The final programme for the Reframing the Nation international conference can be viewed here. The event marks the next step in our exploratory work on the role of strategic narratives in global politics: how states manage the communication of their interests and values in our new media ecology. It is organised by the NPCU, Royal Holloway's Centre for European Politics, and the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC).
Proving PR Success in a Digital World
Lawrence Ampofo, a PhD student at NPCU, has a new article in Communications World on the challenge of measusring the impact of PR activity. Read it here.
Call for PhD applications
Call for PhD applications
Great Powers and Strategic Narratives
The Department of Politics and International Relations has two competitive Home/EU fee waiver scholarships on offer for promising PhD students. Dr Alister Miskimmon and Dr Ben O’Loughlin (Centre for European Politics and New Political Communication Unit) are keen to attract outstanding candidates to work in the area of strategic narratives. The successful candidates will work alongside Dr Miskimmon and Dr O’Loughlin in developing a research framework analysing how the world’s Great Powers project their interests in the context of the new media ecology which shapes political communication.
Major powers have gained internal and external utility from the strategic projection of national narratives. But two trends warrant a renewed focus on such strategies. First, the long-term rise of emerging powers to challenge US pre-eminence will entail narrative ‘work’ on their part, both domestically and internationally, as they each adapt to new power balances. Second, a transformed communications environment means narrative strategies must account for an extended global media ‘menu’ of channels and the unpredictable presence of dispersed, participatory media which can undermine their narratives. As such, the patterns of communication in the international system are likely to become less predictable in coming decades, and major powers will have to adapt their processes of narrative formation and projection. By examining how the Great Powers project their foreign policy narratives, this research offers the starting-point for an empirically-led re-assessment of theories and approaches to analyzing the intersection of interests, strategies and narratives, to explain the forces shaping new major power politics at the beginning of the 21stcentury.
To apply, in the first instance please email in your CV and proposal (1,500-2,000 words) or any enquiries to Alister.Miskimmon@rhul.ac.uk or Ben.Oloughlin@rhul.ac.uk.
Deadline: 18th May 2009.
Japanese media and the North Korean missile
Our PhD student Chris Perkins is in Japan carrying out fieldwork. Here are his thoughts on Japanese media, and click on the link for more.
Fight fire with fire? Maybe it can’t be helped...
On the 5th of April 2009, after a few false alarms, North Korea launched a ballistic missile with the (supposed) intention of putting a communications satellite into orbit. It was feared that parts of the missile would fall on prefectures in the north of Japan’s main island Honshu. In the end the missile passed over Japanese airspace, its first stage dropping into the Sea of Japan. The launch was the latest episode in turbulent North Korea – Japan relations. It also marked a possible turning point in political moves towards revision of the peace constitution. Such revision would require national debate, and it is being hotly contested in academic circles. However, here I want to show how television programmes contribute to the framing of events such as the North Korean missile so that military action and constitutional revision take on an air of inevitability with the general public, becoming commonsensical, and as a result setting out the terrain for public debate in favour of revision. MORE
The Foreign Office's Digital Diplomacy Initiative
Last week, the UK Foreign Office held a Digital Diplomacy event. Chaired by the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and promoted by Weber Shandwick, the event was designed as a showcase for the recent intensification of social media initiatives at the FCO. These come under the heading of “Bringing Foreign Policy Home.”
Cellan-Jones has a typically funny post about the event.
While it’s easy to be sceptical, it’s interesting to note that the FCO has not dumped its earlier internet enthusiasm overboard, as many predicted would happen when David Miliband and members of his team started blogging a couple of years ago.
The FCO bloggers are one of the several examples I discuss in my latest paper:Chadwick, A. (2009) “Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance”I/S: Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society5 (1), pp. 9-41. Download pdf.
[First published at andrewchadwick.com]
Call for papers: Reframing the Nation, international conference, 18-19 May
The NPCU is co-organising an international conference in Central London on 18-19 May 2009, entitled Reframing the Nation: Media Publics and Strategic Narratives. This is the latest in a series of events examining how states use media to project their identity and interests in order to achieve strategic goals in the global arena, and the ways in which citizens respond to - and contribute to - these narratives. The conference brings together scholars from international relations, diplomacy studies, media and communications, and sociology, as well as media and policy practitioners.
Keynote speakers include:
Sir Lawrence Freedman (King's College, London)
Nick Cull (Annenberg School, University of Southern California)
Laura Roselle (Elon University)
Philip Seib (Annenberg School, University of Southern California)
For details, including information for prospective participants, click here.
Sensationalism costs lives
IRA SHOOTS COP DEAD, Officer lured into ambush in new terror outrage, ran today’s Mirror front page headline. The headline in yesterday’s Sun was EXECUTED BY IRA COWARDS, and the byline: TERROR RETURNS TO ULSTER. It is not just journalists that have dramatised the two murder attacks in recent days. On the front page of today’s Times, SDLP member Dolores Kelly says, “We are staring into the abyss”.
The way in which journalists report a conflict affects the conflict being covered. Unlike journalists in the Middle East, those in Northern Ireland have long followed the motto, ‘sensationalism costs lives’. Over the past two decades they have not reported every incident as a major setback, as a failure of the political process, or as the personal fault of duplicitous politicians (studies by Gadi Wolfsfeld demonstrate this). Sensationalist coverage may bring a short term boost to a newspaper’s readership, but it brings long term harm to a community, creating the very ‘climate of fear’ that the terrorists often seek. When journalists live in that community and have to face readers in the street, they are more easily held accountable for irresponsible reporting. Hence it is perhaps no surprise that it is the mainland press that appears more sensationalist than, say, the Belfast Telegraph, which broke the story as, Soldiers shot dead in Northern Ireland terror attack.
The director general of MI5, Jonathan Evans, said in January that intelligence suggested there were ‘splinter groups who are determined to kill a member of the security services or a police officer in Northern Ireland’. Killing a single person is symbolic. Now we have seen two attacks, three state security personnel dead, and fears of copycat killings. In such a tipping point moment, is it not the responsibility of journalists to ensure any climate of fear is reduced, even if it means censoring their own reporting? It is the classic dilemma of giving terrorists the ‘oxygen of publicity’, as Thatcher put it. There are recent precedents. Lately, journalists have had to grapple with whether to report on jihadist kidnap videos: report them, and the kidnappers get a public platform; ignore them, and the kidnapper might as well kill the victim since they have no publicity value. However, it may be that audiences find such videos to be distasteful and hard to watch. It is easier for editors to ignore them. But the ‘return of the troubles’ seems a historically important story and impossible to ignore. Finding a balance that doesn’t contribute to bringing that return about will be tricky.
Dr Ben O'Loughlin named Co-Director of New Political Communication Unit
It is with great pleasure that we announce that Dr Ben O'Loughlin, previously Associate Director of the New Political Communication Unit, will become its Co-Director from March 9, 2009. He will work alongside Professor Andrew Chadwick, Founding Director of the Unit, who will now become Co-Director.
About Dr Ben O'Loughlin
Ben O'Loughlin is Lecturer in International Relations. Ben specialises in international political communication. He is co-investigator of the ESRC-funded project, Legitimising the Discourses of Radicalisation: Political Violence in the New Media Ecology. He was recently a researcher on the ESRC project Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the Iraq War, part of the New Security Programme. Ben is a founding Editor of the new journal, Media, War and Conflict (Sage, from April 2008). His various projects are together at www.newmediaecology.net. This work on media and security is part of a broader interest in understanding the role and influence of political ideas, the translation and adaptation of ideas across different groups of actors and institutions, and the ways in which social and political life is becoming not so much mediated as mediatized.
Ben is co-convenor of the International Studies Association (ISA) workshop, ‘Great Powers after the Bush Presidency: Interests, Strategies and Narratives’. The workshop will take place on 14 February 2009 in New York City prior to the ISA Annual Convention, to be followed up at New Orleans at ISA 2010.
Ben is an Associate Member of the Centre for Research for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at The Open University and the Centre for Memory Studies at the University of Warwick. He also works with the Widening Participation Unit at Royal Holloway.
Ben has presented research to the No. 10 Policy Unit, Home Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, OFCOM, the European Commission and European Broadcasting Union (EBU). He has contributed to the New York Times, Sky News and Newsweek.
Labour 2.0: campaigning for the net generation
We'd like to draw your attention to this conference, at which Andrew Chadwick and Nick Anstead are speaking.
February 28, 2009, 11-5.30 at East Wintergarden, 43 Bank Street, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5AB
in association with
While the real analysis of the reasons for Obama’s victory has yet to be completed, it is obvious that e-campaigning played a major role and that its importance will continue to increase. As the main political parties gear up for the next general election, the focus on internet campaigning will intensify.
To what extent has the Labour party understood the potential of this new campaigning medium?
How can the centre-left use it to mobilise ordinary voters to campaign for progressive causes?
And what steps need to be taken to pull the party into the ‘net generation’?
We hope to find answers to these questions and more at this special one day conference, which will bring together over 100 members of the left blogosphere, net-savvy Labour parliamentarians, councillors, organisers and others from the Labour movement who have an interest in e-campaigning and using the net to build a better democracy.
AGENDA
11:00
Opening address
Rt Hon Douglas Alexander MP
Secretary of State for International Development
11:20
Keynote speech
Speaker TBC
12:00
What will the future of internet campaigning look like?
Professor Andrew Chadwick, Director, New Political Communication Unit, Royal Holloway, University of London
Greg Jackson, Tangent
Tom Steinberg, MySociety
12:45
Lunch
13:30
Mobilising the centre-left blogging community
Adam Bienkow, Tory Troll
Tom Barry, Boris Watch
Theo Blackwell, blogger and councillor
Alex Smith, writer and political activist (chair)
14:15
Fundraising and voter ID online
Gavin Shuker, Political Insight
Jag Singh, MessageSpace
15:00
Learning from the private sector
Simon Redfern
Oliver Rickman, Google
15:45
Afternoon break
16:00
Transforming Labour’s campaigns and communications through new media
Nick Anstead, University of East Anglia
Matthew McGregor, UK MD, Blue State Digital
Sue Macmillan, New Media Campaigns Taskforce Leader, The Labour Party
Paul Simpson
16:45
Close of conference debate:
Can the centre-left dominate the internet despite being in office?
James Crabtree, Senior Editor, Prospect
Derek Draper, LabourList
Rt Hon David Lammy MP
Tim Montgomerie, ConservativeHome
17:30
Close
Venue
East Wintergarden, 43 Bank Street, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5AB
Contact
Mark Harrison
Tel: 020 3008 8180
Fax: 020 3008 8181
e-mail: mark@progressives.org.uk
Call For Papers: International Workshop: Citizen Politics: Are the New Media Reshaping Political Engagement? Barcelona, May 28-30
We'd like to draw your attention to a forthcoming meeting at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The closing date for proposals is February 9. As below, please direct inquiries to Laia Jorba at UAB...
Call For Papers
International Workshop
“Citizen Politics: Are the New Media Reshaping Political Engagement?"
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Organiser Name Laia Jorba
Telephone +34 93 581 24 74
Email laia.jorba@uab.cat
Venue Convent de Sant Agustí, Carrer Comerç 36, Barcelona
Dates May 29th-30th, 2009 (Opening conference, May 28th)
Proposals (abstract) February 9th, 2009
Resolution February 20th, 2009
Final papers May 1st, 2009
Keynote speakers
Bruce Bimber, Andrew Chadwick, Rachel Gibson, Brian Kreuger, and Caroline Tolbert
Workshop Information
According to many scholars patterns of political engagement have been changing in the last decades: the erosion of traditional forms of involvement, such as voting and membership in political parties, is accompanied by an expansion of participation repertoires, the rise of protest politics and more individualized forms of action. This research seminar will examine whether and how the growing use of new media is related to changing attitudes and participation patterns. Internet use by citizens, parties and organisations may facilitate large scale spread of political information, reduce communication and mobilization costs, modify citizens’ political attitudes and involvement, and introduce new modes of online political participation. Although these benefits of new media are being advanced by many scholars, we still need further work to integrate the online dimension in the conceptualisation of political participation, its explanatory models, and its related normative concerns: What is the role of online resources for traditional political participation? What is the causal process by which Internet use may modify political attitudes? What is (and what is not) online participation? How do we explain it? How important are its implications for democratic politics? We welcome theoretical and empirical papers (particularly if comparative and/or combining different methodologies) addressing the following questions:
a) Conceptualisation of political participation including new repertories and particularly online modes
b) Analysis of the impact of new media on political values, attitudes and offline modes of participation
c) Analysis of the cyber activists’ profiles and characteristics and the new online modes of participation
d) Adaptation of organisations and other political and social actors to new technologies
e) Methodological challenges and opportunities concerning the study of new media and political engagement
More information
See: www.polnetuab.net
Subject to achieving additional funding, small travel grants will be awarded to PhD students