ICA Pre-Conference Leicester 2013

Audiences, elsewhere? Reviewing the applicability of audiences and audience research to those in other fields

A pre-conference at ICA 2013 co-organized by the Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA and the COST Action IS0906 Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, and presented in collaboration with ICA Division for Communication and Technology

Hosted by the University of Leicester
June 17th, 2013

Conference website: http://audienceselsewhere.wordpress.com/

The last date for registering to attend the ICA pre-conference Audiences, elsewhere? at the University of Leicester is 10th May 2013. We welcome all colleagues interested in attending the conference even if they are not presenters.

Please register on the ICA website - https://www.icahdq.org/conf/index.asp. Please register by 10th May

The pre-conference programme is available on this link - http://audienceselsewhere.wordpress.com/pre-conference-programme/

The pre-conference website has travel and accommodation details - http://audienceselsewhere.wordpress.com

This pre-conference at ICA 2013 co-organized by the Audience and Reception Studies section of ECREA and the COST Action IS0906 Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, and presented in collaboration with ICA Division for Communication and Technology

Hosted by the University of Leicester
June 17th, 2013

Opening keynote address: Professor Kirsten Drotner, Institute of Literature, Culture and Media Studies, University of Southern Denmark and founding director of DREAM: Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials.
Closing keynote address: Professor Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science, director of EU Kids Online network.

Intellectual scope - More than five decades after the theoretical and empirical appearance of in communications research, it seems apt to ask what, if at all, the idea of audiences and the insights from reception studies might imply for those elsewhere. Caught up in internal debates about establishing the role of the reader, countering and then qualifying the narrative of powerful media effects, over-celebrating diversity, accumulating too much empirical work at the expense of theoretical advancement, and lately, the advent of users and produsers – audience research has seldom had the chance to (re)consider its applicability and utility for other fields. Some of these links ‘elsewhere’ have already been theorised by audience researchers – consider the public or the citizen from democratic participation theory. Consider also, how the text-reader metaphor that lies at the heart of audience reception becomes a tool worthy of interest in the face of discussions about technologies as texts or the affordances and appropriation of technologies. But there are other links waiting to be unpicked – how best might the audience (a media-framed concept) and insights from reception research inform, for instance, education studies, tourism, sociologies of the family? Such a line of questioning places the tradition of audience research into a direct dialogue with other trajectories communication scholars walk on.

We suggest that reviewing the applicability of audience research to those outside communication studies is an important task for two overlapping reasons. First, in intellectual terms, indeed, there is a danger in not engaging with these questions, for these fields, ‘elsewhere’ often assume the audience to be homogenous, singular, or even passive – an ironical fact after the last fifty years of theoretical advancements in audience studies, which have proved otherwise. Second, in more socio-economic terms, audience researchers are often called upon to inform policy, a task in which we must convey the justification for our agenda to economists, political scientists, sociologists, educators and others. This should make us question as to what we must cross-fertilise for these bridges to be built, which insights shall not prove to be useful. And so, Audiences, Elsewhere brings together keynote speakers from both within and outside the field of academic audience research and proposes a work-in-progress format where the latest research can be discussed with aim to look at what may be useful for ‘elsewhere’.

Organising teams

ECREA organising team: Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Ranjana Das, Jakob Bjur
COST organising team: Geoffroy Patriarche, Helena Bilandzic and the Steering Group of the COST Action IS0906
ICA Division for Communication and Technology: Kwan Lee, James Danowski and Lee Humphreys

The programme is available in attachment to this webpage.