Affective Audiences: Analyzing Media Users, Consumers, and Fans

PRECONFERENCE #4

Sponsored by the Popular Communication Division.

Title: Affective Audiences: Analyzing Media Users, Consumers, and Fans
Time: Wednesday May 20, 12:00 – 19:30 and Thursday, May 21, 9:00 – 17:00
Limit: 50 persons
Cost: ICA Members: $60.00USD
(Includes morning and afternoon refreshments, lunch on your own)

The study of audiences constitutes a central concern of contemporary (popular) communication research. As Democratic U.S. Presidential nominee Barack Obama fills football stadia addressing enthusiastic supporters and political commentators frequently refer to “Obama fans” and “Palin fans,” evidence of the centrality of notions of affect and participation in contemporary mediated communication within and beyond the realm of traditional popular culture is abundant. This preconference aims to explore the social, cultural, textual, and psychological conditions through which readers engage with, and attach meaning and emotional significance to, the texts they privilege in their everyday media consumption.

Corresponding with the theme of the 58th International Communication Association’s conference Keywords in Communication (21-25 May 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, USA) the field of audience studies constitutes a key conceptual battleground that has witnessed a number of paradigm changes over the past half century which have both reflected and contributed to the wider discourses of social and cultural theory.

“Affective Audiences” explores these recent paradigm changes by offering a dedicated space within the ICA conference program that combines empirical audience research with a thorough examination of the field’s canon and a discussion of its conceptual challenges vis-à-vis convergence and globalization. The preconference therefore includes themes at the heart of contemporary audience studies:

• Audiences, participation, and citizenship
• The changing interplay of media production and consumption
• Convergence and audience participation
• Television fan cultures
• Gender and audiences


Wednesday, 20 May 2009
12:00 Welcome and Introduction (Cornel Sandvoss)

12:10 – 12:45 Opening Address: Social Institutions and the Affective Engagement of Audiences – Denise Bielby

13:00 – 16:00 SESSION 1: Fans, Audiences, and Citizenship
Chair: Liesbet van Zoonen
• Audiences, Users, Participants: Conceptualising the Affective Public in the Digital Public Sphere - Josetin Gripsrud)
• “It’s Annoying When They Keep Going on About Iraq”: The Political Uses of Popular Culture By First-Time Voters – Sanna Inthorn, Scott and John Street
• News Talk Online – Liz Bird
• The Citizen-Audience Dialectic: Beyond the Active Audiences Framework – Jeffrey Jones

Break 14:45 – 15:00

• Civic Education Through the Media – Lothar Mikos, Claudia Töpper)
• Keywords for Studying the Emotional Audience - Emily West)
• Affects, Information Processing, and Postcommunist Audiences – Alina Dobreva

16:30 – 18:30 SESSION 2: Audiences and Institutions: From Consumption to Production
Chair: Cornel Sandvoss
• Affective Audiences, Affective Musicians, and the Digital Economy – Baym and Burnett
• Capturing Impact? Qualitative Methods of Enquiry into the Arts Consumption Experience – Carnegie and O’Reilly
• Affective Labor in Academia: A Perspective on Blogs – Lia Ungureanu
• Working for the Text: Fan Labor and the New Organization – R.M. Milner)
• The Power of the Image: Exploration of an Image Archive – Virginia Nightingale

19:30 Optional preconference dinner
Off-site, venue TBD.


Thursday, 21 May 2008
09:00 – 11:00 SESSION 3: Gender, Fans and Audiences
Chair: Lynn Clarke
• What’s Gender Got to do with it?: Orientation, Academic Culture, and the Gendering of Audience/Fan Scholarship – Christine Scodari
• That’s So Hot: New Technologies, Audience Feedback, and the Gendered Body – Sarah Banet-Weiser
• A History of Violence: Cultivation Analysis and Fan Studies – Andy Ruddock

Break 10:00 - 10:10

• Women's Magazines and Their Readers – Brita Ytre-Arne
• Gender and Fandom as Interpretive/Performative Frames – CarrieLynn D. Reinhard
• Empowered or Embarrassed? Female Audiences Respond to Women and Sex in Contemporary British Cinema – Louise Wilks

11:30 – 13:00 SESSION 4: Television and its Audience
Chair: Jonathan Gray
• The Reflexive Self: The Expressive Subject in Makeover Television and Audience Research - Katherine Sender
• Reality TV: the Audience Also More “Real” in this Genre? – Michael Real
• Identity, Value & “Quality Television”: Fan Responses to the End of The West Wing – Rebecca Williams
• Media Socialization and Media Convergence – Martina Schuegraf and Theo Hug
• The Winner is the Emotion: Appraising Reality TV – Katrin Döveling and Jakob Eckstein
• Tourist Audiences, Mediated Places: From Hobbiton to Sedona (And Back Again) – Curtis Coats and Robert Moses Peaslee

13: 00 – 14:00 SESSION 5: Poster Presentations: Affective Audiences (Lunch on Your Own)

• Affective Convergence: Reality Programming, Judgment Culture, and Inter(re)active Audiences - Jack Z. Bratich
• Authenticity as Affect in Web2.0: Lonelygirl15 and the Contested Terrain Between The Real and The Fake - Michael Mario Albrecht
• Casting Credibility: Patterns of Audience Assessment of Television News Reporters and News Programs - Dumdum and Garcia
• Interactivity and Fans on the Battlestar Galactica Website and Forums - Melanie Bourdaa
• Modeling Consumption: Selling Fashion as a Way of Life - Elizabeth Wissinger
• Out in the Field: A Theoretical Analysis of “Cultural Gleaners” - Suellen Rader Regonini
• The Affective Space in Online Fandom and ‘Imagined Communities’: Nationalism in Hollywood North – Samita Nandy
• The Labor of Pleasure and a Rhetoric of Empowerment in NBC's Create Your Own Promo Contest – Michael Lahey
• Traveling With Fanfiction Writers - Angela Lee

14:15 – 15:45 SESSION 6: Technological Change and Audience Practices
Chair: Virginia Nightingale
• Participation Beyond Production: The Return of the Active Audience? - Joshua Greene and Jean Burgess
• Technological Convergence and Audience Activism – Jennifer Rauch
• Understanding the Implication of Interactivity Between Musical Artist and Audience: A Virtual Ethnography of Live Musical Performances on Secondlife.com - Hiesun Cecilia Suhr
• Audiences and Friendships in Online Social Networking Sites - Rebekah Willett
• Unplugged Audiencing: Media Resistance Practices in an Age of Convergence and Ubiquity - Michele Rosenthal and Rivka Ribak

16:00 – 17:00 SESSION 7: The Future of Audience Research (Roundtable)
Chair: Cornel Sandvoss
Participants:
Lynn Clarke
Jonathan Gray
Kristina Busse
Nancy Baym
Liz Bird
Denise Bielby
Virginia Nightingale