ESA RN18 2014 - Media and Communication in and after the Global Capitalist Crisis: Renewal, Reform or Revolution?

The world has experienced a global crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 and is continuing
until now. It has been accompanied by a crisis of the state and a general crisis of legitimation
of dominant ideologies such as neoliberalism. Responses to the crisis have been variegated
and have included austerity measures of the state that have hit the weakest, an increased
presence of progressive protests, revolutions and strikes that have made use of digital, social
and traditional media in various ways, the rise of far-right movements and parties in many
parts of Europe and other parts of the world, the Greek state’s closing down of public service
broadcaster ERT and increased commercial pressure on public service broadcasting in
general, new debates about how to strengthen public service media, increased socio-economic
and class inequality in many parts of the world and at a global level, precarious forms of work
in general and in the media and cultural industries in particular, the emergence of new media
reform movements, an extension and intensification of the crisis of newspapers and the print
media, an increasing shift of advertising budgets to targeted ads on the Internet and along with
this development the rise of commercial “social media” platforms, Edward Snowden’s
revelations about the existence of a global surveillance-industrial complex that operates a
communications surveillance system called “Prism” that involves the NSA and media
companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, Skype, Apple and Paltalk;
discussions about the power and freedom of the press in light of the Levenson inquiry,
shifting geographies of the political and media landscape that have to do with the economic rise of countries such as China and India.
Given this context, the main questions that ESA RN18’s 2014 conference asks and to which it
invites contributions are: How has the crisis affected the media and communication landscape
in Europe and globally and what perspectives for the future of media and communications are
there? What suggestions for media reforms are there? How feasible are they? What kind of
media policies and reforms do we need today? Which ones should be avoided? Are we in this
context likely to experience a renewal of neoliberalism or something different?