CALL FOR PAPERS | VII Seminar on Mediatization (2025)

 

VII International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes

Central theme: MEDIATIZATION, SEMIOSIS AND COMMUNICATION: GLOBAL

MUTATIONS

Organized by: UFSM-USP, May 2025

Formats:

Working Groups:May 19th to 23rd, POSCOM/UFSM/PPGCOM-ECA-USP (remote and hybrid)

Conferences and Panel Discussions: May 27 to 31 at ECA USP

Submissions: from January 15, 2025, to April 23, 2025

Submission link:  https://www.midiaticom.org/seminario–midiatizacao/submissaoresumo–expandido/

 

 

MEDIATIZATION, SEMIOSIS AND COMMUNICATION: GLOBAL MUTATIONS

 

The debate around the concept of mediatization has allowed us to confirm its contribution to the understanding of contemporary social processes, even when in interface with other concepts of the area of communication and social and language theories, including the demand that scientific production consider the continuous revision of its theoretical and methodological foundations. This review points to the need for scientific production that connects with a productive network and goes beyond the previous focuses of research groups centralized in hegemonic territories. In confronting the sociocultural instability in mediatization, scientific production requires comparing global environmental territories that shall be understood in the constant production of their differences.

Considering the convergence of the points selected for this edition, it is important to point out that the Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes takes into account the instability of science. Following the technological and sociocultural evolution of the contemporary, it requires a scientific production attentive to epistemological parameters that, in a review that is more heuristic than applicative, requires updating of its central concept, as well as the empirical verification of its dynamics.

 

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At the interface between Mediatization, Semiosis and Communication, the VII Seminar on Mediatization will focus on six thematic axes built at a meeting of the International Research Network on Mediatization and Social Processes, held in September 2024:

 

1. TRANSVERSAL AXIS: THE SCOPE OF MEDIATIZATION TO UNDERSTAND GLOBAL MUTATIONS

A relevant issue today to think about “mediatization” is to reflect on the scope of the term and the processes – in at least three perspectives. First, its scope is to deal with the central theme of “communication” (do the two terms coincide or not if regarding communicational knowledge?). Then, concerning the historical aspect (does mediatization refer to the technologization of humanity’s interactional processes, or does it cover the entire existence of the species?). Finally, does the word “mediatization” currently imply a concentration on the study of the media, or should it involve, in addition to their immediate observables, the established or cultural languages, strategies, and social environments as procedural partners in the communication work? These issues will be transversal in the set of panels and should be problematized according to the specific approaches developed in the axes and research of the participating lecturers.

 

2. NARRATIVE, SOCIAL TIME AND SPACE

The axis of time, space, and narrative is consolidated in the communication area, with a diversity of epistemological perspectives and empirical studies, ranging from media and processes that include orality, forms of writing, the press, radio, and television. From the mediation perspective, it is a problem reiterated in the study of television narratives. Or, from the mediatization perspective, there is the hypothesis that contemporary processes transform the relations between present, past, and future, interposed by media practices and experiences of social collectives and interactional circuits, which demands new epistemologies and methodologies that deal with the tensions between these relations when thought of through previous and current media, as Eliseo Verón addresses it in several of his studies. What is the scope of these lineages and currents for understanding the meanings of times and spaces concerning the production, consumption, and circulation of narratives that currently coexist in the media space?

 

3. NETWORK COLLECTIVES, IDENTITIES AND INTERSECTIONAL DIFFERENCES

From the perspective of circulation/mediatization, the discussion about identity distances itself from fixed and immutable identity signs (at various levels of representation, languages, discursive, narrative, and argumentative), to situate the complex issue of the resignifications that emerge in circulation, with collectives that arise and interpose themselves to hegemonic media offers, in materialized potentialities or not.

In this axis, we intend to strain the epistemological perspectives of mediations. To think about mediations and mediatization in the context of identities and sustainability in their possibilities, we deal with a theoretical-empirical proposal based on a semio-pragmatic approach to the relations between signs and consumers in the spaces of reception and circulation, therefore considering aspects of the communicative mediations of cultures. Among the observables of mediations and logics of mediatization are the experiences of “intersecting collectives” (a term derived from Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of intersectionality), mainly, in this call, from the categories of race, gender, and class, whose crossings meet other repertoires of oppression and resistance in updating. Racism is understood as a cross-cutting issue for these collectives, which provides hypotheses for understanding and operates as a demarcator of logics and repertoires of social collectives, such as peripheral youth, blacks, LGBTQIAP+, agrarian reform movements, delivery workers, advertisers and their logics in the constitution of imaginaries and possible worlds, with a view to understanding possibilities of overcoming the crisis of the Anthropocene and Human Rights for peripheral peoples in decolonial or counter-colonial perspectives. In these epistemological strains, we also intend to problematize current hypotheses and debates on identitarian criticism, like those derived from beliefs that block possible sociabilities and cooperation, favoring irrational interactions.

 

4. DEMOCRACY, FASCISM, AUTHORITARIANISM

In Brazil and several parts of the planet, we have witnessed the deepening of environmental imbalance and the intensification of social problems that occur simultaneously, with the worrying emergence of political forces of the physiological right and the extreme right that deny science and environmental issues which, in countries like Brazil, have become hegemonic, due to the intense use of social networks on the internet and,  thanks to this, of broad electoral victories that culminate in the control of the State by these forces. Digitally born candidacies, such as that of Pablo Marçal in the municipal elections of São Paulo in 2024, tend to dictate the agenda of electoral processes, revealing an extraordinary communicative capacity, which has a powerful impact on dispossessed layers of society. Certain that such tendencies risk not only the legitimacy of civilizing notions of democracy and human rights but life on the planet itself, to the extent that they reinforce reactionary and denialist discourses of scientific knowledge, it seems urgent to us to study and understand the processes of mediatization involved in these senses. We ask about the relations between mediatization and mutations in the political field, situated between configurations of the State and civil society.

 

5.  COMUNICAÇÃO , REGULATION, AND CONFLICT

The cooperation, regulation, and conflict axis refers to national and international levels. This topic addresses the conflict between global digital communication and local cultures, the interests of the local government, and the local ways of regulating this conflict. It also includes the mediatization and hybridization of wars and conflicts alongside new forms of unconventional diplomatic solutions to these clashes. Nationally, it is an investigation into how Brazil has been dealing with the regulation of consolidated digital platforms (such as X) under the prism of mediatization, considering that the relationship between the State and platforms oscillates between collaborative actions (like the launch of Starlink in the Brazilian Amazon in 2022), conflicting actions (such as the prohibition of the operation of X in 2024) and regulatory actions (with the creation of recent public policies,  such as the “Fake News Bill,” among others). The mediatization of these forms of interaction allows us to observe how different actors intervene: either because they have interests in media concentration or can take advantage of the news deserts that persist in the digital, or even because they are interested in the political use of the “technological solutionism” linked to the discursive postures of the platforms.

 

6. SEMIOSIS , EMOTIONS, AND BONDS

Social interactions mediated by mediatization logics, associated with the concentration of technological, economic, and political power of “big techs,” strain the public space established after the liberal revolutions. The citizen converted into a consumer, and the consumer, into a product, is regulated by the logic of the attention economy. Here, we intend to discuss the signing link that emerges from brands and products, but also as cultural signs (in the form of material images, not immediately mercantile) that are transported in time and space to constitute meanings of the present, directing interactions and elective affinities and stabilizing social relations in the production of the common and/or cultural enclosure, including generating polarizations. In this axis, we will also discuss cannibal communicational capitalism (Nancy Fraser’s term), a social form that sucks social energies to accumulate capital: capitalization in networks, which affects attention and affections, devouring the social substance itself, as Fraser says. Social acceleration is a) technological, b) social change, and c) the rhythm (time and space) of life. With it, time is scarce, and space is compressed. Social solutions become technical rather than political, threatening the democratic space of political deliberation. In this sense, how to happen (in Badiou’s sense) politics? As a transversal axis, it is a matter of thinking about “mediatization” as the scope of the term and processes.

 

FORMAT OF THE WORKING GROUPS: HYBRID MEETINGS (FACE-TO-FACE AND REMOTE)

The call for papers is available at https://midiaticom.org/anais/index.php/seminario-midiatizacao-resumos/submissao1 starting December 2024. The research group themes align with the general topic of the Seminar while maintaining flexibility regarding theoretical approaches and specific epistemological perspectives on mediatization. Method: 1. The processes established in previous editions of the Mediatization Seminar will be continued; 2. All submissions must be made through the OJS form (https://midiaticom.org/anais/index.php/seminario-midiatizacao-resumos/submissao1) in the relevant section; 3. Preconstituted working groups can be viewed on the submissions page.

 

FORMAT OF CONFERENCES AND DISCUSSION TABLES

In face-to-face meetings at ECA USP, with remote access and debates, the conference tables and debates will be held in a hybrid format, with in-person researchers in mobility at USP and UFSM, articulated with others at their universities, all with remote access. Equipment will be hired for events in a hybrid system. The arrival of foreign researchers should occur simultaneously, including with resources from national agencies abroad, whenever possible. At all tables, there will be simultaneous translation (Portuguese-English) Participants in the WGs will also participate in hybrid events – faceto-face and remote.

Each table will last three to four hours, with one hour for presentation and discussion of each conference. In total, six tables will be held, with lecturer researchers from four regions of Brazil, in addition to Argentina, France, Sweden and Portugal. The complete schedule will be published in February 2025.

 

PUBLICATIONS

The papers submitted to the Working Groups will be published in Annals of Extended Abstracts: https://midiaticom.org/anais/index.php/seminario–midiatizacaoresumos/issue/archive

After presentation and discussion, they can be published in Full Article Proceedings: https://midiaticom.org/anais/index.php/seminario–midiatizacaoartigos/issue/archive

The conferences will be published in:

https://midiaticom.org/anais/index.php/triviis/issue/archive

Later, debate books (in English and Portuguese) will be published:

https://www.midiaticom.org/e–books/

 

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Jairo Ferreira (UFSM/USP)

Eneus Trindade Barreto Filho (ECA USP)

Ada Cristina Machado da Silveira (UFSM)

Ana Paula da Rosa (UFRGS)

Aline Roes Dalmolin (UFSM)

 

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Dr. Ada Machado da Silveira (UFSM)

Dr. Aline Dalmolin (UFSM)

Dr. Ana Paula da Rosa (UFRGS)

Dr. Angelo Neckel (Uniasselvi / Midiaticom) Dr. Antonio Fausto Neto (UFPB)

Dr. Benoit Lafon (Université Grenoble Alpes)

Dr. Clotilde Perez (ECA USP)

Dr. Deivison Campos (PUC-RS)

Dr. Demétrio Soster (UFS / Midiaticom )

Dr. Dinis Ferreira Cortes (Midiaticom )

Dr. Eneus Trindade Barreto Filho (USP)

Dr. Giovandro Ferreira (UFBA)

Dr. Goran Bolin (Södertörns Högskola)

Dr. Heike Graf (Södertörns Högskola)

Dr. Hermundes Flores (Unileste / Midiaticom)

Dr. Ilia Kiriya (Université Grenoble Alpes)

Dr. Isabel Löfgren (Södertörns Högskola)

Dr. Ivanise Andrade (UFBA)

Dr. Jairo Ferreira (UFSM / USP / Midiaticom)

Dr. Joanguete Celestino (Eduardo de Mondlane University / UFSM / Midiaticom)

Dr. João Damásio (UFU / Midiaticom)

Dr. José Aidar Prado (PUC-SP)

Dr. José Luiz Braga (UFG)

Dr. Lorreine Petters (Université Grenoble Alpes)

Dr. Lucrecia Ferrara (PUC-SP)

Dr. Luis Mauro Martino (Cásper Líbero)

Dr. Luiz Antonio Signates (UFG)

Dr. Mario Carlón (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Dr. Michael Forsman (Södertörns Högskola)

Dr. Natalia Raimondo Anselmino (Universidad Nacional de Rosario)

Dr. Patrícia Gonçalves Saldanha (UFF)

Dr. Paula de Souza Paes (UFPB)

Dr. Pedro Gilberto Gomes (Unisinos)

Dr. Ricardo Zimmermann Fiegenbaum (UFPEL / Midiaticom)

Dr. Tiago Quiroga (UNB)

Dr. Viviane Borelli (UFSM)

 

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

 

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Dr. Dinis Ferreira Cortes (Midiaticom)

Dr. João Damásio (UFU)

PhD student Luisa Schenato Staldoni (Midiaticom)

 

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Prof. Dr. Ricardo Zimmermann Fiegenbaum (UFPEL)

Prof. Dr. Joanguete Celestino (Eduardo de Mondlane University/UFSM)

Prof. Dr. Hermundes Flores (Unileste)

Prof. Dr. Demétrio de Azeredo Soster (UFS)

Prof. Dr. Ângelo Neckel (Uniasselvi)

Dra.. Camila Hartmann (Midiaticom)

Ms. William Martins (Midiaticom)