Archive

Call for Papers, SACOMM 2018, University of Johannesburg, 12-14 September

Theme: “Communication at a Crossroads”

Deadline for abstract submissions: 30 April 2018

A crossroads is a site where roads intersect. It is a point of crisis, a turning point, and a point of alternative configurations, convergence plus divergence, meeting and departure, unity and disunity. Metaphorically, it is a point of flux and change, a critical juncture at which a life-changing decision must be made. The crossroads is a superposition of varied, multiple, different – sometimes conflicting – tendencies, impulses and trajectories, and there is little certainty about the future. At a crossroads movement is channelled, controlled, regulated, or freed: we can stand still or go forward, get lost or find endless possibilities, be trapped by inaction, insincerity and passivity or find freedom. At a crossroads we can be transfixed to the past and its aftermaths, or we sincerely take the future on. We may be misled, be manipulated into going in particular directions, or we may use the crossroads to affirm our independence and agency, forge alliances, and build new, transformative, ethical, just futures.

The student movement for free, quality decolonised education that started in 2015, followed by persistent calls for decolonisation of the university and transformation of research and teaching, has heightened the crises and tensions within traditional disciplines. Centres cannot hold, and typical business-as-usual attitudes to epistemic injustice are no longer tenable. The discipline of communication, like many others that have been caught up in these crises and tensions, is at an epistemic and disciplinary crossroads of its own, one that calls for a “communication turn” and for bold, new, difficult, innovative, boundary-crossing, boundary-smashing, critical, frank and courageous conversations in communication.

 

This conference calls for presentations, papers, posters and panels in communication, media, journalism, film, television, and cultural studies that interrogate the notion of “communication at a crossroads” and the “communication turn” in a variety of ways. The intention is to take stock of the current flux within these fields, as well as map possible futures. Our context is Southern Africa, Africa, and the global south. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Communication at a crossroads
• Decolonisation and epistemic struggles
• Dare we decolonise communication?
• The “communication turn”
• Film/Television at a crossroads
• Journalism at a crossroads
• Public relations at a crossroads
• Corporate communication at a crossroads
• Development communication at a crossroads
• Communication, advocacy and activism at a crossroads
• Visual culture, media and communication
• New media, new mediatisations, and their practices
• Whither social media?
• Communication, social media and social movements in Africa
• Whither cultural studies?
• Communication industries at a crossroads

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

The confirmed Keynote Speaker for SACOMM 2018, Johannesburg, is Prof. Francis Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town.

 

ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 
Category 1: Full 20 minute conference paper presentations.
Category 2: Panel discussion sessions and/or roundtable/workshop proposals 

 

ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS

All abstracts must be submitted on the correct abstract submission form. Submissions which are not submitted on the correct form will not be accepted. Incomplete submissions will not be accepted. 

The Abstract Submission form can be downloaded in MSWord format athttp://sacomm.org.za/call-for-papers/

 

All abstract submissions should be addressed to the SACOMM Conference Organiser, Collen Chambwera, atsacomm2018@uj.ac.za.  Please note that you may submit more than one abstract, but no more than two. In case you submit two abstracts, please make sure that they belong in different streams.

 

Submission deadline: 30 April 2018. 

 

SCHEDULE 
Deadline for electronic submission of all abstracts for peer review and other proposals: Monday 30 April 2018. The conference organisers will notify authors about the status of their contributions via e-mail by end of May 2018.  

 

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION 
A call for registration with further details about the conference will be released in June.

Conference theme: The conference theme gives an indication of the topic of discussions during plenary sessions at the SACOMM annual conference. Individual abstract submissions are not strictly required to adhere to the conference theme. 

 

CONFERENCE FEES

Academics: R 3400

Students/emerging scholars/independent scholars: R 1000

Included in conference fees:

• Full access to all conference sessions and activities;
• Gala dinner on Thursday 13 September;
• Lunch and coffee breaks from Wednesday 12 September to Friday 14 September;
• Conference programme.

SACOMM STREAMS 

SACOMM has six different streams. Please indicate which stream your abstract submission should be allocated to on your abstract submission form. 

 

The SACOMM streams are: 

• Media Studies and Journalism 
• Corporate Communication 
• Screen Studies 
• Communication Studies 
• Communication education and curriculum development (CECD) 
• Communications advocacy and activism (CAA)

Call for Papers – social media data and data aggregators

This specialized track focuses on the ongoing challenges for using data from social media platforms and from third party aggregators as sources for research metrics and scientometric indicators. These challenges include but are not limited to:

--> platform-based restrictions in accessing social media data and potential biases resulting from limited access (also: biases introduced by data aggregators)

--> black boxes, hidden algorithms, and lack of information about collection processes and context affecting the use of social media data and data aggregators

-->lack of understanding of user activities (e.g. motivations to retweet, like, share) and user groups in academic contexts

-->incomplete data (e.g. due to missing DOIs or identifiers not tracked by aggregators) and noise (e.g.due to bot-activity)

We invite the following types of submissions:

a) original research studying the quality of social media data and data aggregators for measuring scholarly communication

b) short (hands-on) introductions and best practices for using data from one or more specific social media platforms or aggregators.

Please submit your work as short papers (max 3,000 words) until April 1, 2018. See http://sti2018.cwts.nl/submissions for templates, EasyChair access and additional submission information.

Looking forward to your submissions

Katrin Weller, Astrid Orth, Isabella Peters

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONFERENCE INFORMATION

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

23rd Science and Technology Indicators Conference (STI 2018)

September 12-14, 2018

Leiden, The Netherlands.

Website: http://sti2018.cwts.nl

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

IMPORTANT DATES

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

- Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2018

- Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2018

- Early-bird registration: June 15 - July 15, 2018

- Conference: September 12 - 14, 2018

Big Data Ethics in China’s Social media Sector

Big Data Ethics in China’s Social media Sector

 

Webpage:https://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=94883

 

Project Description

Requirements:

The candidate should have a first class or upper second class honours degree, or a master’s degree (or equivalent qualification), in Law/Sociology/Media and Communication/Digital Data Studies/Applied Ethics, Evidence of good spoken and written Chinese and English is essential. The candidate should have an IELTS score of 6.5 or above, if the first language is not English. This position is open to all qualified candidates irrespective of nationality.

Degree:

The student will be awarded a PhD degree from the University of Liverpool (UK) upon successful completion of the program.

Project Description:

This project investigates big data ethics in China’s social media sectors. It examines the normative ethics of big data collection and process; it then studies the empirical norms and values of big data ethics practiced in China’s social media sectors; it addresses the conceptual disjunctions between empirical and normative norms and proposes for improvements including both legal and non-legal, hard and soft measures for big data ethics in China’s social media sector. Social science research methods will be applied include: a) Documentary research; b) in-depth interviews; and c) focus groups.

For more information about doctoral scholarship and PhD programme at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU): Please visit:
http://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/admissions/phd/entry-requirements.html

http://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/admissions/phd/feesscholarships.html

How to Apply:

Interested applicants are advised to email yik-chan.chin@xjtlu.edu.cn (XJTLU principal supervisor’s email address) the following documents for initial review and assessment (please put the project title in the subject line).
• CV
• Two reference letters with company/university letterhead
• Personal statement outlining your interest in the position
• Proof of English language proficiency (an IELTS score of 6.5 or above)
• Verified school transcripts in both Chinese and English (for international students, only the English version is required)
• Verified certificates of education qualifications in both Chinese and English (for international students, only the English version is required)

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Dr. Yik Chan Chin (yik-chan.chin@xjtlu.edu.cn), whose personal profile is linked below:

http://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/departments/academic-departments/school-of-film-and-tv-arts/staff/yik-chan-chin

Funding Notes

The PhD studentship is available for three years subject to satisfactory progress by the student. The award covers tuition fees for three years (currently equivalent to RMB 80,000 per annum) and provides a monthly stipend of 3500 RMB as a contribution to living expenses. It also provides up to RMB 16,500 to allow participation at international conferences during the period of the award. It is a condition of the award that holders of XJTLU PhD scholarships carry out 300-500 hours of teaching assistance work per year. The scholarship holder is expected to carry out the major part of his or her research at XJTLU in Suzhou, China. However, he or she is eligible for a research study visit to the University of Liverpool of up to three months, if this is required by the project.

Minitrack: Collective Intelligence and Crowds

Minitrack: Collective Intelligence and Crowds

HICSS 52 http://hicss.hawaii.edu/ Track: Digital and Social Media

January 8-11, 2019, Maui, Hawaii, USA
This minitrack is open to analysis of collective intelligence, knowledge creation, and crowdsourcing. We think that assemblages of people and machines are making new forms of organization possible, and we are interested in research that explores these new forms of organization. The minitrack invites papers that look at crowd sourcing, at idea generation, at remixing communities, and hybrid organizations in which learning machines plays a strong role.
We live surrounded by socially constructed identities – organizations, nations, websites – all of which are constituted through a complex interplay of interactions, a kind of distributed cognition. These Internet platforms allow people to aggregate knowledge from socially distant areas. They also allow diverse groups of people – and maybe autonomous learning machines – to negotiate identities. With these socio-technical configurations we can build collective intelligences that themselves will steer the quest for knowledge. These collectives can be self-catalyzing, deciding individually or collaboratively what to do next, out of which novel and practical ideas emerge.
While these open design collectives rely on organic growth and slow embedding of members in the network, alternative structures based on crowds can be assembled more rapidly. Between the two extremes are a host of different organizational and social structures, in which committed members of a community create, improve, and share ideas. The output of these socio-technical systems often takes the form of digital media, and their traces are varied, ranging from ephemeral short messages to curated collaborative knowledge repositories.
We are interested in 1) papers that observe, analyze, or visualize these socio-technical structures and their outputs: for example, analyses of open design and open source collectives 2) papers that analyze the phenomena of crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and collaborative mass knowledge production; 3) design research that creates and evaluates new tools and processes for crowds and communities; and 4) papers that simulate the production processes and outcomes through software.
We are open to papers that explore unusual ways of modeling emergent organizations: models that demonstrate or reflect the influence of social systems on user behaviors, models that consider the multiple connections between people, technology, and institutions, models of technological and social affordances, models that break personal identity into sub-relations, models that examine the emergence of roles, identity, and institutions, as well as socio-technical models of deviance and disruption. We are particularly interested in papers that apply the foundational ideas of James Coleman, James March, Herb Simon, Mark Granovetter, Harrison White, Charles Tilly and related scholars to modern information systems. We are open to papers concerned with how to visualize large scale social phenomena. And papers that analyze the role machine algorithms and human processes play in our politics and our personal interactions.
In sum, the content of the minitrack is open to analysis of collective intelligence, new sociotechnical configuration of knowledge creation, and crowdsourcing. Included also is the analysis of social interaction as a way of describing underlying social structure. Thus, the track is open to a wide range of content areas that lend themselves to the analysis of relations between people, collectives, and machines, as well as the products produced as a result of these relations.
IMPORTANT DATES

- April 15: Paper submission begins
- June 15: Paper submissions deadline
- August 17: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
- September 22: Deadline for authors to submit final manuscript for publication
- October 1: Deadline for at least one author to register for HICSS-52

Conference Website: http://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Author Guidelines:  http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-and-minitracks/authors/

Minitrack organizers
Pnina Fichman fichman@indiana.edu<mailto:fichman@indiana.edu>
Donald Steiny steiny@steiny.com<mailto:steiny@steiny.com>
Jeffrey Nickerson jnickerson@stevens.edu<mailto:jnickerson@stevens.edu>

Youth Futures: Connection and Mobility in the Asia Pacific Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation Flagship Conference

Call for Papers

 

Youth Futures: Connection and Mobility in the Asia Pacific

Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation

Flagship Conference

 

Venue: Deakin Downtown, Melbourne City Campus

November 15-16 2018

 

Young people across the Asia-Pacific live in increasingly interlinked, complex and uncertain worlds. New mobilities as well as new kinds of connectivity, enabled through changing global economic, geopolitical and technological circumstances, have created unprecedented possibilities for youth pathways and networks to span spatial, temporal and social differences. This conference considers opportunities and challenges for young people in and beyond the region as they make a place for themselves and imagine their futures in an era of increased mobilities, de-standardisation of the life course, hyperdiversity and digital connectedness. Mobilities and the possibilities to which they give rise have long been a defining featu­re of youth transition regimes (Wyn 2015), but today such aspirations and demands are increasingly transnational in scale, as youth are urged towards mastering ‘global’ opportunities linked to the inter and intra national movement of goods and labour, and the acquisition and leveraging of digital skills, entrepreneurialism and cosmopolitan capital in ways which cut regional and class divides (Robertson et al. 2017). In the face of these demands and opportunities, young people are also living in conditions of structurally uneven experiences of mobility, digital access and competence, socio-political and economic precarity. The extent to which young people can pursue new forms of mobility and connection have also become a key challenge in an era where increased diversity and technological affordances have simultaneously multiplied, intensified and fragmented networks, affiliations and connections, making the ability for young people to imagine a future where belonging and security are attainable pursuits increasingly precarious. At the same time, young people are also constructing and negotiating new terrains of togetherness within/across local, national, transnational and digital spaces, contesting stable notions of community, identity and belonging.

 

This conference seeks to address the temporal and spatial dimensions of youth mobilities and connections, bringing into conversation questions of migration, un/moorings, transitions, pathways, stagnation, aspiration, futurity, and hope, with those of (digital and social) networks, aspirations, solidarities, cultures, communities, participation, belonging, and social and civic lives. Hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institute, and animated by its engagement in problem-oriented research into social issues associated with globalising processes, the conference’s underlying thematic context is the Institute’s core focus on citizenship and globalisation. It aims to explore these issues for young people as they navigate new and old pathways through the life-course, establish and disrupt forms of connection across multiplicity and differences, and put down roots/stay on the move in a globalised world. It seeks to share and build knowledge at the multidisciplinary interfaces of youth/childhood/media/migration/mobility studies.

 

Website: http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/events/youth-futures-connection-and-mobility-in-the-asia-pacific

 

Conference Organising Committee

• Professor Anita Harris

• Dr Rose Butler
• Dr Amelia Johns
• Dr Jessica Walton
• Mr Andy Zhao

 

Keynote Speakers

We are excited to welcome keynote speakers:

-        A/Prof Sandrina de Finney (University of Victoria, Canada),

-        Dr Shanthi Robertson (Western Sydney University), and

-        Dr Crystal Abidin (Jönköping University, Sweden).

 

Submit an abstract

Please submit your abstract (200 words max), paper title and a short bionote (100 words max) by 14 May 2018 to adi-admin@deakin.edu.au

We welcome papers which may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

-        young people's digital practices, spaces and cultures;

-        intercultural relations, diversity and migration;

-        (re)configurations of cultural/racial/ethnic/local/national/trans-local and  'post’colonial identities through various forms of connection and mobility;

-        experiences of mobility/immobility and place-making;

-        precarity, opportunity and futurity;

-        new (contested) terrains and temporalities of social or civic togetherness.

Building Resistance Against Racist Digital Futures

Building Resistance Against Racist Digital Futures  

A call for interventions

In the recent years, we have seen adramatic increase in everyday application of digital technologies in theworkplace, public services and everyday activities. They are presented to usthrough the lens of freedom and positive futurity – a freedom to live a‘comfortable life’, a freedom to ‘work flexibly’; a freedom to receive‘services’ efficiently. A freedom to embrace the digital future. At the sametime, we are witnessing an unprecedented rise in the use of those verytechnologies as tool of surveillance, censorship, and carceral control, servingcurrent regimes of ableism, classism, racism – and particularly anti-Blacknessand Islamophobia. ‘Big data’ is used for racial profiling; biometric scanners aredeployed in airports, universities and the labour market; algorithmicmanipulation and censorship are taking place under various ‘anti-terror’regulations; and social media content by activists, migrants and racialisedcommunities is monitored and criminalised. These and other forms oftechnological xeno-racist violence cannot be clearly attributed to either stateor corporate control, but rather, are increasingly about intersections betweenthe two. For example, private data firms are contracted by states to carry outracial profiling and Islamophobic surveillance; while digital giants such asGoogle or Facebook collaborate with governments to suppress anti-war onanti-colonial activism.

This edited collection aims to critically explore and contest thisintersection of the two phenomena, by deploying a combination of legal,activist, and academic perspective on digital violence and digital precarity. Weaim to counter the uncritical celebration of digital tools as unproblematic anddefault technologies of activism and insurgency. Equally, we aim to resist theappropriation of critical digital scholarship by governments, militaries andcorporations. We ask instead:  How can we better understand the constantlyemerging new forms of digital violence? How can we develop forms of academic, legaland community self-defence against them? How do we equip individuals andcommunities, activists, teachers, students and legal workers, with tools tounderstand and resist carceral digital futures?

While attuned toforms of digital violence and precarity internationally, this edited collectionfocuses specifically on the UK contextand in particular upon PREVENT, Brexit, the anti-immigration “hostileenvironment” and the tightening regimes of policing and surveillance of Muslimand Black communities. We invite short contributions of up to 3-4,000 words, in the form of academicor personal essays, legal analysis, proposals, manifestos, calls for action, orother interventions. Topics may include but are not limited to

  - The intersections between racism, ableism and digital technologies
  - GDPR in the UK
  - Digital policing and surveillance of migrants, refugees, Black, Muslim, PoC and other precarious subjects
  - Digital data and racial profiling
  - Social media platforms’ war on political dissent
  - Racial and Islamophobic politics of biometrics
  - The state’s collaboration with digital giants (such as Google, Amazon, Facebook)
  - Securitisation and weaponisation of medical records

Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short bioto digitalprecarity@gmail.com by 16th of April 2018.

PublisherWeare currently exploring publishing venues that are non-profit and committed tosocial justice. We aim to have the print book as low price as possible, accompaniedby free/pay-as-you-can e-book.

Editors

Adi Kuntsman is Senior Lecturer in Information and Communicationsat Manchester Metropolitan University. Adi’s work explored queer and migranton-line communities; regional Internet cultures in the Middle East and Easternand Central Europe; hatred, conflict and memory in digital domains; digitalemotions; Israeli political violence and militarism on social media; and morerecently, the use of selfies in political actions; and data governance and thepolitics of ‘opting out’. Adi’s latest books include Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (withRebecca L. Stein) Selfie Citizenship.

Sanaz Raji is an independent scholar and activist,campaigning for issues relating to neoliberal higher education, anti-racism,migrant rights, and the culture of surveillance. Sanaz established theJustice4Sanaz campaign three years ago and is the co-founded of Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC) - a campaign designed to end monitoring and the hostile environmentpolicy against non-EU and EU migrants students and staff. She is apublished author and writer in the field of Iranian diaspora studies, criticalrace studies and social media. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Tehran Bureau/PBS in addition to academic journals and books.

Patrick Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Criminologyat Manchester Metropolitan University and co-founder of Site of Resistance (www.sitesofresistance.org).  His work is concerned with processes ofcriminalisation; the racialised Othering of minority communities andindividuals.  In particular, Patrick’s researchis focused upon challenging invasive social and criminal regulation and the (over)policingof minority ethnic communities by revealing concealed and hidden strategies ofpunishment which disproportionately affect black communities.  He is the co-author of DangerousAssociations: Joint Enterprise, Gangs and Racism for the Centre for Crime andJustice Studies.