Reimagining the Climate Crisis: Activist Attempts to Affect the Political Agenda on Twitter during the Pandemic

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Original languageEnglish
Publication date2022
Publication statusPublished - 2022
EventECREA 2022: Rethink Impact: 9th European Communication Conference - Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Duration: 19 Oct 202222 Oct 2022
Conference number: 9
https://conferences.au.dk/ecrea2022/

Conference

ConferenceECREA 2022: Rethink Impact
Number9
LocationAarhus University
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityAarhus
Period19/10/202222/10/2022
OtherFor the ECREA 2022 conference in Aarhus, the theme “Rethink Impact” serves as a frame for discussing how media and communication research, education, and training interact with, impact on and reflect society. The theme resonates with preceding initiatives in Aarhus and the vision of Aarhus University for 2020–2025. It builds upon the university’s long-term strategies and fruitful collaborative partnerships with the business community, the city admin-<br/>istration, the region and civil society. The theme of the conference also resonates with the experiences from Aarhus as a European Capital of Culture in 2017 with the motto “Let’s Rethink” and the related rethinkIMPACTS 2017 project between Aarhus University, The City of Aarhus and the Central Denmark Region. Impact concerns the conditions of translating research insight into tangible outcomes for society, policy and business. Impact also suggests that such outcomes from research and education can be (and should be) quanti-<br/>fied and validated. Scholars equally engage in education and teaching, public debate and advocacy, community building and outreach, to name just a few activities, which typically evade the metrics employed in university adminis-<br/>trations and assessment committees. Impact is increasingly important to justify the public funding of research on the national and European level but difficult to quantify or assess in regard to the heterogeneous ways in which media and<br/>communication research and education is practised across different disciplines. Strengthening collaboration across research, teaching, citizens, businesses and policy starts with the awareness of each other. Impact thus also concerns<br/>the conditions of working in academia, the power imbalances and hierarchies that promote or prevent innovations in research from impacting society. Overall, we suggest that the European values of inclusiveness, equality, diversity and<br/>fairness also require a revised notion of impact that research and education in media and communication studies should be shaping at this crucial time.<br/>We have invited four keynote speakers to address how they are experiencing and catering to impact demands and how they perceive these to change across time and settings. We have also put together four special panels that address<br/>questions of impact in relation to, respectively, society more broadly, private businesses, education and, digital research infrastructures. Beyond the academic part of the conference, we have organised a range of Impact tours to public events with our local partners, which delegates are invited to join. With the theme, the plenaries, special panels and impact tours we wish to open discussions – affirmative, critical and everything in between – about how we as scholars and research managers may negotiate what seems a growing range of impact demands.
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