The lively and august Catholic University of Portugal will hold an international three-day conference on communication, cognition and media in September 2009 at the Faculty of Philosophy.
Scholars and researchers are invited to send proposals on any topic related to media studies, particularly within these research areas: journalism, television studies, advertising, multimedia, interactive media, political communication, organisational communication, sociology of communication, theories of communication, cognition and languages, semiotics, art and rhetoric, and communication ethics.
An excerpt from the conference description:
Over the last decades, cognitive sciences have developed theoretical models that allow us the understanding of essential aspects of cognition, of language and of communication itself. For example, we know from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics that people find most categories meaningful in terms of prototypes, not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Hence follows the development of typically polysemous radial networks that are grounded upon human experience. From neurosciences we know that the brain does not process visual information in a disembodied way, but instead maintains the perceptual topology and rebuilds image schemas. These offer coherence to radial categories and motivate metaphorical projections of more concrete domains into more abstract ones. It is known that we may conceptualise certain situation in alternative ways and that we do it by means of construal operations such as perspective, focal attention, prominence, abstraction and the figure/ground distinction, well known from studies in gestalt psychology. We also know that communication is not confined to an exchange of information about the world. It is rather a means of cognitively coordinating different perspectives from the subjects of conceptualisation (speaker and addressee), therefore taking into account other minds, ruling and influencing them. It has been recently argued that human cognition is to be understood as situated, synergic or social, being equally determined by social interaction and culture and therefore can not be reduced to neural individual operations.
The aim of this congress is to promote interdisciplinary research on the biological, cognitive, emotional and sociocultural basis of traditional and new media, regarding their impact on cultures, societies and individuals. The congress includes both the perspective of interpretation or critical analysis of the media discourses and representations and perspectives about their production, perception and assessment. We are particularly interested on the following topics: cognitive and cultural models of socio/cultural identities and in social, political, economic and scientific debates, cognitive and cultural models as covert ideologies; structures, cognitive systems and rhetoric in single and multimodal discourses; prototypes and stereotypes in categorization; conceptual metaphor, in its verbal, non-verbal and multimodal appearances; cognitive power of metaphor and metonymy; mental spaces and conceptual integration; gestalt perception; image perception, understanding, structure and meaning; interaction patterns established between verbal text and image; interpretation of multimodal text; preconceptual image schemas and mental imagery; attention attribution; perspective and intersubjectivity; methodologies and techniques of interpretation and production of the media discourses; interaction between embodied and sociocultural aspects of cognition and of communication.
Further information here.
