IAFOR > The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film (EuroMedia) > EuroMedia2020 > Programme (Live-Stream)

Programme (Live-Stream)

Due to continued uncertainties surrounding the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic, EuroMedia2020 will be held Online via Zoom.

The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film (EuroMedia) is an interdisciplinary conference held alongside The European Conference on Arts & Humanities (ECAH). Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. Registration for either conference will allow participants to attend sessions in both.

This page provides details of presentations and other programming. For more information about presenters, please visit the Speakers page.

Conference Outline

All times are British Summer Time (UTC+1)

Friday, July 24, 2020Saturday, July 25, 2020Sunday, July 26, 2020

09:00-09:15: Welcome Address & Recognition of IAFOR Scholarship Winners
Joseph Haldane, IAFOR, Japan

09:15-10:15: Panel Presentation
The Age of the Zombie: Social Distancing without Social Media Distancing
Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology, New-Zealand
Donna Lee Brien, Central Queensland University, Australia

10:15-10:30: IAFOR Documentary Photography Award

10:30-10:40: Break

10:40-11:40: Keynote Presentation
Crossing Divides and Embracing Difference
Emily Kasriel, BBC, United Kingdom

08:55-09:00: Welcome from the Organising Committee

09:00-10:30: Panel Presentation
Matthew Coats, University of Brighton, United Kingdom
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang
John Lau

10:30-10:40: Break

10:40-11:40: Keynote Presentation
Viral Lessons
Anne Boddington, Kingston University, United Kingdom

11:40-11:50: Break

11:50-13:05: Live-Stream Session 1: Literature/Literary Studies

13:05-13:15: Break

13:15-14:05: Live-Stream Session 2: Film Criticism and Theory

14:05-14:15: Break

14:15-15:30: Live-Stream Session 3: Science, Environment and the Humanities

15:30-15:35: End-of-Day Wrap-up

08:00-08:10: Welcome from the Organising Committee

08:10-09:00: Live-Stream Session 1: Media History

09:00-09:10: Break

09:10-10:00: Live-Stream Session 2: Aesthetics, Design

10:00-10:10: Break

10:10-11:50: Live-Stream Session 3: Literature/Literary Studies

11:50-12:00: Break

12:00-13:15: Live-Stream Session 4: Advertising, Marketing, & Public Relations

13:15-13:30: Break

13:30-14:15: Keynote Presentation
Dislocation/Invitation
Donald Hall, University of Rochester, United States

14:15-14:30: Conference Closing Address
Joseph Haldane, IAFOR, Japan

Featured Presentations

  • Crossing Divides and Embracing Difference
    Crossing Divides and Embracing Difference
    Keynote Presentation: Emily Kasriel
  • The Age of the Zombie: Social Distancing without Social Media Distancing
    The Age of the Zombie: Social Distancing without Social Media Distancing
    Panel Presentation: Lorna Piatti-Farnell & Donna Lee Brien
  • Embracing Difference: Fashion, Design and the Rhetoric of Social Change
    Embracing Difference: Fashion, Design and the Rhetoric of Social Change
    Panel Presentation: Matthew Coats, Bel Jacobs, John Lau & Peter Jeun Ho Tsang
  • Viral Lessons
    Viral Lessons
    Keynote Presentation: Anne Boddington
  • Dislocation/Invitation
    Dislocation/Invitation
    Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall

Draft Programme

The Conference Programme contains access information, session information and a detailed day-to-day presentation schedule. All registered delegates who attend The 7th European Conference on Media, Communication & Film receive a printed copy of the Conference Programme.

The final draft of the conference presentation schedule is now available. Please check that all information pertaining to you is correct and notify us at euromedia@iafor.org if there is any error. Please notify us of any corrections by Friday, July 3.

Click to download as a PDF

After minor changes have been made to the schedule we will send you a link to the final schedule.
The final schedule will contain session information and a detailed day-to-day presentation schedule (including room allocations and session chairs).

This will be available on Tuesday, July 14.

Pre-Recorded Virtual Presentations

A number of presenters have submitted pre-recorded virtual video presentations. We encourage you to watch these presentations and provide feedback through the video comments. A full list of these is on the conference website.

Virtual Video Presentations

Previous Programming

View details of programming for past EuroMedia conferences via the links below.

EuroMedia2019EuroMedia2018EuroMedia2017
EuroMedia2016EuroMedia2015EuroMedia2014
Crossing Divides and Embracing Difference
Keynote Presentation: Emily Kasriel

Join Emily Kasriel, Editor of the BBC Crossing Divides season, bringing people together in a divided world for a session in which you’ll learn all about the groundbreaking season which attracted over 40 million page views on the BBC. You will also get a taste of Deep Listening and have a go trying this out with a fellow participant in a break out room.

Most of us think we are above average listeners. But often when we think we are listening we are actually distracted by the voices in our head. And when we are talking with people we disagree with most strongly these inner distractions can get noisy as we judge what we are hearing while we rehearse counter-arguments. Imagine if you knew how to listen so that the person who was speaking felt truly heard?

During the last two years leading the BBC Crossing Divides season, I’ve been on the hunt of how to bring people with conflicting ideas together, drawing on my own experience as an Executive Coach, training with conflict mediators, and being an expert speaker in an MA module on Listening. I’ve spoken to psychologists, lawyers, organisational behaviour academics and facilitators such as Better Angels, all of whom are using a variant of deep listening.

You’ll leave inspired by the power of connecting across divides and empowered with a technique you can use with colleagues, partners and with family – vital during times of challenge stress and encountering difference.

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The Age of the Zombie: Social Distancing without Social Media Distancing
Panel Presentation: Lorna Piatti-Farnell & Donna Lee Brien

In an era of confusion and anxiety, isolation, quarantines and lockdowns, this panel will look at media and (popular) cultural responses, through digital narratives, and memes. In our blurred life online, our professional and personal lives flow into each other, time warps, and social distancing doesn’t mean social media distancing. What of questions of freedoms, of privacy, or security and of governance in a time of impending doom, real or imagined? Outside our curtains and the safety of confinement, and endless media distraction, is a world without people. Is this the age of the Zombie?

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Embracing Difference: Fashion, Design and the Rhetoric of Social Change
Panel Presentation: Matthew Coats, Bel Jacobs, John Lau & Peter Jeun Ho Tsang

For years, many in the fashion industry have chosen not to speak out on injustices in the world for fear of alienating consumers, and have considered taking a stance on civil rights and equality as unimportant. But these same consumers are starting to question what that means for the character of a brand, and why many creatives aren’t being held accountable for their actions, that have a direct impact on our political climate. It’s becoming ever clearer that the fashion industry can’t be apolitical, and you can’t separate politics from fashion.

Whilst the term ‘fashion’ has been historically used to describe the latest trends and how something is made into a particular form, the industry, and the wider creative industries, find themselves in the midst of an escalating evaluation culture.

In an increasingly online, globally-connected world, and with consumers acting in huge numbers to create a new voice and new type of critical discourse through online social media platforms that provide a direct link to the industry heavyweights, fashion and politics have never been more interlinked. From calling-out discriminatory industry standards to holding brands and businesses accountable for environmental abuses, the creative industries are democratising in a way we have never seen before, with fashion at the forefront of this discourse. Change is happening rapidly, with the new landscape developing on an almost daily basis. The consequences are huge and will affect each part of the fashion industry—from design educators to marketeers to practising designers. Add to this the COVID-19 global health crisis, and it becomes evident that the fashion industry as we know it will never be the same again.

Speakers:

Matthew Coats, University of Brighton, United Kingdom
Bel Jacobs, Writer and Speaker, United Kingdom
John Lau, London College of Fashion, United Kingdom
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, Foundry Powered by IFA Paris, France

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Viral Lessons
Keynote Presentation: Anne Boddington

Many have likened the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic to the experience of war time, except with all the people on the same side against an invisible invader that is indiscriminate, transgresses national borders and disproportionally attacks the socially and economically vulnerable. Across the world, countries and communities have been “locked-down” and retreated to the relatively “safety” of their domestic environments. Our cities and educational institutions were closed and stood silent, their usual vivacious inhabitants physically dispersed, but digitally connected, while the sun shone, Spring “sprung”, summer arrived, and the natural environment flourished with our absence. We retreated, but institutions continued to function, significantly weakened and often struggling to react fast enough to “work differently”, online and “at home”. Work, home, social lives and our different personas all overlaid upon one another. Individually and collectively we have all been forced to confront the ways we manage each of these lives and how they do or don’t intersect and interconnect. In the University context, governance and resilience have been tested, as was the leadership and practical capacity and capability of working and learning remotely. What to do, how to behave, who and what mattered to us as social beings all questioned by COVID’s threat. A threat, that, like climate emergency, artificial intelligence and racial (in)equality has long been known about; but where other technocratic and economic values had perhaps overwritten our preparedness for what we have had to confront.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of “lockdown” and the pitching of wealth against health, this existential moment has presented an opportunity to reflect, prior to addressing the far more challenging task of rethinking and re-opening our worlds, economies and institutions. This presentation focuses specifically on living with COVID-19 and devising a framework and a series of principles for unlocking universities and reflecting on the role, purpose and contribution. It then takes a more detailed look at the lessons we might take from our “viral experiences” and how we might reflect upon and revisit creative education and its social, cultural and economic contribution in our “next normal” and imminent futures.

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Dislocation/Invitation
Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall

IAFOR’s special theme in 2020 is “Embracing Difference”, which builds on two previous years’ themes: examinations of fear for what the future might hold (2018), followed a year later by explorations of our ability to shape alternate futures (2019). The continuing timeliness of both topics has been fuelled not only by global political trends, but also (and in ways that largely account for those trends) the fact that individuals today are being confronted incessantly with forms and intensities of “difference” as never before in human history. Unless we are wholly off the grid of media and extra-communal encounter (as we might find with self-isolating religious communities), we are confronted daily with lifestyles, belief systems, languages, and ways of being that are radically different from our own. Whether face-to-face or mediated, these continuing micro-shocks of encounters with epistemological difference can be terrifying, exhilarating, disorienting, or even erotically stimulating (if not several of those at once). Much hinges on how we decide to process such encounters, a choice for which, I argue, we bear responsibility. To the extent that we can actively choose to frame such “dislocations” as desirable “invitations”– to question the rightness of our own stances, the security of our own “truths,” and the limitations of our own knowledge – we can welcome encounters with difference as necessary for learning and growth. Too often, of course, they are processed much more narrowly as violent threats to insular selfhood, to national and cultural primacy, and to religious absolutes. We as teachers, scholars and public intellectuals have a role to play in reframing a public debate on the fundamental value of “difference”. Beyond our common and often tepid proclamation of respect for “diversity”, it is imperative that we promote and defend the inherently generative effect of the “unsettledness” that terrifies so many of our fellow citizens. Invitations to rethink our “selves”, our beliefs, and our values should be celebrated as inherently educational opportunities, rather than feared as apocalyptic threats to coherence or community.

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