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Euricom Colloquium #31

'The future of critical communication and media studies'
Piran, Slovenia
3.10.16 - 4.10.16
The critical usually finds itself in a difficult relationship with the social. Its strong investment into social change renders it both necessary and uncomfortable. The critical is part of a play of resistance and incorporation, where a diversity of societal projects formulate claims towards the critical and where other projects in their turn retaliate by launching counter-claims about their being ‘truly’ critical. Often, these anchorage points are provided by particular values, that almost always have long traditions in being defended by particular groups and resisted by others.

In this workshop we want to anchor the critical is the particular set of values linked to the Enlightenment, such as equality, liberty, solidarity, democracy and sister/brotherhood, in their non-essentialist versions. These values have been intimately part of what Mouffe has called the democratic revolution of the past 200 years, and we consider them still to be most relevant. From this perspective, the critical denounces and resists discourses and practices that structurally undermine, hollow out or attempt to replace Enlightenment values, without moving into the destructive. As many contemporary lives are affected by the combination of selfish individualism and eager capitalism, and disappointed by the impossible promises of representative democracy, we feel that a reflection about the critical and its anchorage points is very necessary.

Every field of the social is affected by these logics, also the field of media and communication. With only a mild sense of provocation, we can state that the problems are numerous. Media industries (or should we still say: culture industries) are structurally affected in their capacity to provide support for these Enlightenment values, and should become objects of attention for critical reflections. The social contract between journalism and these media industries has provided journalism with a safe haven for a considerable amount of time, but this contract now seems to be crumbling. With some naivety we have invested hope in online forms of communication, but the new commons threatens to be incorporated by a mixture of capitalist logics, non-democratic projects and narcissistic self-glorification. Governments and their policies, if they try to turn the tide at all, face a combination of legitimacy and capability issues, which rather structurally limits their interventionist capacities.

We strongly believe that critical projects are very necessary to explicitly address these deviations from the values of Enlightenment, but also to create new discursive horizons that envisage new ways to hegemonize the non-essentalist version(s) of the Enlightenment.
Organised by Euricom (European Institute for Communication and Culture), DESIRE (Centre for the Study of Democracy, Signification, and Resistance) and Social Communication Research Centre of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.

Euricom Colloquia bring together a small number (up to 25) of invited participants from around the world (there is no open call for papers). The format allows for more intensive and extensive debates than standard conferences as each paper is allocated 40 minutes for presentation and discussion.
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Euricom has been organising the biannual Colloquia since 1987. Information on past events can be found on the Euricom website: http://euricom.si/colloquia/

​Organising committee: Ilija Tomanić Trivundža and Benjamin De Cleen

Program

Day 1, Friday 2 October
9:00 On the critical (Chair: Nico Carpentier)
  1. Ed McLuskieGrounding Communication Studies in Enlightenment Criticality: Toward Dialectical Theories with Scale
  2. Risto Kunelius Reconstruction of criticism for and by media research - A theoretical case study on Axel Honneth’s relevance
  3. Kaarle Nordenstreng To be (truly) critical in media and communication studies: Reflections around a media scholar between science and politics
11:00 Coffee break

11:20 Critiquing capital I (Chair: Risto Kunelius)
  1. Marko Ampuja The New Spirit of Capitalism and its Implications to the Study of Media and Communications
  2. Mojca PajnikThe rise and fall of feminist political economy of communication-
  3. Janet Wasko, Eileen R. Meehan What is Critical Media Studies? Definitions and Debates
13:20 Lunch break

15:00 Public spheres (Chair: Hannu Nieminen)
  1. Slavko Splichal Disciplinary, promotional, or reflexive: conceptualizing publicity and the public sphere in an age of globalization
  2. John Nerone Journalism, the Civil Sphere, and the Network Public
  3. Ilija Tomanić Trivundža Are thousand pictures worth a single word?
Day 2, Saturday 3 October
9:00 Critiquing capital II (Chair: Janet Wasko)
  1. Hannu Nieminen What do we mean when we speak of media crisis – and how is it related to the crisis of capitalism
  2. Igor Vobič, Jernej Prodnik, Sašo Slaček Brlek Blindspots of political economy of communication: A case study of newspaper delivery labour
  3. Mandy Troger Crisis and the Information Economy: Re-Reading Herbert S. Schiller
11:00 Coffee break

11:20 Inclusions and exclusions (Chair: Ed McLuskie)
  1. Paschal Preston Democracy, Inequality, and Power : Ambiguities of Liberal Discourse and the Practice and Study of Mediated Communication
  2. Nico Carpentier Beyond the ladder of participation. An analytical toolkit for the critical analysis of participatory media processes
  3. Alice Tejkalova I’m definitely not going to have THOSE people in my session and no TV audience really wants to watch THEM!
13:20 Lunch Break

15:00 General discussion
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19:30 Farewell dinner
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