Bucharest, Romania, Oct. 17-18, 2014

Media and Communication in and after the Global Capitalist Crisis: Renewal, Reform or Revolution?
ESA RN18 Mid-Term Conference 2014
University of Bucharest, Romania
October 17-18, 2014

Full Call Text and additional information:
http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/RN18_2014.pdf

Call for Participation and Abstracts

European Sociological Association, Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research
http://www.europeansociology.org/research-networks/rn18-sociology-of-com...

Submission deadline for abstracts: July 1st, 2014. Submission per e-mail to christian.fuchs@uti.at
Abstracts should be written in a word processor, have 250-500 words, and contain title, author name(s), email address(es), institutional affiliations, the suggested presentation’s abstract.

The world has experienced a global crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 and is continuing until now. It has been accompanied by a crisis of the state and a general crisis of legitimation of dominant ideologies such as neoliberalism. Responses to the crisis have been variegated and have included austerity measures of the state that have hit the weakest, an increased presence of progressive protests, revolutions and strikes that have made use of digital, social and traditional media in various ways, the rise of far-right movements and parties in many parts of Europe and other parts of the world, the Greek state’s closing down of public service broadcaster ERT and increased commercial pressure on public service broadcasting in general, new debates about how to strengthen public service media, increased socio-economic and class inequality in many parts of the world and at a global level, precarious forms of work in general and in the media and cultural industries in particular, the emergence of new media reform movements, an extension and intensification of the crisis of newspapers and the print media, an increasing shift of advertising budgets to targeted ads on the Internet and along with this development the rise of commercial “social media” platforms, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the existence of a global surveillance-industrial complex that operates a communications surveillance system called “Prism” that involves the NSA and media companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, Skype, Apple and Paltalk; discussions about the power and freedom of the press in light of the Levenson inquiry, shifting geographies of the political and media landscape that have to do with the economic rise of countries such as China and India.

Given this context, the main questions that ESA RN18’s 2014 conference asks and to which it invites contributions are: How has the crisis affected the media and communication landscape in Europe and globally and what perspectives for the future of media and communications are there? What suggestions for media reforms are there? How feasible are they? What kind of media policies and reforms do we need today? Which ones should be avoided? Are we in this context likely to experience a renewal of neoliberalism or something different?

"Kali's Day" Reading with Bonny Finberg, Feb. 3, 2014, New York City

Come celebrate the publication of Bonny Finberg's new novel,
"KALI'S DAY" (Autonomedia/Unbearable Books)

Monday, February 3rd, 2014 @ 7PM
SAINT MARK’S BOOKSTORE
31 THIRD AVE., New York City

PENNY ARCADE, BRUCE BENDERSON, THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI
and the author will read selections from the book.
Emceed by JIM FEAST

Accelerationism: A Symposium on Tendencies in Capitalism
December 14, 2013, 10-20hr, Berlin Alexanderplatz

http://xlrt.org/

Contemporary capitalism is an object of high abstraction. The symposium is an invitation to discuss and disclose the anonymous and inner tendencies of capitalism, to study its monetary, algorithmic and energetic viscera. How can one grasp the living drives of financial markets and technological innovation? And more importantly: who really produces and controls those drives and how could any alternative political subject emerge without such a complex knowledge?

The recent debate on accelerationism and the philosophical scene of Speculative Realism just reminded of an old question posed by Deleuze and Guattari: Which is the real revolutionary path? To withdraw from the world market or, on the opposite, to go further and "accelerate the process", as Nietzsche already suggested long before the current Stillstand? For example today Germany finds itself in the eye of the storm: a mild social democracy at the center of Europe watching neoliberalism freely devastating the rest of the world.