CFP: “EXCITING NEWS! Event, Narration and Impact from Past to Present”

Brendan Dooley Announcement
Location
Ireland
Subject Fields
Early Modern History and Period Studies, European History / Studies, Film and Film History, Communication, Contemporary History

Conference Theme
The Irish Humanities Alliance (IHA), in collaboration with University College Cork, presents-
“EXCITING NEWS! Event, Narration and Impact from Past to Present,” bringing together a
broad range of current research in Ireland and abroad, regarding an issue of crucial
importance for the understanding of past cultures and our own. The conference is
organised in collaboration with the EURONEWS project, an IRC-funded effort to trace the
concept and use of news back to the early modern origins, as Ireland became integrated
within a European network of shared experiences. The conference will take place on 15-16
March 2021 (either virtually or socially distanced subject to government Covid-19 advice
and regulations at that time).

Call for Papers (deadline 30 October 2020)
Papers will discuss the many ramifications of media-induced anxiety and anxiety-induced
mediality, engaging the humanities, including history, film studies, literature, folklore,
creative writing and adjacent fields intersected by sociology, politology, psychology,
anthropology. News Media here include all means of mass communication impinging on
daily experience, from books to music, from the social web to films, on multiple platforms
and in multiple languages across municipal, state, regional boundaries.
Irish humanities have a key role to play in understanding the wider ramifications of
traumatised media space that are fresh as today’s news reporting about BREXIT or COVID19 and as serious as the recurring nightmares about catastrophic events which have
occurred on these and other shores from time to time.
Panels will be oriented around the basic themes of production (form and narration),
distribution (reproduction and exchange), translation (cultural and linguistic), vocabularies
(narrative representations), iconographies (visual representations), consumption (usage,
redistribution), response (appropriation, agency), control (institutions, individuals),
pathologies (biological, psychological and social), etc., including such specific analytical
categories as disasters, scapegoating, traumatic memory, and the like, as well as
methodological insights regarding text analysis and data mining. The two-day conference
will close with a round table drawing together and updating the perspectives studied, with
suggestions for further research. Publication of proceedings is envisioned in an opensource framework.
We invite proposals for:
• 20 minute papers, from local, International and conceptual perspectives (abstracts
250 words);
• three person panels (abstracts 500 words).
Proposals should be emailed to Prof. Brendan Dooley b.dooley@ucc.ie by 5pm on Friday 30
October 2020. 

Contact Information

Brendan Dooley b.dooley@ucc.ie.

Contact Email
b.dooley@ucc.ie