Announcement Calenda 1242681
In recent decades, a "turning point" has been consolidating in historiography and, more generally, in the social sciences as a whole, inviting us to consider the processes and events of the past from an explicitly global perspective. However, the desire to extend scales of observation by incorporating a macro level, i.e. beyond defined national boundaries, was complemented by the notion of "connected history", which implies not only an increase in "the scale of analysis but also [a profound change in] the orientation of research" (Bertrand, 2015). In the words of the main ideologue and initiator of this current, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the aim is to deepen, in this perspective, "the search for the sometimes fragile threads that connected the world" on the premise that through a research prism that transcends divisions regional studies, "we are most likely to find them [historical subjects] connected to a network, to a process of circulation" (Subrahmanyan, 2020).
In this context, media history (which could be extended to a broader history of communication), although disciplinarily situated between two traditions with very different influences and epistemological bases at first glance, historiography and information and communication sciences (Martínez Gallego and Laguna, 2015), has generally been constructed as an object of study from the material horizon and possibility of nation-states (combining analyses at local, regional and national scales). Indeed, it is not anecdotal to observe how, at a time when this discipline was still in its infancy, during the 1990s, one of the main references in the study of the Spanish press in France, Jean-François Botrel, pointed out that the methodological proposal for the future was to focus on the local and regional space (Botrel, 1992). Without abandoning the background implicit in this proposal, the framework of a connected history applied to the study of the media, as presented in these lines, could, in our opinion, provide new tools that would enable us to understand these realities within broader, interdependent and resolutely global frameworks of meaning. In this respect, we share Martínez Gallego and Laguna's (2023) desire to "replace the predominant concept that identifies communication with the transmission and social circulation of messages with a more complex conceptual framework that considers communication as a sociocultural process of meaning production". However, we believe that this proposal could be realized, in the first instance, from the more specific branch of study that concerns media history (on which many academic researches are directly or indirectly based), and which puts into perspective the postulates defended by connected history.
Ultimately, this is the aim of this seminar: to create a space for multidisciplinary dialogue between specialists to discuss the possibilities and challenges of integrating the notion of connection into the study of media from a diachronic perspective. Thus, for this first edition, entitled "Connected media history", it was decided to add the subtitle "Objects, notions, methods and sources for globally connecting media historical analysis". The aim of the six sessions is to acquire an in-depth knowledge of the various research contexts that have dealt with some of the most relevant dimensions of media studies, and to collectively analyze their potential, from a connected perspective, on the basis of their theoretical and methodological postulates and the corpus of documentation used. In this way, we might be able to lay the foundations for what could be a future line of work, fully integrating connectivity as a sign of identity and as a guiding axis for the implementation of studies in this field. In short, the aim of this seminar is to bring our research together in order to connect media history on a global scale.
