"Trust Me!" Truthfulness and Truth Claims across Media

Second call for papers

Abstract template for download

Submit here. Opens May 1, 2020.

In times of “post-truth”, “fake news”, and “alternative facts,” new forms of media and communicative strategies challenge our understanding of how we know something to be true. Most of our knowledge of the world depends on our trust of a reliable source and on the expectations of credibility in different media types, such as newspapers, encyclopædias, novels, documentary and essay films, and social media. However, in the ongoing digitization it becomes clear that truth claims in media are perceived as truthful only under certain conditions. Thus, with this conference we suggest that we need a media-oriented approach to understand truth claims and truthfulness.

The Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University has already for some years been investigating the issues of truth claims and truthfulness in media. More specifically, how processes of integration and transformation in and between media affect the communicative strategies for conveying reliable information and creating credibility (see for instance Elleström 2018). Members of the centre have explored the mediation of scientific facts in literature, films, games and teaching, the construction of authenticity in comics or animated films, and the role of media in the courtroom.

With this conference, we wish to further this research and confront current challenges head on in a broader research community. What is the role of media and communication in our perception of truth? How is truthful mediation constructed and how can we analyze it? What significance does the combination of e.g. text, image and sound have in this construction of truthfulness? And how and when can we trust the truth claims of different media?

Exploring these questions will help understand current social challenges posed by conflicting truth claims in news media and politics, or in public debates on, for example, climate change and global migration.

When investigating the truth claims of media and truthfulness in mediation, intermedial and multimodal frameworks provide useful theoretical concepts and methodological approaches. They offer, for instance, useful tools for developing digital literacy. At the 2 (2) same time, intermedial or multimodal approaches also need to address the impact of historical, transnational, and industrial frameworks involved in the production of trustworthy meaning.

This inaugural conference sets out to break new ground by inviting scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them media and communication, education, digital humanities, history, film, visual art, literary studies, comics studies, memory studies, musicology, sound studies, linguistics, social and political studies, and museum and archive studies.

We also invite practitioners from news media, arts and literature; archives, libraries and museums; public history, education, or the legal profession. The list is not exhaustive.

We welcome proposals for individual papers, panels or workshops. Please submit your proposal via the conference homepage lnu.se/en/trustme by under the headline “Abstract submission”. When submitting your abstract, make sure to use the compulsory word template for abstracts. You find the template on the conference homepage under “Abstract submission”.

Submission of proposal opens May 1, 2020. Deadline for submissions is 15 September, 2020.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 30 September 2020.

Individual papers

Individual papers will be allocated a time slot for 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Proposals need to include the speaker’s name and email address, the title of the paper, an abstract (250 words max), 3–5 keywords and a short bio of the presenter (200 words max).

Pre-constituted panels

In order to ensure the coherence of the panels, we encourage the participants to submit proposals for pre-constituted sessions composed of three 20-minute papers.

Proposals need to include the name, email address and affiliation of the panel organiser, the title of the panel, a short explanation of the rationale (up to 200 words), 3–5 keywords and info on the individual papers (titles, abstracts of 250 words and speakers’ bionotes). We highly recommend that speakers on pre-constituted panels come from different institutions.

Workshops

We welcome proposals for workshops and other session formats. In general, workshops will promote active participation while exploring new ideas. The duration can be up to 2 hours. If you would like to propose a workshop or another session format, please contact the organisers (Beate Schirrmacher and Dagmar Brunow) by email trustme-conference@lnu.se in order to discuss its form and content.

Works cited

Elleström, Lars. "Coherence and truthfulness in communication: Intracommunicational and extracommunicational indexicality " Semiotica, 2018.225 (2018): 423-446. Open access from doi:10.1515/sem-2017-0001

All times CET.

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

12.30-12.50 Welcome and opening

12.50-13.00 Break

13.00-13.45 Panel discussion

Truth claims and Truthfulness at IMS: Intermedial and Multimodal perspectives to current social challenges. Moderator: Dagmar Brunow

14.00-15.00 Keynote 1

Gunn Enli: Trust Me I am Authentic! Seven Paradoxes in Populist Politics
Chair: Pernilla Severson

15.00–15.30   Break

15.30–17.30   Parallel sessions

Panel 1a: Post-truth, trust, and the public sphere 
Chair: Jørgen Bruhn

• Frida Beckman: Truth Regimes and Paranoia in the New Public Sphere
• Kristoffer Holt: Can media outlets and platforms be “true” or “false”?
• Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska: Image Wars: How the Right-Wing Illustrated Press Abuses History in Poland?
• Annelie Frank: The role of 4chan in the information disorder

15.30–17.00   Panel 1b: Witnesses and evidences 
                      Chair: Nafiseh Mousavi

• Anna Polze: Circulating References in the multimodal Videos by Forensic Architecture)
• Camila A. P. de Figuerido: Trying to cover up the cracks: Uncovering guilt and truth in Nora Krug’s Heimat
• Senad Halilbašić: Performing uncertainty – Artistic inquiries of the ‘truth’ during the siege of Sarajevo

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

13.00-14.00 Keynote 2

Thomas Strässle: Fake and Fiction. On the Invention of Truth
Chair: Beate Schirrmacher

14.00-14.30 Break

14.30-16.00 Parallel sessions

Panel 2a: Facts and Fictions
Chair: Anna Gutowska

• Anna Obererlacher & Natasa Vukelic: Clemens J. Setz on Bursting the Reader's Reality Bubble
• Beate Schirrmacher: A Story Too Good to Be True: Manipulation of Truth Claims in Faked New
• Tamás Csönge: Fictionality as a Rhetorical Tool in Political Mockumentary Films

Panel 2b: Experiences of Truth Across Social media
Chair: Kristoffer Holt

• Felix Raczkowski: Prove You’re no Robot: Practices of Authentication in Digital Media
• Pernilla Severson: How non-sharing in social media can signal trust
• Auguste Dementavičienė & Fausta Mikutaite: Public Sphere in the Age of Social Media: Anti-vaccination Movement in Lithuania

16.00-16.30 Break

16.30-18.00 Parallel sessions

Panel 3a: Alternative Stories
Chair: Péter Makai

• Yeqi Zhu: Impure Realism, Pure Eventness, and Horror Cinema in the Post-truth Era: A Case Study of One Cut of the Dead
• Barbara Braid: The Brontë Myth and Charlotte Brontë’s Criminal Biofictions
• Anna Gutowska: “An occasionally true story”: biofiction, authenticity and fictionality in The Great (2020)

Panel 3b: The truth about a virus: the mediated Pandemic
Chair: Jørgen Bruhn

• Asbjørg Westum & Gunilla Byrman: Swedish strategies for Covid19 - stories about death figures and face masks. How credible are they?
• Ragnhild Kr. Olsen, Mona Solvoll & Knut-Arne Futsæther: Trust in news media and social media platforms amidst the COVID-19 pandemic
• Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun & Fredrik Stiernstedt: Media, trust and information during the pandemic

Thursday, March 11, 2021

11.00-12.00 Workshop: Annelie Frank, Corina Löwe & Beate Schirrmacher: News in the time of infodemics

12.00–13.00   Break

13.00–14.00   Keynote 3

Kay O’Halloran (in collaboration with Elena Musi): “Developing Fake News Immunity”.  
Chair: Kristina Danielsson

14.00–14.30   Break

14.30–16.00   Parallel Sessions

Panel 4a: Truth Claims and Multimodality
Chair: Péter Makai

• Danielle Almeida: On Toys and the Playing Child: Truth Values and Affordances in Media’s Multimodal Messages
• Klas De Zwaan The Truth about a Bacillus: Visualizing Tuberculosis with the Lantern (1882- 1906)
• Morten Boeriis: Emotive truth and the eye in the hand: Representing visual reality with digital technology

Panel 4b: Transmediating Scientific Knowledge
Chair: Lars Elleström

• Jørgen Bruhn: Truth claims and intermedial ecocriticism
• Emma Tornborg: “More Citations Needed” – Truthfulness Through Transmediality

16.00–16.30   Break

16.30–18.00   Parallel Sessions

Panel 5a: Modelled Realities: Games and Simulations
Chair:  tba

• Péter Makai: Nothing is true, history is playable: The Assassin's Creed series as historiographic metafiction
• Alesja Serada & Alexander Pfeiffer: “Untrust Us”: Modeling Fake News on Blockchain
• Matthew McGinity: When is a simulation true? Truth and realism in immersive media

Panel 5b: Truthful Representation of the Anthropocene 
Chair: Lars Elleström

• Liviu Lutas: Representation of ecological crisis
• Niklas Salmose: We Are What We Eat! Food Cultures in Anthropocene Cinematic Cli-fi.
• Heidi Hart: Posthuman Hesitations: Unspeaking the Poetry of Witness

Friday, March 12, 2021

13.00–14.00   Keynote 4

Petra Bauer: “Listening to images of a future now”
Chair: Dagmar Brunow

14.00–14.30   Break

14.30–16.00   Parallel Sessions

Panel 6a: Truthfulness, performativity and affect
Chair: Jørgen Bruhn

• Heidrun Führer: Truth in Advertising
• Nadine Dannenberg: The Circle of Suspicion. Claiming a queer self in contemporary reality media landscapes
• Janneke Schoene: Exposing the theatrical of the real, exaggerating the real in the theatrical: Truthfulness and authenticity in performance art

Panel 6b:  COVCOM - Fighting a pandemic through translating science’

Workshop and Project Presentation. Henriette Thune and Siri Wiig

16.00–16.15 Break

16.15–17.00 Panel discussion: Projects and Practices of Truthfulness. With Turi Munthe (Parli), Annelie Frank (Faktajouren), Nafiseh Mousavi. Moderator: Beate Schirrmacher

17.00–17.15 Break

17.15–18.00 Summary and closure

Gunn Enli is professor in media studies at Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. She teaches and researchers in the fields media policy, social media, political communication and election campaigns. Enli has written seven books, of which three are published on the international market. Her recent books include Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), Mediated Authenticity (2015), and The Media Welfare State (2014).

https://www.hf.uio.no/english/people/admin/fac/management/gunnen/

Kay O’Halloran is Chair Professor and Head of Department of Communication and Media in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. She is an internationally recognized leading academic in the field of multimodal analysis, involving the study of the interaction of language with other resources in texts, interactions and events. In particular, a key focus of her work is the development of digital tools and techniques for multimodal analysis. Kay is developing mixed methods approaches that combine multimodal analysis, data mining and visualisation for big data analytics within and across different media platforms. 

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/communication-and-media/staff/kay-ohalloran/

Thomas Strässle is Head of the transdisciplinary Y Institute at Bern University of the Arts, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich, President of the Max Frisch Foundation at the ETH Zurich and a Literary Critic on Swiss TV. He studied at the Universities of Zurich, Cambridge and Paris and is also trained as a professional musician.

https://www.bfh.ch/en/about-bfh/people/mu24snqq2ity/

Petra Bauer, artist and filmmaker, is professor in Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, with a special focus on Moving Images, currently the area head for Mindepartementet which includes moving images, photography, performance and sound-art. In her artistic practice she is concerned with question of film as a political practice, and film as a place where social negotiations can take place. For many years she has been engaged with, both from a political and aesthetic point of view, how women have organized, refused and resisted, historically and in a contemporary global world. Together with different women’s communities she explores how artistic methods can be used to work and live together.

I have among other things had long-term collaborations with Southall Black Sisters in London, the sex-worker led organization Scot-Pep in Edinburgh, and with The Women’s Centre in Tensta-Hjulsta in Stockholm, which primarily mobilise and organise minority women. I am also one of the initiators of the feminist platform k.ö.k (Kvinnor önskar kollektivitet – Women Desire Collectivity –  http://kvinnocentertensta-hjulsta.org/kok/en/front-page/

You register to Trust Me here latest on March 1, 2021.

The entire conference will use the e-meeting platform Zoom. In order to participate, please read the following and see further below for instructions of how to connect and install the Zoom client - we strongly recommend everybody to do that because it will give you much better technical quality.

Links to the sessions will be provided to all registered participants shortly before the conference starts.

Important for all!

• Links to all zoom rooms will be available shortly before the conference starts. The links will be active 15 mins before the beginning of each lecture or session so that all participants can enter and make sure that everything works.
• The paper presentations are organized in parallel sessions, and each session will be led by a moderator. The papers are presented live, and there will be room for questions and comments either immediately after each paper or at the end of the session in question.
• Please also note that the names and identity of participants will only be visible within the sessions and the same thing goes for the personal identity in the chat rooms.

Questions and support

For all types of questions before the start of the conference, please use the conference e-mail trustme-conference@lnu.se. During the conference you can chat with us live via Zoom.

Connecting to Zoom

If you do not already have the Zoom client installed on your computer, you will need to make the following steps to install and configure Zoom:

1. Download the Zoom.us software on the device which you will use for the video conference (Windows, macOS, Android or iOS)
2. Test the internet connection and the audio system (microphone + headphones/ speakers) and video (webcam). You can click here to test a Zoom conference meeting. 

Steps for the actual video conference:

1. Accessing the video conferencing link, in the form of https://zoom.us/j/xxxxxxxxxx, you will find in the programme for each session. This will open the already installed application.
2. The authentication in the video conference is done with the email and password previously received from the conference administration.

General recommendations for using Zoom

1. Write your name and institution - eg. John Doe - University of Everywhere. In order to see how to do this please read this.
2. Keep the microphone turned off when you are not speaking, since background noise can be very distracting.
3. In order to talk with the moderators and other speakers try using the chat. Find instructions here.
4. In order to share your screen watch this short tutorial.
5. During a zoom conference you can give more non-verbal feedback - by raising your hand to ask for permission to speak, or by answering yes / no, etc. To see where you can access them, look at the explanatory images here.

For presenters (papers/keynotes) - some tips for better technical quality in recordings

• Set your video resolution to 1920x1080. If you use a mobile phone to record, record in landscape (horizontal) format.
• Use a neutral background and record in good light.
• Place yourself slightly to the left or right of the centre of the frame, and make sure not to have too much air above your head.
• Place your camera at the same level as your head.
• Preferably, use a wired lavalier microphone plugged into your computer or phone. In case you do not have access to a lavalier, use a high-quality USB microphone or a high-quality phone headset. Try to avoid large headsets, as these do not look good on video.
• Avoid using a room witch echo or other disturbing sounds.
• Preferably, do not use a virtual background. In case you record in Zoom with a lit green screen behind you, it is ok to use a virtual background.
• Choose mp4 as your file format