Department of Sociology
Myth(s) in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Wednesday 13 May 2015, 9.30AM to 18:00
Speaker(s): Keynote: Dr Shani Orgad (LSE) and Dr Vanda Zajko (University of Bristol)
It seeks to create a space where a multitude of disciplines, perspectives, and methods could be discussed critically. The ambivalence and the ambiguity of 'myth' is intentional. Myth is wide and varied - it can be a problematic social construction; it can be the process of creating meaning; it can even be the myth of meaning itself. Thus this conference plans to provide an opportunity for multi/interdisciplinary perspectives and their critical exploration.
Location: RCH/037 Heslington East Campus, University of York
Admission: by registration
Overview
Overview
Keynote speakers: Dr Shani Orgad from LSE and Dr Vanda Zajko from the University of Bristol
Date and venue: Wednesday 13 May in room RCH/037 (University of York, Campus East)
This postgraduate conference aims to explore the variety and richness of the notion of myth. It seeks to create a space where a multitude of disciplines, perspectives, and methods could be discussed critically. The ambivalence and the ambiguity of 'myth' is intentional. Myth is wide and varied - it can be a problematic social construction; it can be the process of creating meaning; it can even be the myth of meaning itself. Thus this conference plans to provide an opportunity for multi/interdisciplinary perspectives and their critical exploration.
Keynotes
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Shani Orgad, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science
The Others are Coming: Ambivalent and incomplete imaginings beyond dreams and nightmares
Today’s global media are overflowing with ‘others’. What do media representations tell us about the ‘others’ in our world and how we do or should relate to them? What myths of nationality and strangers, of ‘us’ and ‘them, does the contemporary media space offer?
Shani Orgad will explore these questions by focusing on representations of immigrants and migration. Based on her book Media Representation and the Global Imagination, Orgad will show how the representations circulating in the contemporary mediated space, in various forms, media and genres, are mostly polarized between utopian constructions of ‘dream’ lives and dystopian accounts of ‘nightmare’ existences. These narratives tend to swallow up, though not always entirely, ambivalence, uncertainty and complexity, which are the crux of modern life and the experience of migration.
But when narratives of dreams and nightmares interact with people’s ‘localized structures of feeling’ (Williams), their rigidity and crude antinomies can be transformed in unexpected ways. In particular, the representations produced by migrants themselves, although mostly at the margins of public debate and research on migration, can play a significant role in shaping and reshaping how we imagine difference and otherness, ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the relations between the two.
Biography
Shani Orgad is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. She writes and teaches on representation and globalization, suffering, war and conflict in the media, and gender and the media. She is particularly interested in the public narratives of these issues in today’s media and how they interact with people's personal narratives and lived experiences. Dr Orgad explores these issues in her recent book on Media Representation and the Global Imagination (Polity, 2012), in various journal articles, and a recently completed research project on humanitarian communication, which she co-directed. Dr Orgad is also interested in online communication, narrative and media, and health and new media, themes she examined in her previous book Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet (2005).
Dr. Vanda Zajko, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Bristol
The Syncretism of Contemporary Mythopoesis
Biography
Dr Zajko has wide-ranging research interests in the reception of classical myth and literature, particularly in the 20th century, and in psychoanalytic theory and feminist thought. She has published on a variety of ancient and modern authors including Homer, Aeschylus and Ovid, Shakespeare, Keats, Melanie Klein, James Joyce, Freud, Mary Shelley and Ted Hughes. She is currently editing the Blackwell Companion to the Reception of Classical Myth.
Prof. Ivor Gaber, University of Sussex
Media Myths and Society or Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story
The UK media's frequent misrepresentation of social policy and social science arises as a result of a number of factors. Most obviously is the political bias of the British press (resulting from patterns of media ownership and concentration). The influence of the press remains high, despite falling circulations, because of their ongoing agenda-setting power that the newspapers (and their websites) still exercise over the broadcasters and the social media. Other factors at play include our adversarial political and media culture, journalistic pressures and practices and the ongoing audience requirement for "folk devils and moral panics" (pace Stanley Cohen) Areas of social policy in which myth-making is stronger than truth-telling, include "youth", "problem families”, “scroungers”, "drug-takers", "immigrants", "Muslims", "social workers" and "the sixties".
Biography
Ivor Gaber is Professor of Journalism University of Sussex and Emeritus Professor of Broadcast Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before entering academia he was a reporter, producer and programme editor at BBC TV and Radio, ITV News, Channel Four News and Sky News. He has published widely on the relationship between the media and politics and on television news and agenda-setting. He has provided media advice to a range of organisations including the ESRC, the Rowntree Foundation, the British Sociological Association and the Political Studies Association. He represents the UK on UNESCO's International Programme for the Development of Communication.
CfP
Call for Papers
Papers were invited for the following topics:
- Myths and social representations
- Mythic imagination
- Myth in popular culture
- The role of institutions in the myth making process
- Myth, knowledge and reality
- Narratives of myths, mythical narratives
- Myths and power
- Myth debunking in academia
- Problematic myths
- Myth and social discourse
- Myth as a framework for understanding social life
- Myths and memory
- Ancient myths and/vs modern myths
The call for papers has now closed
Papers & Presentations
Papers & Presentations
Media Myths and Society or Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story, Prof. Ivor Gaber, Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex [Powerpoint]
Neither potion nor plaything, but a provocation: teenagers’ engagement with myth, Cath Heinemeyer, International Centre for Arts and Narrative, York St John University Cath_Heinemeyer (MS PowerPoint 
, 1,232kb) Cath_Heinemeyer_Paper (PDF 
, 100kb)
Gender Crossing Tales: a case for myth and metaphor, Stella Fremi, School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Brighton Stella_Fremi (MS PowerPoint , 4,780kb)
Dispelling Development: Exploring myths as meaning making systems, Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani, School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex Fawzia_Haeri_Mazanderani (MS PowerPoint , 1,601kb)
Transnational Mythscapes and the (new) Enlighteners: young Bulgarian skilled migrants in the UK, Elena Genova, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham Elena_Genova (MS PowerPoint , 11,448kb)