Background and Research Questions

Passion is at the heart of an emotional economy within media, culture and society. Marketing trends such as The Experience Economy (Pine and Gilmore 2011), or affective economics, signal a growth in passion as a revenue source. Emotional engagement with a product or service, such as sports, is used as a driver in the selling of media and culture. The trouble with passion, as Hall (2005) notes, is that for too long it has been dismissed as subjective experience outside the remit of scientific enquiry. And yet how people feel about politics, the press, or sports is vital to understanding media today. This conference focuses on media and passion as multidimensional, working across industry and economics, politics, society and popular culture. In Theorising Media John Corner (2011) traces an increasing interest in subjectivity both within the media industry and academic research. Work by Hoschchild (1983) on the commercialisation of feeling in industries such as air travel shows a strong sociological line of enquiry into emotion as part of modern society and working life. Viviana Zelizer’s research on care workers highlights how reason and emotion work in complicated ways, where intimacy, emotion and passion bump up against economics, employment conditions and human rights. Zelizer calls the space where reason and emotion come together hostile worlds. But, we think and feel with our head and hearts and to separate rationality from passion is to ignore its powerful place in media, society and culture. Current academic research on emotion includes broad studies of politics and passion (Hall 2005), and contemporary research on media and democracy that explores the place of affect in civic practices (Dahlgren 2009, Coleman forthcoming). Within a sociology of emotions, there has been a sustained investigation into emotion, affect and the senses in identity work and social relations (Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk 2011). In the case of media and communication studies, research on fans and anti-fans has explored strong emotional identification and disidentification in people’s responses to television fiction, or sports (Sandvoss 2005, Boyle and Haynes 2009). Recent work on social media examines radical politics and extreme religious or political messages and their impact in democratic societies (see Nightingale 2011). What this research highlights is that emotional engagement with politics, sports, or popular culture is fraught with tension. How people feel about democracy can be significant to greater personal investment in civic practices and voting behaviours. But how people communicate their feelings in the press, or via social media, can be a source of great concern, for example in the case of offensive behaviour regarding racism or right wing politics. Thus people’s passionate communication of their feelings about issues, problems or beliefs is bound up with the right of freedom of speech (Winston 2012). This makes media and passion a complex and multifacted area of enquiry. This conference focuses on media and passion in four areas of enquiry: politics and passion, emotional economy in media industries, subjectivity, and identity and social relations. The research questions include:

1. What is the role of passion in political culture?
2. In what ways has emotion become an economy in media and cultural industries?
3. How can we research subjectivity and the media?
4. How do people feel about media, identity and social relations?

These research questions can be applied to a range of theories, ideas and problems concerning political culture, citizenship and democracy, television, film, radio and print media, social media, popular culture, live events, as well as other topics. Different approaches to research on media and passion can include media, communication and cultural studies, media history, film studies, sociology, social psychology, sociology of media and culture, political communication, and cultural geography, amongst others. The aim is to provide a platform for international scholars from various disciplines to debate the complex issues at work in understanding the interplay between media and passion. References Boyle, Raymond, and Haynes, Richard (2009) Power Play, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Coleman, Stephen. (forthcoming) How Voters Feel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahlgren, Peter. (2009) Media and Political Engagement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Cheryl. (2005) The Trouble With Passion, New York: Routledge. Hermes, Joke (2005) Re-reading Popular Culture, London: Blackwells. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling, Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press. Nightingale, Virgina, ed. (2011) The Handbook of Media Audiences, Blackwells. Pine, Joseph and James Gilmore. (2011) The Experience Economy (updated edition), Harvard: Harvard Business Review. Sandvoss, Cornell. (2005) Fans, Cambridge: Polity Press. Vannini, Phillip, Dennis Waskul, Simon Gottschalk. (2011) The Senses in Self, Society and Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Winston, Brian. (2012) A Right to Offend: Free Expression in the 21st Century, Bloomsbury: London. Zelizer, Viviana. (2005) The Purchase of Intimacy, Princeton University Press.