On April 29th 2011, the Center for Network Culture at the IT University of Copenhagen will be hosting a kick-starter research symposium focusing on the mobile and local aspects of today’s networked cultures.

The symposium will address topics, such as:

• Mobile communication and location awareness in everyday life practices; New urban spatialities developed with mobile gaming and locative social media;
• Privacy and surveillance issues as they relate to location-based social networks;
• Identity and spatial construction through locative media art / performance design;
• Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and location-aware technologies;
• Learning and education potentials of mobile and location-based media;

Invited Speakers:

Mimi Sheller (Drexel University, USA), Keynote

Christian Licoppe, Telecom Paristech (France)

Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa (Pontificial Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil)

Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Australia)

The event is free.
Registration required as seating is limited.
RSVP to net-cultures@itu.dk with name and affiliation.

See full program: http://itu.dk/networkculture/?page_id=548

More information: http://itu.dk/networkculture/?page_id=536

The NordMedia conference takes place in Iceland August 11-13, 2011, and the division on Media, Culture and Society will again convene several sessions. Below you find a description of the research agenda of the division.

I will remind you, that the deadline for submission of abstracts is March 25th, 2011.

Please notice that submission of abstracts should be done through the conference’s website (and only through this channel). The website of the conference is here: http://english.unak.is/conferences/page/call_for_papers

I hope to see you in Iceland!

Best regards,

Stig Hjarvard, Professor, Ph.D., Chair of Division
Media, Culture and Society

Chairs:   Stig Hjarvard (stig@hum.ku.dk)
              Professor, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

              Göran Bolin (goran.bolin@sh.se)
              Professor, Media & Communication Studies, Södertörn University College

The division focuses on the interplay between the media and their cultural and social context. The media have emerged as a central institution of modern society, and other actors and institutions must increasingly accommodate to the logic of the media in order to gain access to the communicative resources that media control. At the same time media, including mobile and interactive media technologies, become integrated into the fabric of the wider culture and society: Work, consumption, politics, family life, religion and many other social and cultural phenomena are transformed by the increased mediatization of modern society at the same time as the media themselves are influenced by cultural and social factors. The development of new social networks, changes in political communication and governance, and the changing relationship between art, culture, and commercial market are important aspect of these new dynamics.

The media perform important rituals in modern society, both by the staging of major media events and through the ritualization of everyday social practices. Media discourses establish political realities and negotiate the social meaning of age, gender, class, and ethnicity, and media have become important vehicles for the reproduction and renewal of lifestyles. The importance of media needs to be considered in the context of other transforming forces of high modernity: globalization, individualization, commercialization etc. The division invites theoretical, historical, methodological, and empirical contributions and it will provide a forum for a renewed dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities.