of Friday October 20th will be Dr Richard Barbrook, academic, activist and an author of Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Digital Democracy Manifesto’.

The conference will bring together policy, community and scholarly perspectives, and organisers welcome proposals for papers from a diverse range of pertinent subject areas, including but not limited to media pluralism, social media, effective networking, changing news discourses, gaming, online privacy and surveillance, new and evolving cultural forms and formations, media education/pedagogy, and access/engagement; in the area of computing for social and information networks, proposals are welcome in data analytics and sentiment analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, big data technology, image processing, virtual and augmented reality and massive parallel processing.

Proposals are welcome on the following themes in particular: critical understanding of ‘experts’, in an age of increasing diversity, specialisation and customization of media discourse;
media literacy as a classroom subject; the ‘computational turn’ in the creation and understanding of media phenomena.

Proposers should indicate whether they would like to do a poster session rather than a conventional presentation.

Anyone who has a proposal accepted will have an opportunity to send a full-length paper for inclusion in a special edition of the peer-reviewed publication Irish Communications Review.

To submit a proposal, abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to harry.browne@dit.ie by July 30th, 2017, with notification of acceptance by August 15th, 2017.