- CFP – Digital Spatialities: A Critical Visual and Ethnographic Social Media Methodologies Workshop
- Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2019 in Pittsburgh!
- NCA 105th Annual Convention: Communication for Survival
- CFP: AoIR 2019
CFP – Digital Spatialities: A Critical Visual and Ethnographic Social Media Methodologies Workshop
CFP – Digital Spatialities: A Critical Visual and Ethnographic Social Media Methodologies Workshop
Tuesday, March 26, 2019 (All day)
The SocialMediaLab@GSC invites essay submissions for a workshop on social media methodologies to be held at Pratt Institute on March 26th, 2019. The workshop aims to bring together scholars pursuing research on social media phenomena within the US and globally. We are particularly interested in papers that explore both ethnographic and critical visual methodologies in analyzing social media practices that address issues of social justice.
While analyses of social media have proliferated over the past five years, few have accorded attention to developing a precise methodological frame for the ethnographic and critical visual analysis of social media practices. Drawing from Mirca Madianou and David Miller (2012, 2013), we foreground an understanding of social media as scaffolded by “polymedia” formations — moving away from an understanding of digital spaces as comprising discreet and separate online platforms to one in which users move seamlessly across multiple converging digital spataliaties toward the pursuit of different communicative aims. Though some scholars have proposed the utility of ethnographic approaches to social media, such frameworks can elide attention to the visuality of digital practices, as well as to the preservation, storage, and disappearance of digital visual archives and communities. We insist instead upon a methodology that foregrounds ethnographic and critical visual methods that enable us to understand the relational dynamics between media ecologies and individuals, and the ways that both are transformed through mediations. Such a methodology would also facilitate our attention to precise social media engagements within particular interactional contexts that are both individual and collective. For instance, individuals contending with precarity (e.g. militarized conflict, settler colonialism, carceral states, diasporic and immigrant communities) have used social media to visually document everyday dispossession and to subvert the metonymy of violence by documenting pleasurable everyday affective sentiments. By allowing the “field” to surprise and inform us, and by attending critically to ways that visuality enframe and circulate on social media platforms, scholars will be able to contest dominant narratives on social media use within the U.S. and the global south.
Beyond elaborating on specific ethnographic contexts and the research questions, papers should critically evaluate the methodologies used to analyze social media practices. How do ethnographic and critical visual methodologies enable us to provide a “thick description” (Geertz 1973) of social media practices, thereby subverting “big data” approaches? How does attending to polymedia enable us to understand how individuals utilize media ecologies in unique ways in order to mediate their communication practices, and relationships with one another? What unforeseen visualities and countervisualities emerge when we analyze social media as a visual practice? How do ethnographic and critical visual methodologies in turn enable us to understand intersecting processes such as surveillance, dispossession, and subversion at the level of micro-practices?
This workshop will serve as a platform for junior academics looking to build an intellectual community with other emergent scholars working on social media and critical visual studies. Funded by Pratt Institute’s SEED grant, this workshop is part of the Social Media Lab’s long-term plan of proposing a pathbreaking methodology for the ethnographic and visual analysis of social media practices. As an autonomous lab, we work closely with the Global South Center (GSC) and the Critical Visual Studies (CritViz) concentration to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration across Pratt Institute and beyond building alliances with fellow artists, scholars and activists within New York City and across North-South and South-South networks.
We strongly encourage applications from advanced PhD students (post-fieldwork/writing stage) and junior scholars. Please submit a 250-word abstract to socialmedialabpratt@gmail.com by January 15, 2019. Recipients will be notified of their acceptance by January 31st. We plan to have targeted discussions on the essays, so participants will submit a 15-20 page, double-spaced essay by end February to their panels. Instead of a typical conference format, participants are expected to present a brief 15-min summary of their essays, and will receive comments from the invited discussant and other participants during their panel. We envision this format to spur deeper engagement with the papers. We are also planning to propose a special issue on methodology with a peer-reviewed journal drawing from the conference proceedings.
Please note that we will not be able to fund travel costs. As such, we are encouraging applications from scholars based in the New York, Boston, New Jersey and Philadelphia area. Participants will be required to spend a full day at Pratt, attending workshops and a keynote session. All meals (tea, lunch, dinner) will be provided.
Please direct all questions to the co-coordinators of the lab and workshop organizers: Drs. Nurhaizatul Jamil (njamil@pratt.edu) or Wendy V. Muñiz (wmuniz2@pratt.edu)
Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2019 in Pittsburgh!
Join us for Personal Digital Archiving 2019!
The University of Pittsburgh is pleased to host the Personal Digital Archiving conference, to be held in Pittsburgh, PA from May 2-4, 2019.
Personal Digital Archiving is an annual conference dedicated to the exploration of issues related to individual and community records in all digital forms. It is interdisciplinary and inclusive in nature, welcoming discussion between information professionals, academics, artists, and all individuals and community groups engaged in this area. We encourage an expansive, creative, and inclusive interpretation of “personal digital archives” at this conference.
The Call for Proposals is Currently Open.
Personal Digital Archiving 2019 invites proposals on topics including, but not limited to:
Innovative personal or community archives projects
Ethical issues pertaining to personal digital archives
Uses of personal digital archives in the classroom or other educational settings
Tools and techniques for establishing or sustaining personal digital archives
Research or creative projects from other disciplines which incorporate personal digital archives
PDA 2019 will follow the format of previous conferences, with two days of presentations, panels, and posters, and a third day of workshops and community events. The program committee seeks proposals for:
10-20 minute presentations
5 minute lightning talks
posters (including demos)
Hands-on workshops and community-facing events
Some scholarships are available to support attendance for presenters. Please indicate in your proposal if you would like to be considered for financial support.
Submit your proposal here: https://goo.gl/forms/QUp9nMI3hzpQrt9g1
Deadline for submission of proposals: Monday, February 4, 2019
Who Should Attend?
All are welcome to Personal Digital Archiving. In addition to Thursday and Friday’s presentations, we will be coordinating events on Saturday that will be open to the public, including those who have not registered for the conference. Those interested in attending may include, but are not limited to:
Community organizations focused on gathering oral histories or other local collections
Scholars, researchers and graduate students of all levels in all related disciplines
Those preserving familial material, activist groups, hobbyists, and tool developers
Information professionals such as archivists, librarians, and curators
Please address any questions or requests for more information to Chelsea Gunn at cmg100@pitt.edu.
NCA 105th Annual Convention: Communication for Survival
Deadline March 27, 2019
The convention theme, “Communication for Survival,” is designed to help inspire us to think about the ways communication improves lives, helps people build relationships, sustain communities, change society for the better, and provide peace of mind. As scholars, teachers, students, leaders, and community members, I hope I can count on you to consider the ways communication can help people and the planet to survive. I imagine that convention attendees will be discussing change: the Black Lives Matter movement; the #metoo movement; international relations; apocalyptic rhetoric; driving while black or brown; homo sacer; the prison industrial complex; terrorism; economic crisis; natural and man-made disasters; gun violence; health care; and/or utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to communication. Additionally, the theme might inspire engagement with and innovation of current theoretical scholarship (e.g., social movement theory, theories of social change, neoliberalism, racial microaggressions, biopolitics and necropolitics, racial battle fatigue, queer futurity, integrated communication, negotiation, etc.).The theme is meant to challenge our community to think about the many ways in which communication can help improve our lives and our communities.
The overarching theme of AoIR2019 will be Trust in the System.
“Data Security Breach” by Blogtrepreneur can be reused under the CC BY license.
Trust is one of the most critical issues of our time: trust in our fellow Internet users; trust in the information we encounter in our online environments; trust in the data we produce and in the data that are continuously produced about us; trust in the algorithms that process and evaluate these data; trust in those who create the digital content we consume; trust in platforms and intermediaries that maintain our online spaces and that manage and trade in these data; trust in our national and regional governments that engage citizens over the Internet; trust in grassroots, social welfare and non-government organisations; trust in the regulatory bodies and political systems that are in charge of governing these systems of exchange. At every level, and spurred on by a rise in extremism and increased suspicion of others, our trust in the system is being challenged, presenting challenges for existing institutions and the opportunity to imagine new ones. The 2019 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers addresses these questions of trust.
Trust is one of the techno-emotions that shape sociality online (Svedmark, 2016), and is part of the process that guides the choices we make on the Internet (deLaat, 2008). Consequently, the data about us and our interactions that are produced and processed across a variety of digital devices encapsulate deeply personal and intimate facets of our digital selves. For the most part, these data are managed by commercial third-party platforms and applications, where many users have proven unable to exercise appropriate control of their data. While governments and other regulatory bodies seek to find appropriate settings for governance of a transnational, datafied society, trust in the government is an option only for the privileged, and undermined by the rise of populist and partisan regimes. At the same time, developers and activists have proposed and introduced a number of alternative, supposedly more trustworthy systems of their own, from Tor to Blockchain and beyond, but these, too, frequently embed only the limited worldviews of their creators. But ‘we’ are many, diverse, complicated, and contradictory, and in Internet research as much as in its development, governance, and use it is crucial that the voices of the marginalised finally be heard.
As Internet researchers at the intersection of critical studies of technology, culture, and society, the present crisis of trust in the system presents us with opportunities to seek new insights into these issues and provide advice and guidance for individuals, communities, governing bodies, policy-makers, and platform providers. While emergent technologies attempt to bridge the gap between users, developers, and processes, there is still significant work to be undertaken on critical issues such as rebuilding trust for Internet users. The 2019 AoIR conference in Brisbane, Australia, invites contributions that explore the question of whether we can still have, or how we might regain, trust in the system: in a world of unscrupulous actors and dubious data, how can we know what and whom to trust? Indeed, how might we change the system itself – rethinking, redesigning, rebuilding, repurposing it – to provide a more trustworthy experience for a broader, more diverse, more inclusive community of Internet users?
The 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference welcomes contributions that address these themes, including but not limited to the following questions:
- Trust in technologies and platforms: how might users operate safely on commercially owned platforms? What role do emergent, decentralised, autonomous technologies play?
- Trust after Cambridge Analytica: what is the impact of this highly mediatised data breach? Do users understand the data trails of their actions on the Internet?
- Interpersonal trust: can we trust our friends on the Internet? Does authenticity become a central element of trust online?
- Trust in governance: if national governments lack leverage over transnational tech giants, who do citizens trust to act in their interest? How do powerful actors in Internet governance justify their influence, and how can they be held to account?
- Trust in information: as mis- and disinformation spread, how do we identify trustworthy sources of information?
- Trust by design: how can design and development processes be reshaped to ensure greater inclusion of diverse and marginalised communities?
- Trust in theory: what theories of trust are available to describe the present moment and provide pointers to possible futures?
- Trust in black boxes: how can scholars, civil society, regulators, and users interrogate the workings of only partially visible communication systems? What ethical, methodological, and practical challenges must they confront in doing so?
- Trust in translation: how do issues of trust play out in different national and cultural contexts? How might we de-westernise current debates about trust by recognising different international perspectives, especially perhaps from the Asia-Pacific region?
- Distrust in the system: how might trust’s darker side be addressed? What are the alternatives to trust?