Benjamin Ferron
Département de Communication Politique et publique
Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC)
Centre d’étude des discours, images, textes, écrits, communication (Céditec, EA 3119)
Dear colleagues,
In the framework of the next congress of the French Association of Political Science (July 2017, Montpellier, France), we organize a thematic section dedicated to the following topic : « Mobilizing in the Media » (ST49, Tuesday the 11th of July in the morning).
You will find below and as attachement a call for papers. The propositions should not have more than 750 words and be sent before the 15th of october 2016 to : [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
The organizers : Benjamin Ferron (East-Paris Créteil University & Céditec) and Erica Guevara (Paris 8 University & Cemti)
ST 49
Mobilizing in the media
Keywords: political participation, social movements, activism,
media, communication, public problems
After the outbreak of the « Arab Spring » and the numerous mobilizations
such as Anonymous, Indignados, Occupy Wall Street…, which
have used new digital technologies to call for action and increase public
awareness on political issues, there has been a renewed interest in academic
researches on the communication of social movements and collective action by
the media. However, the rich international literature on these protests would
gain from exploring crucial questions raised by political sociology: the
socio-historical conditions of possibility and legitimacy of this
media-centered political activism; the processes of division, differentiation
and prioritization of the political and media work, within and between social
movement organizations; the prosopographical study of agents who, like
« media-activists », are sometimes lastingly invested in
communication and information issues and reap specific benefits from this
investment.
Many studies have tried to adopt a sociological perspective to analyze the complex « associates-competitors » relationships between the mass media and social movements. Others have focused on the professionalization of communication services of activist organizations, or the activist commitment of journalists in trade unions or professional associations. However, few studies have used the conceptual and methodological apparatus of political sociology to analyze, from a relational and critical point of view, these forms of activism which don’t operate only « through » or « for » the media (Patrick Champagne) but also fully « in » the media. We think about the rise, since the 1970s, of the parallel and underground press, free and community radio, pirate or non-for-profit television channels or, more recently, multiple forms of “web activism”.
The aim of this thematic section is thus to participate to a renewal of the analysis of the different media repertoires and the activist construction of public problems, and to open a theoretical and methodological reflection on the processes of production, diffusion and legitimization of social movements media. Numerous recent researches dedicated to the study of media and collective actions have been made on non-European fieldworks. The section will give a special attention to comparative approaches, comparing case studies or exporting concepts from the political sociology field on new cases.
We welcome contributions that address the following
interrelated issues:
Issue 1: Career paths and multi-organizational positions of media activists
Who uses communication tools for activism? How do activists get an access to the « traditional » and digital media, and how do they use and appropriate them? Do their trajectories and career paths share specific features? What social factors (gender, age, profession, socialization) predispose the individuals to engage in this kind of activism and allow them to position themselves in the advocacy work? What are the relationships of these activists with other related social fields (such as journalism, associations, syndicates, parties, politics, public institutions, artists, information technology professionals)? Are they able to reconvert the stocks of resources accumulated from one social field to another? How should we study the trajectories of « on-line activists »?
Issue 2: Practices and organizational resources of activists’ media and communication devices
What are the internal properties of activists’ media and communication devices?
What are the daily practices of « social movement journalists »? What
are the specific technical, economical and editorial constraints faced by the
agents? What are their day-to-day production and distribution routines? What
kind of beliefs and professional mythologies do these actors share and how do
they express their internal conflicts? How do organizational dynamics appear in
« cyber activism », or in social networks used for militancy? How do
communication issues change the activist division of labor? Our purpose is to
open the « black box » of militant communication devices and
organizations, and to capture interactions between actors and their
implications for the mobilization. Methodologies like ethnological observation,
sociological interviews and archive analysis are most welcome.
Issue 3: Social movement media as entrepreneurs of public problems
What are the effects of social movements communication strategies on public authorities and the media? How and to what extent does the communicational repertoire of social movements follow the internal transformations of politics and journalism fields? Can we say that this communicational repertoire of social movements has become autonomous, and that it is used to mobilize for specific public problems such as media critique, media system democratization or « alternative » media promotion? What are the consequences of its potential autonomy for more « traditional » ways of activism? We are particularly interested by adjustment and/or rejection reactions of social movement organizations when confronted with this communicational repertoire of activism.
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