Istanbul 2011

A pair of well-attended Special Sessions were held at IAMCR 2011 Conference which examined the implications of WikiLeaks for the field of media and communications. The first session, entitled 'Lessons from/for WikiLeaks: Perspectives from Media and Communications', offered perspectives from both practitioners and academics regarding WikiLeaks and the wider issues the project poses to the field of media and communications.

The two sessions served as a springboard for an edited volume which will feature contributions from participants involved in both panels More details on this edited collection will be released soon.

It has become a tradition for IAMCR to invite other international communication and media studies associations to organise a panel within the IAMCR conference, based on the principles of diversity, curiosity, exchange and reciprocity.

ECREA, the European Communication Research and Education Association, and ALAIC, the Latin American Communication Researchers Association, accepted the invitation and decided to co-organise a panel at IAMCR Istanbul 2011.

As part of IAMCR's 2011 conference in Istanbul, UNESCO and IAMCR's Media Education Research Section organized two joint sessions on Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Indicators.

These sessions allowed IAMCR members to provide constructive feedback on a project that UNESCO is in the process of developing: creating indicators for Media and Information Literacy as a diagnostic tool for the use of nation-states’ decision-makers as well as civil society actors.

Taryn Mackay (South Africa), one of the nine young scholars to be awarded an IAMCR scholarship to attend IAMCR's 2011 conference in Istanbul tells us about her expectations and experiences, and how this event helped her appreciate her every day reality from a different perspective.

M C Rasmin (Sri Lanka), one of the nine young scholars to be awarded an IAMCR scholarship to attend this year’s IAMCR conference in Istanbul tells us about his experience at the Istanbul conference: "[the 2011 IAMCR Conference] was not only a media conference but also a knowledge festival which I believe everyone enjoyed."

Many IAMCR members are using Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools while at the Istanbul conference from 13-17 July. Check #iamcr2011 and #iamcr on Twitter and visit IAMCR 2011's Facebook page.

Below we will link to blog posts, news articles and photographs that we find on the internet. If you post something about IAMCR 2011 or find something interesting that someone else has posted, please send the link to membership (at) iamcr.org.

It's All Systems Go!  
IAMCR on target for Istanbul Conference 2011, July 13-17!

With barely three weeks to go, planning is now in high gear for another exceptional IAMCR conference, to be held in Istanbul, Turkey, July 13-17, under the theme Cities, Creativity, Connectivity.

The conference will be attended by close to 1000 registered academics and researchers, participating in some 340 concurrent panel sessions and 24 poster sessions.

The IAMCR 2011 Istanbul Local Organising Committee has announced the winners of the UNICEF-Turkey and the Bersay Communications Institute awards for students attending the conference.

The Bersay awards of 500 Euros each were for PhD students residing in low-income countries while UNICEF-Turkey offered registration grants in the amount of 150 Euros to five MA/PhD students with Turkish citizenship.

Congratulations to the eleven award winners.

The first few months of 2011 have seen an astonishing unfolding of political change across the Maghreb and Middle East. These build on long-standing grievances and inequalities and older forms of political mobilization, so cannot simply be labelled as 'Twitter revolutions', yet at the same time there is little doubt that different forms of new media were creatively used in these uprisings.

If you had a paper accepted for presentation at IAMCR 2011, don't forget to upload it by 3 June via IAMCR's Open Conference System.

The Bersay Communications Institute is offering six travel grants in the amount of 500 Euros to PhD students residing in low-income countries with an abstract already accepted for presentation at the conference.

UNICEF Turkey is offering five grants of 150 Euros to offset the cost of registration for MA and PhD students with Turkish citizenship and an abstract accepted for presentation at the IAMCR's upcoming conference in Istanbul. MA/PhD students studying in Turkey or abroad are eligible.

14th July, 2011

During IAMCR's annual conference in Istanbul, Annabelle Sreberny,  president of the association, is organising and hosting a "presidential conversation" focused broadly on the cosmopolitan environment of cities, echoing the conference theme.

The intention of these Presidential Conversations is to bring interlocutors from diverse disciplinary fields outside our main academic areas to debate with us. The focus of this session is broadly on the cosmopolitan environment of cities, echoing the conference theme.

Registration for IAMCR's 2011 conference in Istanbul, Turkey is now open.

Click here to register online.

IAMCR has awarded 9 travel grants worth up to US$ 1,750 each to members who will be attending and presenting papers at the 2011 Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, 13-17 July 2011. The grants will go towards offsetting the cost of participating in the conference.

All requests for invitation letters to IAMCR 2011 Conference should be directed to Professor Levent Soysal (levsoy[at]khas.edu.tr) of the Local Organizing Committee, who has kindly agreed to prepare individual letters for funding applications and visa invitations. Persons requesting these should provide specific details of their Section or Working Group (if applicable), the title of their accepted paper and the details of the person or institution to which the letter is to be addressed.

All Sections and Working Groups have completed their evaluations and communicated their decisions, positive or negative, to all people who presented abstracts for IAMCR's 2011 conference in Istanbul, Turkey.

If you submitted an abstract and have not yet received a response, please login to your personal page on IAMCR's Open Conference System with the same username and password you used when you submitted your abstract to see the status of your abstract.

In 2011 IAMCR is dedicating more travel support than ever to young scholars. Ten travel grants worth US$1,750 each will be offered to offset the cost of participating in the conference in Istanbul, Turkey. The deadline for applications is Friday 15 April 2011.

The grants will be available to young scholars (35 years of age or younger as of 13 July 2011) who are current IAMCR members. Nine of the grants will be reserved for scholars residing in low income countries and one will be offered to a post graduate student from last year's host university, the University of Minho, in Braga, Portugal.

Tradition, innovation, and employment in Communications departments
IAMCR 2011 Special Session organized by the IAMCR Emerging Scholars Network.
Call for contributions

Deadline: 1st April 2011

Over the past few years, students and faculty in California, Puerto Rico, Quebec, Greece and England, and other regions where the government has customarily given strong support to higher education, have responded to massive fee increases with protests and strikes.

IAMCR president Annabelle Sreberny has announced the fee structure for IAMCR's 2011 conference.

In her message to the membership she noted that conference fees have not increased over the past three years and that the early registration period, when fees are 50€ to 100€ less, has been extended to 15 April.

Plans are afoot to  hold a Special Session at IAMCR  annual conference in Istanbul in July on WikiLeaks titled Lessons from/for WikiLeaks: Perspectives from Media and Communications.

The panel proposal text was developed by leaders of the Community Communication Section and Global Media Policy Working Group, along with cooperation from Ibrahim Saleh of the Journalism Section and the IAMCR Secretariat.

IAMCR will be offering nine travel grants worth US$ 1,750 each to offset the cost of participating in the 2011 conference in Istanbul, Turkey.

The grants will be available to young scholars (35 years of age or younger as of 13 July 2011) who are current IAMCR members residing in low income countries and who have an abstract accepted for full presentation at the conference. Abstracts accepted for poster sessions do not qualify.

The 8 February deadline for submitting abstracts for IAMCR's 2011 conference in Istanbul, Turkey has passed with more than 2,300 abstracts received. IAMCR's 31 sections and working groups will now begin the process of evaluating and selecting the proposals that will be invited to present during the conference, which will take place from 13-17 July 2011 under the general theme of Cities, Creativity, Connectivity. The results of the selection process will be announced by 25 March.

The new website of the 2011 Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) is up and running.

Next year's IAMCR Conference will take place on the campus of Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey) July 13-17 2011.

Visit the new website at http://iamcr2011istanbul.com/

Kadir Has University will host the 2011 IAMCR Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, July 13-17 2011. The theme for the 2011 conference will be 'Cities, Connectivity and Creativity'.

More information will be available on this website and on the IAMCR announcements mailing list as it becomes available.