International Seminar on

MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES AND ACCESSIBILITY:

POLITICS, REPRESENTATIONS AND PARADIGMS

ORGANISED BY

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA AND MASS COMMUNICATION

PONDICHERRY UNIVERSITY
IN ASSOCIATION WITH

UNIVERSITY OF TOULON & ACT TNP

21-22 JANUARY 2020

DEMMC, PONDICHERRY UNIVERSITY

About University
Pondicherry University is a Central University
established by an Act of Parliament in
October 1985. It is an affiliating University
with a jurisdiction spread over the Union
Territory of Puducherry, Lakshwadeep and
Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The University’s objectives are to
disseminate and advance knowledge by
offering teaching and research facilities, to
make provisions for studies in French and
integrated courses in Humanities and the
Sciences, and to promote interdisciplinary
studies and research. The University’s motto is
'Vers la lumière’ meaning 'towards the light’.
The main campus is located at Kalapet, 10
kms from the town of Puducherry, in a serene
and beautiful campus of 800 acres adjoining
the scenic Bay of Bengal. The University also
has campuses at Karaikal and Port Blair which
currently offer P.G. and Doctoral programmes.
About Department
Established in 2007, the Department of
Electronic Media and Mass Communication
offers two postgraduate courses namely M.A.
in Mass Communication, and M.Sc. in Electronic
Media. The primary objective of the
department is to provide equal thrust on
theoretical and practical know-how in the
spheres of journalism, television production,
radio production, advertising, public relations,
film studies, digital media studies,
development communication, health and
environmental communication, media and
culture studies, photography,
photojournalism, e-content development and
audio and video editing.
The department aims to nurture cutting
edge media professionals with effective
communication and critical thinking skills.
Further, the department works towards
preparing young minds with a strong
foundation in technological and production
skills, content writing, designing and expertise
in media management. Implicit in this is the
department’s efforts to ensure that students
develop a thorough understanding of society
so that they can proactively intervene in
developing a just and humane society.
Call for papers
Media access is increasingly woven into the textures
and cultural practices of everyday lives. To
Raymond Williams (1983), access is an integral part
of the ordinary culture. Dimensions of access and
media accessibility have been on a continuum with
scholarship that seeks to see accessibility as an
afterthought to address concerns of the excluded
and at the same time engaging with it as a critical
project for all. However, access and diversity cannot
be understood without predicating them on power,
inequity, exclusionist agenda and the political
economy of media. In capitalism, the control of
media by dominant class has resulted in
“monopolised communications industries that in new
ways make voice, visibility and access selective and
a realm of asymmetric power” (Fuchs, 2017).
While the older notion of access referred to
exposure to media technologies, the term ‘access’
has now a reconfigured import with the
interchangeable relationship between readers, text
and producers dominating content production,
consumption and distribution. This has contributed to
diversity and plurality of information. But, access is
never insulated from grand political and economic
imperatives. For instance, access to the Internet is
de jure right but it is controlled by a
country/countries, corporate and the State. Access
is thus implicated in control and network society
inheres in control society, what Deleuze (1992)
writes about lucidly in his Postscript on Control
Society. The rise of digital technologies informs how
perceptions of control are overshadowed by
perceptions of access, resulting in the notion of
participatory surveillance or, put in other words,
consenting to be surveilled.
Further, on the one hand, access merely
constitutes exposure to spectacles (Debord, 1967),
whereas Benjamin (1935) argues for technological
reproducibility, an indicator of increased access, as
a possibility for political ramifications. If access to
excess content has resulted in producing media
spectacles thereby denying us subjectivity, the
meanings of access needs to be engaged with
more critically than reifying it. Access leading to
empowerment is also caught in a structural and
linguistic dialectic between abundance and
alienation, abundance of media, technologies and
content on the one hand and alienation and
deprivation of people from access to media and its
ensemble.
Access has also received impetus from another
perspective wherein media technologies designed
and developed are more amenable to normal
citizens as well as men (Oudshoorn, 2004). As a result,
the disabled and women are excluded from access
to technologies. While W3C proposes guidelines to
make internet user-friendly to all, the design of
technologies enables normal users, characterised by
ableism, to produce public spheres that further
create and reproduce disability as a deprived
category. How can technologies be used for
articulations of the subaltern and not merely that of
the normative populations? It is quite interesting to
engage with questions of hegemonic arrangement of
uses of technologies accomplished through their
intended user positions, mostly predefined and
preconfigured. Does that mean that there is a wilful
attempt not to be inclusive because disability can
possibly destabilise the intended potential of the
medium? Likewise, spatial production in terms of
women having access to public spaces with wifi
zones underlie productions of discourses of gendered
inaccessibility.
Another outcome of the advancements in digital
technologies is the shift from industrial to
post-industrial society, marked by ‘knowledge
economy’ and the emergence of the concept of
open access. Making knowledge available to
everyone became the central tenet of open access.
But the politics of open access as we see it in the
forms of corporate dominating the market or the
State muffling the voices emanating from open
access and collaborative tools registers a new
highpoint in accessibility. Techno-imperialism has
providers of access to content, not dictated by
nation-states, such as Julian Assange at their peril.
Access is also linked to aspirations (Appadurai,
2004); lack of access can lead to a failure of
aspirations. Access is an enabler of aspirations and
therefore individual preferences and collective
capabilities. Media access in the context of social
media does strengthen the potential of users to
aspire, aspiration that is not linked to material
benefits but knowledge, critical inquiry and reflection
on future possibilities.
This seminar seeks to discover several dimensions
of media access and related concepts from multiple
perspectives, including films, paintings, social media,
print, television etc.. This year's conference aims at
probing into the realms of access and how access
has evolved to include the growing derivatives of
technology.
This seminar marks the 100th anniversary of
journalism and communication in Tamil Nadu and
India. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Annie
Besant, theosophist, journalist, educationist and
freedom fighter, the first formal initiative to offer
journalism as a course in an institutionalised setting
took shape in 1919 in Madras. Though short lived, it
brought alive the potential of journalism as a site of
education alongside journalism as a site of freedom
struggle. ACT TNP and Pondicherry University are
proud to commemorate this centenary with a topic
of accessibility that was also dear to Annie Besant.
Abstracts are invited from interested
academicians, research scholars and media
practitioners as well as activists.
Submission
The abstracts must be submitted via Easychair.
(Please create an account before you access the
link.)
https://easychair.org/cfp/PUMEDIACONF2019
Themes
• LGBTQ / Queer visibilities in and through social
media
• Body positivity in media / social media
• Access, Poverty and Media
• Political economy of start-up digital firms: Have
they refashioned the discourse of media access?
• Access Denied or Enabled: Injustice to women
and media reportage
• Media, inclusivism and differently abled
• (de)legitimising media: how is access configured?
• Connected Activism or Fragmented connectivism:
Social media offerings for citizens
• Political participation and local people: speaking
loudly about social issues
• Documentaries and representations of media
access
• Films as access points for literacy
• Droning and Surveillance: Access society or
control society?
• Invasive data gathering and Privacy rights
• Access to information: Symmetry or Asymmetry
• Understanding media access from feminist
perspectives
• Media literacy on what to access than access
per se
• Gendered labour and women’s political
participation
• Free Software and Open Access
• Platform Politics
• Internet: A site for potential discrimination or
equality
• Privacy and Data Protection Policy
• Media, disability and the politics of participation
• Access to excess content: Spectacles of
screened reality and imageries
• Reality and truth in access-driven mediatised
society
• Digital media accessibility and identities
• Histories of images in/through archives
(photographs, films, engravings, paintings, videos,
games etc.)
• Politics of images in contemporary cultures
• Accessibility in E-content courseware
• Accessibility, conflicting forms of knowledge and
social reality
• Accessing science through media
• Communicating environment through Media
• Accessibility, technologies and health
Registration Fees
Faculty from Universities / Deemed to be Universities /
Govt & Aided Colleges : INR 1500/-
Faculty from self-financing institutions : INR 1000/-
JRF/Other equivalent fellowships : INR 750/-
Non-NET fellowships : INR 500/-
Industry Practitioners : INR 2000/-
Faculty from Abroad : US $ 75

Timeline
Abstract registration and submission : December 10, 2019
Notification of Selection of Papers : December 15, 2019
Deadline for registration fee payment : December 25, 2019
Full paper submission : January 11, 2020

Publication
The organising committee is pleased to inform that select papers will be
considered for publication in an edited book volume of an international publisher
with ISBN immediately after the conference. Some of the papers will be considered
for publication in an online research journal brought out by the Department of
Electronic Media and Mass Communication, Pondicherry University.

for more details

http://www.emmcconference2019.com

Organising Committee
Chief Patron
Prof. (Dr). Gurmeet Singh
Honourable Vice-Chancellor, Pondicherry University

Patrons
Prof. S Balakrishnan
Director, Directorate of Studies, Educational Innovations & Rural
Reconstruction, Pondicherry University
Prof. Rajeev Jain
Director, Directorate of Culture and Cultural Relations, Pondicherry University
Dr B Chitra
Registrar i/c, Pondicherry University
Dr Amaresh Samantaraya
Finance Officer i/c, Pondicherry University
Prof C. K. Ramaiah, Ph.D.
Dean, School of Media and Communication, Pondicherry University, Puducherry

Organising Secretaries
Department of Electronic Media and Mass Communication, Pondicherry University

Dr M Shuaib Mohamed Haneef, Head i/c, Assistant Professor

Dr S Arulselvan, Associate Professor
Dr D Nivedhitha, Associate Professor
Dr Anand Lenin Vethanayagam, Reader
Dr Radhika Khanna, Assistant Professor
Dr Samarjit Kachari, Assistant Professor
Mr A Muthamil, Assistant Professor
Dr V Santhi Siri, Assistant Professor
Dr T Balasaravanan, Assistant Professor
Faculty members of
i3 Ingemedia Department Association for Communication Teachers -
University of Toulon, France Tamil Nadu & Pondicherry (ACT-TNP)