Media Engagement: Connecting Production, Texts and Audiences

How do people engage with media such as television drama, twitter feeds, or reality entertainment? Media engagement is a broad term for research into how we experience media content, artefacts and events, from our experience of live performances, to social media engagement, or participation in media itself. Media engagement offers a rich site of analysis for exploring the dispersed connections across industry contexts, cultural forms, and audience experiences.

This symposium provides a platform for research on new terms of media engagement. We want to understand industrial contexts for engagement, including performance metrics, production practices and policy discourses. And we want to understand people’s shifting and subjective relations with media as live audiences, catch up viewers, illegal users, citizens and consumers, fans and anti-fans, contestants and participants. Media engagement thus encapsulates research on audiences, fans or producer-users, and the ways these different groups co-exist with those making content and driving policy and politics. The aim of the symposium is to investigate how industrial contexts, producers and audiences co-create, shape and limit experiences within emerging mediascapes.

1. Industrial contexts for engagement: production practices, policy discourses and stakeholder coalitions
2. Empirical production and audience research: quantitative and qualitative methods and practices Audience experiences and engagement: affect, emotion and passion
3. Fans and anti-fans: labour and fan practices
4. Unmeasured audience: informal media economies and illegal practices

The conference includes a combination of invited speakers and open panels. Confirmed speakers include Professor Göran Bolin (Södertörn University, Sweden), Professor Raymond Boyle (Glasgow University, UK), Professor John Corner (Leeds University, UK), Professor Annette Hill (Lund University, Sweden), Professor Jeanette Steemers (University of Westminster, UK), Dr Paul Torre (University of Northern Iowa, USA), Professor Anne Marit Waade (Aarhus University, Denmark). The symposium is connected with the Media Experiences project, a production and audience study of television drama, documentary and reality entertainment based at Lund University, in collaboration with Endemol Shine Group, and funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (http://mediaexperiences.blogg.lu.se/). Media Industries and Engagement
CAMRI research seminar, Boardroom 309 Regent Street, London Information about the CAMRI seminar series