Gender & The Media – Conference

NordMedia2017 – http://www.uta.fi/cmt/en/Conferences/NordMedia2017/index.html

The Conference will be held August 17-19, 2017, at the University of Tampere, Finland.

Chair: Greta Gober, PhD Candidate, Media and Cultural Studies, Warsaw University of Social Sciences and Humanities; Guest researcher, Center for Gender Research, University of Oslo
greta.gober [at] stk.uio.no

Chair: Carla Cerqueira, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Communication and Society Research Centre, University of Minho; Assistant Professor, ULP – Lusophone University of Porto
carlaprec3 [at] gmail.com

Co-chair: Karolina Dmitrow-Devold, PhD Candidate, Research Centre for Children and Youth’s Participation and Competence Development, Lillehammer University College
karolina.dmitrow-devold [at] hil.no

Working group dealing with diverse aspects of the relationship between gender and the media. We are looking at deepening our theoretical, analytical and methodological interdisciplinary knowledge of the contemporary gender formations that permutes our cultures across different socio and geo-political context. On one hand studies can explore gendered representations and relations, discourses and symbols featured in various cultural texts, such as newspapers and magazines, television, computer games, film or advertisement. On the other hand, we seek to explore how these representations are consumed and produced.

Critical exploration of contemporary social and cultural institutions will remain incomplete without profound understanding of what the media production culture is like today; who actually decides what we see in the media? What does it mean to be a media producer and what are the conditions under which media are produced? How the structural inequalities are reproduced in modern media institutions? And how is one’s participation in the production culture shaped by one’s gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, race, class, age, nationality?

Media can both contribute to and help maintain gender inequalities and hierarchies, through the persistence of hegemonic gendered discourses, but it can also serve as a space of resistance, social innovation and cultural change.

In this working group we seek to explore the old, the new and the controversial discourses and interrelations between contents, producers and consumers, or in other words between gender, identity and power.

Topics may include:

– Gendered representations of the refugees’ crisis;

– Representations of gender, class and power in the contemporary mediated politics;

– Media as a tool of empowerment and activist/alternative media strategies;

– Precarious working conditions and gendered labor divisions in the newsrooms, on-line and off-line;

– Positioning of girls and women amongst both amateur and professional media producers;

– Neoliberal and gendered imperatives in the creative industries and the role of media in legitimation of existing social inequalities;

– Gendered technology, the digital participation gap and the digital safety gap;

– Girls’ and women’s new media production within the postfeminist popular culture.