Scope

In the age of ubiquitous internet-based digital communication and substantial economic, social and political upheavals, understanding the relationships between society, politics and communication processes is essential to understanding, explaining and evaluating the world around us, as well as attempting to change it.

The Political Communication and Society section fosters boundary breaking, interdisciplinary and innovative scholarship, both theoretical and empirical, that helps expand and deepen our understanding of the interactions between social, political and communication processes. Its express goal is to enable critical and progressive research, which challenges orthodoxies and expands intellectual inquiry by moving thinking beyond existing paradigms, ideological boundaries and status quo orientated research agendas.

This section draws particularly on the fields of media and communication studies, political science / international relations and sociology. It will provide space for scholars that explore the relationship between communication and class, race, gender and sexual identity, as well as how these intersect with government (at any level), the nation state, imperialism, international relations, corporate/capitalist power and indeed the activities of social movements – from both above and below. Our reach is genuinely global and seeks to address issues surrounding political communication and major issues including conflict, inequality and environmental crisis and their consequences in all parts of the world. We encourage all forms of critical and progressive political communication scholarship especially that which helps to expand the boundaries of existing mainstream political communication research. We are particularly interested in Original Research, Conceptual Analysis, and Hypothesis and Theory. 

We welcome ground-breaking scholarship in the following areas:

• the role of propaganda, persuasion and influence activities and their impact upon democracy;

• progressive normative theory which seeks better ethically grounded approaches to persuasion and influence;

• the role of communication in policy and political processes both via mass media and through direct communications – specifically through examinations of lobbying and associated processes;

• the politics and sociology of science, health and environmental communications and their interactions with expertise;

• the role of communication in social movements and the communicative and strategic activities of social movements;

• news media coverage of political affairs with a focus on identifying and explaining media performance and its relationship to power and the exercise of power;

• the impact of new media technologies, including the internet, social media and independent/alternative media on the public sphere, both at national and global levels;

• the political economies of media industries;

• political-economic and empirical work on marketing, advertising and related communicative industries, including on consumerism;

• progressive normative theory which seeks to improve political journalism and the capacity of news media industries to facilitate democracy;

• strategies to improve both media literacy amongst publics, in particular developing critical awareness of media bias and propaganda activities;

• considerations of methods in researching and analysing political communications processes and indeed how communication intersects with the material, the real and with extra-communicative / discursive actions and activities.

Submission

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