Call for papers: Media, Populism and Public Space: contemporary challenges

Title: Media, Populism and Public Space: contemporary challenges

Submission deadline: 31 May 2020

Publication: first half of 2021

 

Over recent decades, we have seen an increase of a variety of movements, political parties and actors that establish politics under the form of populism. The severe crisis experienced by liberal democracies, the corruption scandals that are brought to the public’s attention, the implementation of austerity measures, the migratory crisis issues or the political and social polarisation that often fuels hate speech are all fertile ground for generating populist movements, which find in the new digital ecosystems a space for communicating with the public without intermediation.

 

Present at various moments in the political history of the West, populism draws on simplistic discourse and moralist discussions to explain and organise reality: concepts such as the will of the people and general interest are used to fight against alleged enemies of the people, commonly identified with the elite or the political establishment, or with foreigners. Across the party spectrum, populism constitutes a type of ideology or a style of politics that draws on antagonism between parts of society and on the exploitation of feelings of fear and social disenchantment.

 

The populist logic has widely interfered with several sectors of democratic life, influencing the result of elections and threatening the running of political, legal and media institutions. Leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil are just some emblematic cases of individuals who have managed to combine popular disenchantment with the flaws of democracy, exploiting the potential of new information and communication technologies, as well as social media, to win elections through the dissemination of basic and simplified views of social phenomena. Movements such as Brexit in the United Kingdom, and the emergence of extremist right-wing parties, like Chega in Portugal, or the Popular Front in France, are also some examples of how populism works: it feeds off the structure of democratic power to undermine and threaten it.

 

The editors of this edition, Bruno Araújo, from CEIS20 and the Post-Graduate Programme in Communication of the Federal University of Mato Grosso, and Hélder Prior, of the Autónoma University of Lisbon and the Post-Graduate Programme in Communication of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul,  wish to call for the submission of papers for Issue 12 of Mediapolis – Revista de comunicação, jornalismo e espaço público, on the topic of Media, Populism and Public Space: contemporary challenges, as well as on the following topics:

 

• Historical contextualisation of populism: agrarian populism; Latin-American populism; national-populism in Europe;
• Visibility of populist actors in traditional media;
• Frameworks of movements and of populist actors in the press;
• Anti-democratic and authoritarian movements in digital media;
• Disintermediation, direct communication, and social media;
• Elective affinity between populism and post-truth communication: misinformation and propaganda in digital media;
• Algorithms, filter bubbles, social media targeting, and hate speech;
• Populist communication style in election campaigns;
• Left-wing-populism vs right-wing populism;
• The impacts of populism and the reconfigurations of the public space.

The paper submission deadline is 31 May 2020, to be included in Issue 13 of Mediapolis, concerning the first half of 2021.