ANZCA 2022 Conference

‘Communicating through Chaos: Connection, Disruption, Community’

University of Wollongong, Australia (November 22 – November 25, 2022)

Convened by School of The Arts, English and Media, Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, and Centre for Digital Transformation, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences

ANZCA 2022 will showcase new directions for research focusing on fundamental changes occurring across the broad sectors of communication, journalism, digital health, and digital media. This includes burgeoning research and methodological frameworks in public and health communication, civic participation, and community-building. The conference will bring together academics, independent researchers, creative practitioners, and activists to explore a range of issues that intersect with digital, social, and virtual communities and Web futures, as well as the ascendency of streaming services and social gathering platforms.

The conference will run as an inclusive hybrid face-to-face and online event, welcoming emerging, aspiring, and established thinkers interested in interrogating new communication developments, connections, and disruptions that have transpired during the COVID pandemic era.

ANZCA 2022 will also facilitate debates on a range of developments that are responding to the apparent deepening of digital divides and the prevalence of misinformation in an era marked by significant global crises. The conference will scrutinise the emergence, adoption, propagation, and extension of new community cultures and practices, as well as the policy and governance mechanisms that have yet to keep pace with them, inviting us to consider questions such as what are some of the new testing grounds for human creativity and for overcoming post-COVID challenges in this interdisciplinary arena?

Key topic areas include:

– The transformation and impacts of COVID-era organisational, intercultural, and interpersonal communications, and responses to misinformation;

– New and dynamic forms of public relations and health communication, and the creative use of digital media tools among communities of creative practitioners, commentators, audiences, fans, and policymakers;

– The evolution of virtual communication and social engagement in networked, mobile, augmented reality, and online spaces in the COVID era, and the environmental/carbon impact of these forms of engagement; and

– Adaptions made to civic and community-building communication practices that are designed to support participation in society during periods of lockdown, isolation, and restricted mobility.

– The first day of the conference will feature a Postgraduate (HDR) and Early Career Researcher (ECR) Day, which is being organised by the Fan Studies Network Australasia. More details will be provided about this soon.

Conference Attendance: Given the ongoing uncertainty with COVID-19, ANZCA 2022 will be held in hybrid (in person and online) mode. Stay tuned for more details about attendance and registration options.

Guidelines for Submission: We welcome submissions for papers and panels on a wide range of topics as outlined above. We invite four types of submissions: individual paper abstracts; panel proposals; HDR/ECR roundtable day; and full papers for consideration in a special conference-themed journal issue. Please indicate whether you intend to present in person, or online.

ABSTRACTS: Abstracts should be a maximum of 250 words. Please indicate your submission type and include a 100-word author biography with your submission.

PANEL PROPOSALS: Pre-constituted panels can feature 3-4 speakers whose papers share a strong thematic link. To propose a panel, please submit the following: panel title; an abstract providing an overview of the panel (250-500 words); an abstract for each individual paper (250 words each); and a 100-word bio for each presenter.

HDR/ECR ROUNDTABLE: For HDR students and ECRs (i.e. those within 5 years of being awarded their PhD), we invite submissions of 200 words for our Roundtable session on Day 1 of the conference. This session will offer each speaker the opportunity to receive feedback on any element of their research from both their peers and senior academics. Please include a 100-word author biography with your submission.

FULL PAPERS: All full papers submitted will undergo a double-blind peer-review process to assess the suitability for one of two ANZCA conference special issues – in either Communication Research Practices (CRP) or Media International Australia (MIA). ANZCA no longer publishes conference proceedings. However, the organising committee will issue a formal letter of acceptance to the paper author(s) based on the peer-review. Please eliminate any authorial identifying information from the submitted paper, including from the title page, headers and footers, and document file names. This will ensure blind refereeing, and failure to deidentify a paper may lead to its rejection.

The body of the paper should be double-spaced, and left-aligned or justified. Quotations should be in “double quotation marks” and paragraphs of cited text longer than 40 words should be indented. Please number all pages of your manuscript in the top-right header. The suggested word count is a maximum of 6000 words, including references cited. Papers must be referenced in APA style. Authors selected for either CRP or MIA will be contacted following the conference, with anticipated publication in 2023.

ELIGIBILITY: You do not need to be a member of ANZCA to submit an abstract, panel proposal, or full paper. If your submission is accepted, you will be asked to register for the conference via our website. There are a range of different registration fees available, depending on career stage/employment, which will be announced soon.

KEY DATES:

•       Submission site opens: 9 May 2022
•       Submissions close: 05 August 2022
•       Acceptance notifications and instructions emailed to participants by: 16 September 2022
•       Early Bird registration opens: 1 September 2022
•       Registration for Postgrad/ECR pre-conference symposium opens: 1 September 2022
•       Early Bird registration closes: 7 October 2022
•       Registrations close: 14 November 2022

Keynote speakers confirmed:

Dr. Lev Manovich – Presidential Professor, City University of New York

Manovich is a world-renown innovator and top influencer in many fields, including media theory, digital humanities, cultural analytics, and media art. He is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. Manovich was included in the list of “25 People Shaping the Future of Design” and the list of “50 Most Interesting People Building the Future”. He is an author of 180 articles and 15 books that include Cultural Analytics, Instagram and Contemporary Image, and The Language of New Media described as “the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” Manovich’s digital art projects were shown in over 110 international exhibitions in Centre Pompidou, ICA London, ZKM, KIASMA, and other leading venues.

Dr. Amanda Lotz – Professor of Digital Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

Amanda D. Lotz is the author, coauthor, or editor of twelve books that explore television and media industriesincluding We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television, Media Disrupted: Surviving Cannibals, Pirates and Streaming Wars, and Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-funded Video on Demand.

She leads the Transforming Media Industries research program in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology where her research explores the implications of digital media on media businesses and the culture they produce. She led a major report for the Australian government assessing media business models in 2020 and the development of the Australian Television Drama Index in 2021.

Her award-winning book, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, now in its second edition, has been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Italian, and Polish and her most recent books explore the connections between internet-distributed services such as Netflix and the legacy television industry, as well as the business strategies and revenue models that differ. She is frequently interviewed by media from around the globe and has appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, ABC, BBC, CNN’s The Nineties, HuffPost Live, and ZDF (German television network) and been interviewed for articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Wired, and Men’s Health among many others. She has published articles about the business of television at Quartz, Salon, The New Republic, hosted the Media Business Matters podcast, and tweets about television and media @DrTVLotz. For more, see amandalotz.com

For more information about the conference, please visit https://www.anzca2022.com/

Here are some snaps of the Wollongong: