ECREA’S 8th European Communication Conference The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) in partnership with the University of Minho call for papers to be presented at the 8th European Communication Conference, to be held in Braga, Portugal, from 2 October to 5 October 2020.

In Ireland in recent weeks, national broadcaster, RTÉ, has not only been a news producer but a news item. The broadcaster, facing serious financial pressures, has indicated that it will aim to reduce its budget by selling off assets, reducing the pay of top earners and offering voluntary redundancies.

‘And we are LIVE… Hello from Europe, hello from the ECREA Television Studies Section’. I think we should make more of a song and dance of it, don’t you? When I originally came across TV Studies in 1998, I don’t think much European Television Studies did yet exist.

If you live in any country other than Turkey, Hungary, India, Brazil, the USA or the UK (and a number of others more) you might be excused for thinking that life is … kind of as it has always been.

A few years ago a colleague suggested that I watch an unusual television programme about people watching television programmes. Obviously, such a description didn’t initially tempt me to spend my valuable leisure time observing a bunch of boring strangers make silly comments about this week’s programmes. I’m more than capable of doing this myself.

There is a lot of talk about mental well-being at the moment, and it’s great to see that we also contribute to this, not least Kerr Castle in his recent blog, based on his PhD, on comfort television. I saw Kerr present last year at the Critical Studies in Television conference, and it really triggered something in me – suggesting that this is something I at once recognised and felt I needed to think more about.

When I started working for the soap operas production industry in Portugal I was always a little bit afraid of talking about it with my friends and family. No particular reason for that…just a strange feeling that I was part of something terrible: low quality television content for the masses, rubbish television. I started working mostly in production, but I later moved to something even more daunting: selling soaps!

Call for Papers: The Youthification of Television and Screen Culture Biannual Conference of the Television Studies Section of ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association)  24-25 October 2019, University of Groningen, NL   Confirmed keynote speakers: Prof. Jeanette Steemers (King’s College London) Dr. Vilde Schanke Sundet (Inland Norway University, Lillehammer)

Hi, my name is Elke and I am a compulsive overworker. When I say ‘compulsive’ I literally mean I cannot help myself. I am ‘acting from a compulsion’ as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. When I work less than 10 hours I feel guilty, after all there is always more to do, more to learn, more to improve. Even going down to 10 hours has been a bit of a struggle: before having children, I was regularly working 12 hours a day.

Sorry if I’m bringing this up, but something is bugging me… I don’t really know where to start with this, because the longer I think about it, the more it appears that all of the elements are interconnected and, in the end, hark back to how we as television scholars see ourselves and the role we’re playing in the bigger picture of academia within the social sphere… So, yes, the big questions.