Dear GEP-ed, If you plan to participate in the Association of American Geographers meeting in NYC in Feb 2012, please consider this session (described below) for your paper/presentation. Email Dan Brockington [email protected] with any questions, comments and submissions. The deadline is Sept 20.
Thanks, max -- Assistant Professor, CIRES Center for Science & Technology Policy University of Colorado-Boulder http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/boykoff/ Senior Visiting Research Associate, Environmental Change Institute University of Oxford http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/boykoffmax.php due out next month: 'Who Speaks for the Climate?' Cambridge Univ Press www.cambridge.org/9780521133050 CFP: AAG, NY Feb 23-28, 2012 Celebrity, Media and Vital Causes Session organizers: Dan Brockington (Manchester), Max Boykoff (University of Colorado) and Mike Goodman (King’s College London) The power of celebrity to mediate vital causes has risen inexorably over the last three decades, and academic attention to the phenomenon is now gathering speed. The amplification of these voices through governing elites and social movements, and the reshaping of both to accommodate their ‘celebritization’ is exciting an increasingly loud, and at times heated, debate in academia and newspapers. The presence of celebrity voices, bodies and discourses has emerged in disputes over environments and ecologies, international poverty and development, and a plethora of other social issues. In so doing, their influence raises important questions about the social values celebritized campaigns promote, the accountability of elites and decision makers to electorates and the role of the media in western democracies. This panel brings together some of the latest research in diverse fields to elucidate those issues and ask a series of—amongst other—questions such as: how has the emergence as well as ‘use-’ and ‘exchange-value’ of celebrity changed the spatialities of activism over time? How do celebrities work to frame what we are calling ‘vital causes’ either to their benefit or their detriment? How and in what ways have celebrities become the pivot around which the media develop narratives designed to bring attention to causes? In short, have segments of the media turned news and reporting into more fully polarized and binary debates? What forms of evidence are there to show how celebrity-tinged campaigns ‘work’ and how do we define and articulate what this ‘working’ might mean in our thoroughly mediated culture? How do these play out differently across varied ideological, socioeconomic and political cultures? For those interested in this session, send an abstract to Dan ([email protected]) by 20 September so we can put the sessions together for the meeting.
