2006: Conferences and publications

This has been the final year of the IREN project (International Radio Research Network), an EU-funded Framework 6 initiative led by Jean-Jacques Cheval, a leading scholar in the field of radio who is based in Bordeaux, France. Although I was not one of the original thirteen partners from ten European countries, IREN have made me most welcome from the beginning, to the extent that Jean-Jacques called me the membre caché at the final conference held by IREN, in Belgium in November! I considered that quite a compliment.

The project has provided an excellent stimulus for research into a wide variety of aspects of radio, as well as a lively forum for radio academics from Europe and beyond to meet, discuss and collaborate in a number of very positive ways. During 2006 I have given the following three papers at IREN conferences:

The democratisation of the media through proliferation: new technologies, changes in regulation and community broadcasting at the Jornadas Internacionales de la Radio y la Television, Bilbao, Spain, January (http://www.kazetaritza.com/).

Regulation and democracy – PSB, commercial and participatory radio in the 20th and 21st centuries at The Medium with the Promising Future (Radio in Central and Eastern European Countries), Lublin, Poland, June.

Radio: theorising the future/theorising in future (or in French Radio : théoriser le futur / théoriser au futur) at Quelles voix/voies pour le futur, Brussels, November. I was particularly pleased to be invited to give a keynote address at this conference, which was split between the town of Louvain-la-Neuve and the Belgian capital, Brussels.

All three papers are being published in bound volumes along with other contributions to those respective conferences, and although the Bilbao paper was presented in English to a PowerPoint presentation in Spanish, I have translated it into Spanish for the book.

Although IREN in its first incarnation has now come to the end of its contractual life, it lives on, not least within ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) but also as a federation of national radio research groups - with a further exciting initiative to follow in 2007.

A fourth 2006 conference, La radiodiffusion aux tournants des siècles, at Lyon, France, in June, was organised by the French radio research group, GRER (le Groupe de Recherches et d'Etudes sur la Radio), of which I became a member. I wrote the paper in French and presented it in French after a little cosmetic tweaking by two other GRER members, Elvina Fesneau and Béatrice Donzelle, to whom went many thanks and a nice meal afterwards. The title was Mais, est-ce encore de la radio? Programmation et transmission en mutation en temps de crises http://radio2006.org. This paper is also being published, in the original French.

At Sunderland we hosted two excellent conferences of particular interest this year, Martin Shingler's Sounding Out 3 in September, and Michael Higgins's Politics and the Media in November. While making only brief appearances to introduce speakers at Sounding Out 3, I gave a fifth paper at Politics and the Media, Regulation and democracy: representation of politics in the media – a comparative study.

I do have plans to work on conference papers in 2007, but it is unlikely that I will have the time to give quite so many!