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Call for Papers for EME Volume 17

All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.

Explorations in Media Ecology, the journal of the Media Ecology Association, accepts submissions that extend our understanding of media (defined in the broadest possible terms), that apply media ecological approaches, and/or that advance media ecology as a field of inquiry. As an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary publication, EME welcomes contributions embracing diverse theoretical, philosophical, and methodological approaches to the study of media and processes of mediation through language, symbols, codes, meaning, and processes of signification, abstracting, and perception; art, music, literature, aesthetics, and poetics; form, pattern, and method; materials, energy, information, technology, and technique; mind, thought, emotion, consciousness, identity, and behavior; groups, organizations, affiliations, communities; politics, economics, religion, science, education, business, and the professions; societies and cultures; history and the future; contexts, situations, systems, and environments; evolution, and ecology; the human person, human affairs, and the human condition; etc.

EME publishes peer-reviewed scholarly articles, essays, research reports, commentaries, and critical examinations, and includes several special features. Our Pedagogy Section focuses on teaching strategies and resources, pedagogical concerns, and issues relating to media ecology education; we are particularly interested in articles that share great ideas for teaching (GIFTs) media ecology in the classroom. The Probes Section features short items that are exploratory or provocative in nature. Creative writing on media ecological themes can be found in our Poetry Section. Questions of concern to media ecology scholars are taken up in our Forum Section. And our Review Section includes individual book reviews and review essays.

EME is a refereed journal. Strict anonymity is accorded to both authors and referees. References and citations should follow the Harvard Referencing system, and the journal otherwise follows standard British English for spelling and punctuation.

Submissions can be uploaded online at <http://submission.newgen.co/journals/index.php/EME/login>

Direct inquiries to

Lance Strate, Editor: <strate@fordham.edu>

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Call For Articles – Game Studies Special Issue: “Queerness and Video Games: New Critical Perspectives on LGBTQ Issues, Sexuality, Games, and Play”

by Guest Editors – Ruberg & Phillips

The intersection of LGBT issues, queerness, and video games represents a space of great turmoil and great potential. Video games, the games industry, and games culture have long struggled with discrimination and marginalization. In recent years, large-scale online harassment campaigns have made it especially difficult for those who do not fit the image of the traditional “gamer” to express their ideas through games. Yet LGBTQ game-makers — along with women, people of color, and many others — are establishing their place in the medium. At the same time, video games offer more than the opportunity to represent LGBTQ people. Games also share a common ethos with queerness, which is a way of approaching the world as well as a name for LGBTQ identities, as queer studies has long argued. Both games and queerness push us to live life otherwise, to explore alternative ways of being, and to challenge the status quo by creating opportunities for play.

This is a moment of explosive growth for queer video games and the exploration of LGBTQ issues in games. The academic paradigm of queer game studies, which brings together the established fields of queer studies and game studies, represents a fast-emerging area of scholarly growth. At the same time, over the last five years, a veritable wave of video games developed by LGBTQ game designers making work that explicitly explores queer experiences has pushed the medium in important new directions. While volumes like Queer Game Studies, Gaming Representation, and Rated M for Mature and monographs like Gaming at the Edge are establishing a body of scholarship, events like the Queerness and Games Conference and the GaymerX convention are building community around LGBTQ issues and video games. Additional voices from a wide variety of disciplines are joining the dialogue regularly. At this moment of national and international political upheaval, there has never been a more important time to approach video games, the defining medium of the 21st century, through queerness, queer analysis, and queer politics.

This special issue of Game Studies seeks to explore new critical perspectives on queerness and video games, building from existing queer game studies work and broadening the current scope of the paradigm by inviting intersectional voices, highlighting underrepresented LGBTQ identities, and challenging those who study video games to make explicit the political implications of their work. The interplays, overlaps, and points of tension between video games and queerness are vast and myriad. Here, we aim to push into new corners of this work, moving beyond the simple and often instrumentalized call to increase LGBTQ representation. Instead, we challenge our fellow queer game studies scholars, as well as those who are new to this area, to explore what it means to critique, play, build, protest, and feel in ways that are queer.

Possible topics for contributions include:

  • Intersectional perspectives on LGBTQ issues and queerness in video games. For instance, how can games and play be understood through queer of color theory? What is the relationship between disability studies and queerness in video games? How do socioeconomics, nationality, religion, etc. in games intersect with queer issues?
  • LGBTQ identities and experiences currently underrepresented in queer game studies scholarship, such as topics related to asexuality, bisexuality, transgender and genderqueersubjects, as well as non-normative desires (e.g. kink) and relationship styles (e.g. polyamory).
  • Queerness in video games beyond representation. What might it mean to play games queerly, to design games queerly, to interpret games queerly? What is the value of moving conversations around queerness in video games beyond the push for increased representation of LGBTQ characters and romances? How can we use queerness as a way to understand the technical elements of video games that are themselves underrepresented in existing scholarship, such as engines, code, and interfaces.
  • Queer politics and social justice in/through video games and games culture. What are queer games, game-makers, game scholars, and players working toward in the present political climate? What are the powers and the pitfalls of creating and studying queer video games today, amidst social upheaval and reactionary vitriol in North America, Europe, and beyond?
  • The role of affect in queer experiences of video games. Can a game make a player feel queerly? What is the place of empathy in games that address LGBTQ perspectives and is empathy in queer games promising or problematic? What role does emotional labor play in queer games and/or the production of games more broadly, and what implications does that have for LGBTQ subjects?
  • Interactions between industry, mainstream reception, and video games that engage with LGBTQ issues. What responsibility do queer game-makers or queer game studies scholars have to making video games “better.” How can we reconcile critiques of “queer-baiting” with the desire for diverse representations?

The special issue editors welcome submissions from scholars from a variety of backgrounds, including those from game studies, queer studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, and beyond. We hope to hear from authors who are new to the work of queer game studies, as well as those who have already contributed scholarship in this area.

To submit, please send full articles of 6500 – 8,000 words in length to submit@gamestudies.org by December 31, 2017. Please follow the Game Studies Style Guide and submission instructions to be found on the Game Studies website, with this exception: for organizing your references in-text and your list of “References” follow APA. Please also make a separate “Ludography” for games referenced. Place it after References. Use only endnotes, not footnotes — see the Game Studiesstyle guide for how to format these and for the mandatory checklist, which you need to include with your submission.

All submissions will undergo peer review. Publication of the issue is expected in Fall 2018. Please feel free to contact the Guest Editors, Bonnie Ruberg and Amanda Phillips (article content), or Game StudiesManaging Editor Jessica Enevold (all other journal questions) with inquiries.

Link to CFP
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National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web, March 22-24, 2018

Deadline: November 14, 2017

The National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web will take place at the New Museum in New York City, March 22-24, 2018.

If you would like to propose a short presentation, workshop, discussion, or case study, or if you wish to attend but require funding to do so, please fill out the form below. Limited funding is available for travel and accommodation, and presenters will receive an honorarium. Additional tickets will go on sale in December.

About the conference

The dramatic rise in the public’s use of the web and social media to document events presents tremendous opportunities to transform the practice of social memory. As new kinds of archives emerge, there is a pressing need for dialogue about the ethical risks and opportunities that they present to both those documenting and those documented. This conversation becomes particularly important as new tools, such as Rhizome’s Webrecorder software (https://webrecorder.io/), are developed to meet the changing needs of the web archiving field.

This National Forum will address the need for a deeper understanding of the ethical implications of web archiving–on the part of professionals and web users alike–in the age of social media. The event will bring together online communities, librarians, journalists, archivists, scholars, developers, and designers to talk about how to create richer, non-oppressive web archives—archives that will better serve their publics and the historical record.

In particular, we welcome applications for presentations, discussions, and workshops on community-driven archiving efforts, and documentation of activism; archiving trauma, violence, and human rights issues; recognizing and dismantling digital colonialism and white supremacy in web archives; strategies for protecting users (from one another, from surveillance, or from commercial interests); design-driven approaches to building more ethical web archives; and legal or ethical issues arising when archives become big data or are used for machine learning.

The conference will be livestreamed and made available for later viewing on the event website. Proceedings and a white paper will also be published and circulated online.

Submit here
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Symposium: Amateur Video and Journalism – May 25/26, 2018, Canada

May 25-26, 2018, MacEwan University (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada)

Among the many changes introduced by new media technologies to news practices, the growing utilization of user generated content is one of the most challenging. Amateur videographers are capturing dramatic events around the world and then sharing them, not only on social media platforms, but with professional news media organizations which are eagerly incorporating the images into professionally produced news stories. The presence of amateur images in news discourses is a growing phenomenon that is reshaping the profession of journalism, news coverage, and public expectations.

The issues raised by these practices often involve tensions between labour precarity and professionalism, entertainment and evidence, centralized and decentralized management of news rooms, traditional and emerging forms of social media news narratives, truth and immediacy.

We invite scholars and practitioners to submit abstracts exploring how user generated video content is changing news gathering around the world.

The symposium will bring together scholars and practitioners to share ideas and experiences in connection with the utilization of user generated video content in professional news coverage. We invite submissions addressing a range of themes:

How are amateur videos transforming labour practices among journalists and the structural organization of news media?

  • Emerging forms of precarious labour
  • Professional labour vis-à-vis labour of love
  • Changing labour practices in the newsroom

How is user generated video content influencing the construction of meaning in news coverage?

  • The impact of user produced content on the aesthetic of visual news
  • The influence of non-professional producers on news narratives, framing and agendas

How is the use of amateur video in news content reorganizing professional and non-professional practices of production?

    • Organisational changes, risk in relation to using unprofessionally produced news content
    • User generated content and professionalism in news rooms
    • The challenge of new technologies on the professional conditions of contemporary news rooms
    • New procedures for uptake and verification of amateur video

What are the theoretical, methodological and historical considerations helping to understand and explain the growing use of amateur video in news content?
Other topics related the above themes.
The proceedings of the symposium will be livestreamed. They will be published on the website.

Abstracts (300-500 words, including references) to be considered for inclusion in the symposium, should be emailed to the convenors by January 31, 2018 clearly identified by “UGC 2018” in the subject line.

Please submit your Abstract to the following email address: avjs2018@gmail.com
Dr. Michael A Lithgow, MA, PhD
Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Athabasca University
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Second Biennial Conference on Communication, Media, and Governance in the Age of Globalization

An International Conference Co-Hosted by the Communication University of China (CUC) and the National Communication Association (NCA)

To be held in Beijing, China, June 22-23, 2018

This ground-breaking conference will be held at the CUC International Convention Center, creating public space for scholars, media practitioners, government officials, and students to participate in open discussions and dialogue. Presentations will be made in English and Chinese, with simultaneous translations available via headsets.

Rationale: With converging and diverging interests, China and the United States are increasingly intertwined in issues related to sovereignty and cyber-sovereignty, nationalism, citizenship, human rights, popular culture, climate change, and public health. This international conference will address these broad issues as questions about communication: about how our two nations engage with and envision each other, and about how our interlinked imaginaries create both opportunities and obstacles for greater understanding and strengthened relations. Within the overarching theme of “Communication, Media, and Governance in the Age of Globalization,” the conference will address three key topics:

      1.      Green Public Spheres & Environmental Communication, led by Dr. Phaedra C. Pezzullo. We live in an age of ecological crises; environmental communication is central to constituting these challenges and expressing our hope for a more sustainable world. Scholarship on green public spheres underscores the conditions of possibility for people to connect to local, national, and international matters of collective environmental interest. Work in this area will focus on green public sphere theories; the role of communication in environmental decision-making in China and the United States; utopian or dystopian narratives of green imagined communities; and environmental and climate justice discourses, communities, and/or critiques of the ways ecological issues are intertwined with social injustices.
      2.      Social Media & Mobile Communication, led by Dr. Guobin Yang. A fascination with digital communication platforms is palpable in recent academic and popular discourse about social media. Platform studies of Facebook, Twitter, and even Sina Weibo have proliferated. Work in this area will examine the concepts of platforms and infrastructures in the study of social media, and will focus on how these evolving platforms both enable and constrain the civic work of netizens. Further, work in this area will focus on empirical and historical studies exploring the multiple ways practice, culture, language, and history shape, or are shaped by, social media platforms.
      3.      Global Health Inequalities & Communication Interventions, led by Dr. Mohan Dutta. The accelerated flow of goods, services, and labor across global boundaries has produced inequalities in access to health resources, health services, and opportunities for health. Likewise, the global distribution of precarious working conditions and environmental risks, the weakening of labor organizing, and the privatization of public health resources all pose dramatic challenges for global health. This track will cover new thinking about the roles of communication in constituting a socially just global health infrastructure. We seek submissions that address both practical case studies of communication interventions into global health inequalities and theoretical arguments about how to advance social justice through health communication.

Additional Conference Workshops Will Include:

1)      Communication Pedagogies in the Age of Globalization, led by the NCA Task Force on Fostering International Collaborations Pedagogy Team.

2)      Publishing in the Communication Discipline and Applying to Graduate Programs, led by Dr. Trevor Parry-Giles, NCA Interim Executive Director.

3)      A Snapshot of Research Trends Across the Communication Discipline, led by the NCA Task Force on Fostering International Collaborations Research Team

Call for Submissions: We invite submissions that address any of the topics cited above. Applicants should submit a project proposal of 750 – 1,000 words. Submissions can be made in English or Chinese and should indicate the submitter’s home institution. Submissions should be in Microsoft Word or Adobe.pdf format. The deadline for all submissions is February 1, 2018 (USA Denver time). Applicants will be contacted by March 1, 2018, with results. Please send all English-language submissions and inquiries to Dr. Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge, Associate Professor Clinical Track, CU Denver and International College Beijing, patrick.dodge@ucdenver.edu; please send all Chinese-language submissions and inquiries to Dr. Zhi Li, Professor of Media Studies, Communication University of China, bbilee@sina.com.

Additional Information: In a show of international friendship and support, CUC and NCA have agreed to waive registration fees and provide hotel accommodations for all accepted presenters during the duration of the conference. Upon notification of acceptance to the conference, Dr. Dodge will convey to all participants the necessary information regarding lodging, visas, airfare, and other logistics.

The conference’s local host, CUC plays a leading research role in studying, teaching about, and practicing communication, journalism, and radio and television arts in China. Since its founding, CUC has earned the reputation of being “the cradle of China’s radio and television talent”; it stands today among the top universities in China. Situated on a lovely campus on Beijing’s east side, CUC’s world-class Convention Center will provide a unique staging ground for conference participants to experience the charm and character of Beijing, the political, economic, and cultural center of China.

The conference’s international co-sponsor, NCA is the largest and leading U.S. organization committed to advancing the discipline of Communication. Dr. Patrick Dodge, Dr. Qingwen Dong, and Dr. Zhi Li, all members of NCA’s Task Force on Fostering International Collaborations in the Age of Globalization, are leading NCA’s role in this conference.

Resulting Publications: Following the model used to publish Imagining China: Rhetorics of Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (Michigan State University Press, 2017, edited by Stephen J. Hartnett, Lisa B. Keranen, and Donovan S. Conley), our three “track” leaders will edit volumes based on the best work presented at the conference. These are not conference proceedings, but academic books wherein each chapter is an expanded version of the original conference presentation. The “track” leaders will solicit chapters from the conference presenters.

For a spiffy version of this information, please see the flyer posted to the NCA website, www.natcom.org.
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Call for Papers: International Colloquium on Communication July 2018

International Colloquium on Communication 2018
Philipps Universität Marburg (Germany)
July 22nd – July 29th
Multimodality in Communication

According to Gunther Kress (2010), multimodality is the normal state of human communication. This insight, that communication functions through different modalities, is as old as theory on communication itself. Cicero, Quintilian and Aristotle emphasized voice, gesture, facial expressions and other modalities in the art of speech. The importance of these modes was one of the founding impulses of the discipline of speech in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century. In the last 20 years, the integration and analysis of different communication modalities has gained new prominence, and it has done so in different strands of the field.

At the 2018 International Colloquium on Communication we will discuss the concept of multimodality for speech and communication studies across and between different areas. For example, in interpersonal communication and conversation analysis, scholars take non-verbal layers, such as prosody and bodily expression, to be fundamental to the analysis of communicative events. More recent theoretical analysis and critical examinations of public discourse reach across social media platforms to comment on a variety of traditional and non-traditional speech acts. In argumentation studies, the prominence of scholarship on visual argumentation is now complemented by recent work on sound. Kinetics, embodiment and somatics as communication practices are addressed in performance and dance studies research. Communication pedagogy has emphasized and to some extent embraced the importance of multimodal writing and speaking. Thus, multimodality in communication can be considered from a number of different realms, perspectives, and practices.

The International Colloquium on Communication (ICC) is an interdisciplinary conference that invites scholars from the U.S. and Europe to present and discuss new results of research on communication. The ICC was founded in 1968 and takes place every other year. A specific feature of the ICC is its small size, with only about 25 participants. Each scholar presents a paper that is followed by a discussion among the entire group. The length of the colloquium allows additional time for interaction and dialogue. Please note, that participants are expected to attend the entire colloquium. The conference will be held in English. Those interested in presenting a paper at the ICC should submit an abstract of 300 words to the Program Chairs listed below by 1 December 2017. The abstracts should contain a brief section on the notion of multimodality the author employs. Notice about acceptance will be sent out by 1 February 2018. U.S. based scholars are asked to submit to Professor Michelle LaVigne (mrlavigne@usfca.edu), while European scholars are asked to submit to Professor Kati Hannken-Illjes (kati.hannkenilljes@uni-marburg.de).

Submission deadline: 1 December 2017

Contact:
Prof. Michelle LaVigne
Director of Public Speaking
Department of Rhetoric and Language
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton St., San Francisco, CA 94117.
mrlavigne@usfca.edu
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