2012-06-05: Andrew Chadwick Speaking at This Year's Holberg Prize Symposium

Andrew Chadwick will be speaking at this year's Holberg International Memorial Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, on June 5.

This year, the prize of NOK 4.5 million (or EUR 570,000/$800,000) has been awarded to Manuel Castells for his outstanding work as the leading sociologist of the city and new information and media technologies. The prize is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law, and theology.

More information on the 2012 Holberg International Memorial Prize can be found here.

The 2012 Holberg International Memorial Prize Symposium programme can be found here.

The Symposium is open to the public.

2012-04-27 Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media Analysis

The NPCU is supporting the launch of a special conference and networking event on social media analysis entitled Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media Analysis on Friday 27 April 2012 in central London. It is designed for everyone interested in the potential of social media data to stimulate data-driven discovery and decision-making in this hyper-connected digital era. 

For a limited time, until Monday 13 April, a special admission price for University affiliates of GBP 37 will be available. Please email lampofo@zero1events.com for the discount code. More information about the event including the programme can be found by visiting www.zero1events.com

The event will feature short, energetic talks from experts from the fields of psychology, political and security intelligence, gamification, big data and brand insight amongst others. 

Distinguished speakers include:

Kevin Anderson – The Guardian, Al-Jazeera

Pippa Norris – Ministry of Defence

Professor Martin Everett – University of Manchester

David Stillwell – University of Cambridge

Nathalie Nihai – The Web Psychologist

Alfred Rolington – Former CEO Jane’s Information Group, Oxford Analytica

Ben O'Loughlin and Nick Anstead - NPCU and LSE

For more information, please visit www.zero1events.com and Twitter @zero1events

2012-07-20 Olympics@NPCU - Call for papers

Call for Papers - Olympics and the ‘isms’

Deadline 23 March 2012

Royal Holloway University of London, 20 July 2012

In summer 2012, London will host the XXX Olympic and XIV Paralympic Games.  As part of the Olympic Village, Royal Holloway provides a stimulating environment for a multidisciplinary dialogue that explores the tensions and contradictions within and between modern Olympic ideals and traditional ideologies (‘isms’). By seeking to sustain certain narratives and ideologies that precede the 21st century, the Olympics seemingly stands as an anomaly in our post/alter-modern times.

Following the Olympic idea of combining “a healthy body and a healthy mind”, we would like to invite contributions from athletes and academics to explore and problematise the framing of Olympics in the following binary logics:

• Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
  • What impact do the Games have on ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘national’ narratives and identities?
• Commercialism and Idealism
  • How does the commercialisation of the Games bear upon the political and ethical ideals underpinning our conceptions of sport generally and the Olympics in particular?
• Amateurism and Professionalism
  • Is there a contradiction between the Olympic ideal of athletic amateurism and trends towards professionalism? How does this impact beyond the Games?

These are the ‘isms’ we are interested in, but we welcome additional ideas and contributions.

The morning session will follow a traditional conference format with speakers giving presentations followed by questions. The afternoon will be devoted to an interactive discourse analysis workshop in which we invite all participants to analyse selected Olympic-related texts, PR materials and media coverage. The results of this analysis will contribute towards a paper evaluating the discourse surrounding the Games. This, together with a selection of papers from the morning session, will be put forward for publication in a special issue of a journal.

If you are interested in taking part at this conference, please contact us with a 300 word abstract at olympismconference@gmail.com  by 23^rd March 2012.

2012-06-22 Strategic Narrative panel at BISA/ISA Edinburgh

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).

2012-02-08 O'Loughlin speaks at Oxford seminar on Strategic Narratives

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 ~

2012-01-31 O'Loughlin at GCHQ - Cyber Security: Lacunae of Strategy

On 31 January 2012 a workshop will be held at King’s College London for GCHQ on the theme, ‘Cyber Security: Lacunae of Strategy’. The UK’s cyber security strategy seems to build upon ideas evident in Foreign Secretary William Hague’s recent speeches. In November 2011 he stated:

Our vision is for the UK in 2015 to derive huge economic and social value from a vibrant, resilient and secure cyberspace, where our actions, guided by our core values of liberty, fairness, transparency and the rule of law, enhance prosperity, national security and a strong society.

UK Cyber Security Strategy: Protecting and Promoting the UK in a Digital World

This suggests the trade-offs any national cybersecurity strategy faces, not least how security policy should not impinge upon democracy, liberty or other ‘core values’. Meanwhile there is a lack of conceptual clarity, with cyber war, crime and security often being used interchangeably, and a recurring difficulty among policymakers of how to conceive of ‘cyberspace’ given its social and technical character.

Ben O’Loughlin and Andrew Hoskins will talk about how strategy can be organized and communicated in these conditions, conditions they have theorized as ‘diffused war’. Other speakers include Thomas Rid, Richard Clayton and Tim Jordan.

2012-02-21: Rasmus Kleis Nielsen Speaking on his Major New Book, "Ground Wars"

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
Amazon

2012-04-01 'The New Mass' theory at ISA San Diego

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.

2011-11-10 Ben O'Loughlin speaking at Digital Methods workshop, Manchester

Ben O'Loughlin is among the speakers on 10 November 2011 at a workshop Digital Methods: Tools for Analysis held at the University of Manchester. This workshop brings together leading international scholars developing and applying innovative new methods to analyse web 2.0 applications. The focus of the workshop is on new methodologies for capturing and analysing social media data from applications such as blogs, social networking, micro-blogging or video sharing sites and hyperlinks. Ben will present the latest version of his research with Nick Anstead, "Semantic Polling: the 2010 UK General Election and Real-Time Opinion Monitoring". Based on recent interviews with pollsters, party strategies, data mining companies and electoral regulators, the research shows how different actors made use of real-time public opinion polling through social media - semantic polling - in the 2010 UK General Election. 

View list of participants and workshop agenda

Participation is free but registration is required as the number of places is limited.

If you are interested in participating please contact the organisers at contact.projectcode@gmail.com

2011-11-03 Ben O'Loughlin to speak on Crisis and New Communications Media

Adam Smith Research Foundation, University of Glasgow

Symposium: Crisis and New Communications Media

Date and time: Thursday 3 November 2011, 5–7pm

Venue: Seminar Room 109, 66 Oakfield Avenue

It makes decreasing sense to speak of media and crisis in isolation. As the media insinuates itself into the everyday in the developed and the developing world, it becomes a pervasive tool for both perpetrating and assuaging crises, for garnering revolutions and for intervention by citizens and enforcement agencies/first responders, and as an emergent source for later legitimizing or contesting such actions in broader mainstream news and political discourses.

Participants

Prof. Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow); Prof. Ben O’Loughlin (Royal Holloway University); Dr Pieter Verdegem (Uppsala University); Dr Jennifer Giroux (ETH Zurich); Dr Karen Renaud (University of Glasgow); Prof. Michele Burman (University of Glasgow (TBC))

To reserve a place, please email Frances.Gaughan@glasgow.ac.uk