On 8 February Ben O’Loughlin will give a talk at the University of Oxford entitled, ‘The Conditions of Strategic Narrative Effectiveness: Infrastructure, Intention, Experience’. The talk will address some unforeseen difficulties and unintended outcomes public diplomacy practitioners have faced in recent years as they have tried to communicate about their nation in international affairs.

Time: 17:00 – 18:30

Place: Seminar Room D – Social Science Building – Manor Road, Oxford

This seminar series explores the role the media play as political actors in developing countries and fragile states. It gathers scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how old and new media are used to support different political agenda: from foreign countries trying to win the hearts and minds of a local population to local governments aiming at increasing their ability to communicate with, but also exercise control over, their citizens. Particular attention will be paid to understanding how flows of information can be mapped in contexts characterized by an increasing media density, resulting from the liberalization of the airwaves, the diffusion of mobile phones and new media, and the persistence of traditional modes of communication.

The seminar series is part of a year-long programme of events organized by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR) at the University of Cambridge, the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Politics (PCMLP), Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford and the Justice and Security Research Programme (JSRP) at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

~ All are welcome, please email iginio.gagliardone@csls.ox.ac.uk for further information ~

Date: February 21, 2012.
Time: 5.15–6.30 p.m.
Location: Founders West FW101.
All Welcome!

Ground Wars: Personalized Political Communication in American Campaigns

American elections today are won or lost in the so-called ground war—the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter to sway the undecided and turn out the base. Faced with a changing communication environment, characterized by audience fragmentation, an increasingly strained attention economy, and a certain desensitization to traditional mass-mediated appeals, campaigns have increasingly turned to “personalized political communication”—the use of people as media for political communication.

Today, both candidate campaigns, the two major parties, and interest groups spend millions of dollars on new technologies for targeting voters and combine them with increasingly intense old-fashioned efforts to mobilize and organize volunteers and paid part-timers, all to be able to contact millions of people at home—43% percent of all voters reported being contacted in person in 2008, and we will see equally intense ground war operations in the 2012 electoral cycle.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in two congressional districts in 2008, I will show how American campaigns employ personalized political communication to engage with the electorate. I will argue that the resurgence of labor-intensive and seemingly old-fashioned campaign techniques like canvassing gives campaigns a renewed incentive to try to mobilize people to take part in campaigns. This stimulates increased levels of political participation even as the orientation of personalized political communication towards marginal voters reinforces existing tendencies to cater primarily to the most polarized and/or lethargic elements of the electorate.

Dr Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and assistant professor at Roskilde University in Denmark.

Princeton University Press Website
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Ben O'Loughlin and Andrew Hoskins will give the first presentation of their 'new mass' theory at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego on 1 April 2012. They will present on the panel, 'Media Coverage of Crisis' at 4pm, Hospitality Suite 1501. Details of their paper are below.

Return of the Mass: Structures of Attention, Mediatized Sociality, and Why it Matters for IR

The mediatization of the social transforms the ‘connectedness’ of individuals, groups and societies. Mediatization refers to the manner in which our perceptions, relationships and institutions increasingly inhabit and are shaped by media and technologies, becoming reconfigured such that the logics of contemporary media (immediacy, visuality, connectivity) transform the processes we know as perceptions, relationships and institutions. It is not that social relations are necessarily fragmenting or integrating, as sometimes argued in standard accounts of global politics and society. Instead, the experience of individuals in the early 21st century is marked by shifting senses of connectivity and proximity which lead to a new sense of relating to social entities beyond the self. Consequently, new socialities emerge, featuring a simultaneous density and diffusion of relations. These socialities constitute what we call the new mass. Empirically, the effects can be seen in the circulation of news and other media content, the renewal and hybridity of media institutions and systems, and changing public conceptions of “the mainstream”. This paper begins to map the new mass by exploring how processes of authority, legitimacy and reflexivity operate around a series of international crises.

A local in EdinburghIn June 2012 the first joint conference between the International Studies Association (ISA) and British International Studies Association (BISA) will be held in sunny Edinburgh. The conference features the latest panel in the Strategic Narratives programme. This will be held on Friday 22 June from 14:00 – 15:30 (room TBC). The line up is:

Chair: Philip Seib, University of Southern California

Discussant: Frederick Mayer, Duke University

Alister Miskimmon, Royal Holloway: Integration as a strategic narrative? The case of the European Union

Ben O'Loughlin, Royal Holloway: Narratives of Global Uncertainty

Robin Brown, University of Leeds: Public Diplomacy and the Construction of Strategic Narratives

Laura Roselle, Elon University: Strategic Narratives and Great Powers

Ben and Alister will present further ideas on strategic narratives alongside senior IR figures at the roundtable ‘Unclenching Fists’, also featuring Neta Crawford, Thomas Diez, Roxane Farmanfarmaian, and Harald Mueller. This panel was generously organised by Karin M. Fierke and Antje Wiener, and will take place on Wednesday 20 June from 16:00 – 17:30 (room TBC).