*CFP* "THE AESTHETICS OF CREATIVE ACTIVISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM

As both a field of study and form of practice, creative activism seeks to understand how artistic forms can serve the ends of activist interventions.

 

To date, most emphasis has been on the activism component, drawing on theories of social movement formation, participatory action, and community organising. While there has been passing mention of aesthetics (relying heavily upon Rancière) the ‘creative’ term in creative activism remains woefully undertheorized. There are some scholars who have asked important questions about affect and effect, but overall, creative activism is ripe for deeper research into and theorisation of its aesthetic forms. Key questions include how creative activism differs from other activism, what makes it creative, and how (whether) the artistic components function effectively to achieve or enhance social change.

The Editors welcome submissions on any philosophically informed exploration of artistic forms as activist interventions, including, but not limited to:

• Ethics and morality in and of artistic activism

*CFP* "LA IGUALDAD DE GÉNERO: UNA LUCHA CONSTANTE", NÚMERO 22, COMMUNICATION PAPERS: SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH JOURNAL

“La Estrategia Europea para la Igualdad de Género presenta actuaciones y objetivos políticos para avanzar de forma sustancial hacia una Europa con mayor igualdad de género de aquí a 2025. La meta es una Unión en la que las mujeres, los hombres, los niños y las niñas, en toda su diversidad, dispongan de libertad para seguir el camino que elijan en la vida, gocen de las mismas oportunidades para prosperar y puedan conformar y dirigir por igual la sociedad europea en la que vivimos”. Esta declaración es el punto de partida del Call for papers de este Número 22 que esperemos no acabe en un brindis al sol.

Aunque la presencia cada vez mayor de las mujeres en el mercado de trabajo y sus logros educativos y de formación son tendencias alentadoras, persisten las desigualdades entre hombres y mujeres, manifiestas en la brecha salarial, en la infrarrepresentación en los puestos de responsabilidad, en los estereotipos presentes en los relatos mediàticos y, en general, en todos esos sesgos que las discriminan y las invisibilizan.

El peso de la sociedad patriarcal ha conllevado una visión androcéntrica, normalizada durante muchos años, que penetra en las rutinas de trabajo y se transmite a través de la comunicación. La incorporación de la perspectiva de género en la comunicación, y la normalización y el equilibrio de la representación que, desde los medios de comunicación, se hace de mujeres y Hombres, son elementos básicos para poder llegar a una sociedad igualitaria y libre de violencias machistas.

*CFP* "SATANISM AND FEMINISM IN POPULAR CULTURE", EDITED COLLECTION

In 2017 historian Per Faxneld published the landmark study Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture. The book argues for the existence of a nineteenth-century counter-reading of Satan that constructed the Devil as a symbol of women's liberation, progressive values, and intellectual freedom. For nineteenth- and early twentieth-century suffragists, artists, and radical thinkers, Satan served as an empowering model of self-determination and nonconformity. This collection seeks to build on the work of Faxneld and other scholars of the Satanic by mapping some of how Satanism has been employed as a lens through which to explore issues related to gender, sexuality, and feminist activism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture.

In the twentieth century, Satanism flourished as part of 1960s and 1970s popular Occulture, moving from real-life satanic organisations like the Church of Satan (founded in 1966) to sensationalist portrayals in films like Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). In both its real-world and fictional incarnations, Satanism often collided with issues central to the women's movement: reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, sexual freedom, and gender-based violence. Satan also served as a symbol of women's liberation in many texts of this period, with films like Black Sunday (1960), Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), and Alucarda (1977) portraying Satanic women as alluring, even empowering, figures. Now, in the twenty-first century, Satanism retains its complex imbrication with feminist discourse and activism. Organisations like the Satanic Temple (founded in 2012) utilise Satanic iconography in campaigns for reproductive justice and LGBTQ+ rights. Around the same time, a new wave of films and television shows utilised Satanic ideas and iconography to explore feminist themes.

*CFP* "COMUNICACIÓN, PROPAGANDA Y MOVIMIENTOS REVOLUCIONARIOS EN LA HISTORIA", NÚMERO ESPECIAL, RAEIC: REVISTA ESPAÑOLA DE LA ASOCIACIÓN DE INVESTIGACIÓN DE LA COMUNICACIÓN

RAEIC, Revista Española de la Asociación Española de Investigación de la Comunicación, abre su llamada a propuestas para los artículos del número especial sobre “Comunicación, propaganda y movimientos revolucionarios en la historia”, que se publicará en mayo de 2022.

La comunicación planificada, especialmente de tipo persuasivo mediante diferentes estrategias y técnicas al servicio de emisores políticos, sociales o culturales, ha tenido un protagonismo relevante en los procesos revolucionarios a lo largo de la historia, sobre todo a partir de su difusión en los medios de comunicación de masas en períodos de crisis y/o conflictos sociales.

El uso de un periodismo militante y de los medios en la esfera pública como instrumentos de lucha política mediante la difusión de mensajes de agitación al servicio de causas que promueven el cambio de modelo político o social y sus instituciones en determinados períodos históricos, ha sido una constante en la historia contemporánea. Pero la capacidad seductora de los movimientos revolucionarios, tanto en su dimensión simbólica como en su cualidad sensacional para los medios periodísticos, ha potenciado su capacidad de impacto mediático y persuasivo.

*CFP* "FILM EXHIBITION: THE ITALIAN CONTEXT", SYMPOSIUM AND EDITED VOLUME

This symposium and edited volume seeks to draw together research into cinematic exhibition in Italy throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Current research into Italian cinema is continuously expanding its purview to consider the great range of genres, forms and contexts that have been engaged by filmmakers working in the country. Similarly, recent studies have shone vital light on the complex make up of Italy’s film audiences, and on the practices of film producers and distributors in the country. This project will continue this critical expansion by investigating the myriad ways in which film media (both Italian and foreign) has been exhibited and consumed in Italy. It aims to investigate both the audience experience of film exhibition and the practices of exhibitors themselves (eg their programming habits, the construction and restoration of cinemas, their relationships with distributors and political organisations etc).

Possible subjects of discussion could include, but are not limited to:

• The screening of silent/early films at travelling fairs and other public events 
• The establishment/construction of Italy’s first purpose-built cinemas 
• The conversion of Italian cinemas to sound 

*CFP* "COMMUNICATION AND DISSENT: COMPETING VOICES IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD", ISSUE 14.2 (FALL 2022), CATALAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION & CULTURAL STUDIES

Traditional media were for a long time seen as institutions that had to avoid challenges to the system in order to guarantee the maintenance of the social structure, which was dependant on broad consensus around certain issues. Making news was key to the social construction of reality in a complex world (Tuchman, 1983). The impact of the media on public opinion, approached at first as a desirable influence for the functioning of society (Lippmann, 2011), was later identified as an instrument of control and propaganda (Herman & Chomsky, 2013). However, the media have also proven to be essential in questioning discourses of power. Alternative journalism has offered a discordant as well as rigorous proposal of framing reality (Couldry & Curran, 2003; Barranquero Carretero & Sánchez Mocanda, 2018). And, occasionally, media outlets have also been responsible for the generation of dissent in the public sphere, promoting social protests (Milne, 2005). The expression of dissent has been strengthened thanks to the digital media (Loader, 2018), which have given rise to connective actions (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012); this is, online mobilizations that coexist with collective action in offline world, as the anti-racial protests in the US or the new impetus of the feminist movement have recently shown.

But dissent expressed on the Internet often establishes problematic relationships with factual truths, as COVID-19 denialism has demonstrated in the first pandemic of the post-truth era (Parmet & Paul, 2020). Digital sphere has emerged as a perfect ally for the dissemination of hoaxes and misinformation (Magallón, 2020; Salaverría et al., 2020), conspiracies that tune in with messages delivered by celebrities and politicians such as Bolsonaro (Ricard & Medeiros, 2020) and Trump, who first talked about “alternative facts” to deny data provided by journalists, discredited as fake news. 

*CFP* "MEDIATING MOTHER-ACTIVISM", BOOK CHAPTER

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in exploring motherhood and mothering as political and emotional resources for digital activism. Although the intertwinement of mothering and politics predates the digital context, feminist debates around the politicization of mothering, from protests against state killings and disappearances, via the role of the mother in nation-building, to advocacy for right wing populisms, need addressing all the more urgently as we endeavour to understand the ways in which mothering is not only mediatised, but agentively deployed across social media platforms. The political role and significance of the mother, the uneasy relation between motherhood as gendered identity and mothering as daily practice, continue to be contentious issues for feminists (Rich 1976, DiQuinzio 1999, Gumbs, Martens and Williams 2016, Naber 2021). Mother-activists have historically constructed public issues from their personal experiences of suffering and loss within family structures (Reiger 2000), utilizing the symbolic power of motherhood in order to motivate others to join their causes (Logsdon Conradsen 2011). Notwithstanding, campaigns such those of the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been cast as ‘trapped by a bad script’ (Taylor 1997), that is as reproducing the same narratives of familialism and heteropatriarchal bloodline that underpin the narrative of the state. Conversely, many feminist scholars have argued that the political mobilisation of the trope of the mother has the potential to challenge the ‘official’ frameworks of national, ethnic or other group loyalty and to undermine or to radically reframe these very narratives (Kim 2020, Athanasiou 2017, Carreon and Moghadam 2015). For example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have raised the slogan ‘One child, all the children’ (Sosa 2014), taking the campaign beyond limits of blood kinship.

*CFP* "TRANSNATIONAL DIMENSIONS IN DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND PROTEST", THEMED ISSUE, REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

Giuliana Sorce & Delia Dumitrica are currently seeking submissions for a themed issue on Transnational Dimensions in Digital Activism and Protest to be published in the Review of Communication, a flagship journal of the National Communication Association (NCA). There are no APCs and submission and publication is free. Please see the full CFP below. This themed issue aims to map international perspectives on transnational processes in digital activism and protest. Against wider claims that social movements and citizen activism are shifting from the logic of spatial organization to networked flows (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Mercea, 2020), this themed issue seeks to illuminate how the global and local come together in networked public spheres. Recent transnational movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter yield the importance of interweaving digital communication, pre-existing activist collectives, and citizen activation on a seemingly global scale. The policing of physical protests during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have intensified reliance on digital technologies among activists and grassroots collectives (Sorce & Dumitrica, 2021), further enhancing the appeal to create transnational ties and globalize movement appeals.

We ask how political causes circulate globally, what role digital technologies play, and ultimately, what “transnational” means for seemingly universal causes, global collective identity, and activist ractice. In reflecting how activists across the globe employ digital media to construct a civic imaginary of a transnational polity, attention must be paid to the dialectical nature of transnational processes that simultaneously magnify the importance of locality while normalizing hybridity (Roudometof, 2016; Kraidy, 2005; Pieterse, 2015).

*CFP* "LA NOCHE EN EL MUNDO IBÉRICO E IBEROAMERICANO", XL CONGRESO DE LA SOCIÉTÉ DES HISPANISTES FRANÇAIS

La noche en el mundo ibérico e iberoamericano

XL Congreso de la Société des Hispanistes Français - SHF

de 8 a 10 de junio de 2022

Universidad de Artois (Arras, Francia)

 

Dedicado a la temática de la noche en el mundo ibérico e iberoamericano el congreso se celebrará en la Universidad de Artois (Arras, Francia), de 8 a 10 de junio de 2022, en el marco del XL Congreso de la Sociedad de Hispanistas Franceses (SHF)

Será la ocasión de sacar a la luz percepciones diferentes y de cuestionar la evolución de las representaciones de la noche y de las realidades unidas a este espacio-tiempo a lo largo de las épocas y según las áreas culturales. Podrán contemplarse varios enfoques:

*CFP* "SOUTH KOREAN WOMEN'S CINEMA", ONLINE CONFERENCE

South Korean Women’s Cinema

Online conference 23-25 September 2021

Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom)

Funded by The Academy of Korean Studies

 

While the profile and popularity of Korean cinema abroad has peaked with the success of multi-Oscar award-winning film Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019), women’s cinema and women filmmakers’ wide-ranging contribution to Korean cinema have been consistently overlooked by film audiences and academics alike. Such neglect is evident in a dearth of English-language sources on women filmmakers in the Korean film studies scholarship. As the first major English-language conference focused solely on Korean women’s cinema, the conference aims first of all to celebrate Korean women filmmakers (from pioneers to new generation) and contributions they have made in the history of Korean cinema. The event also intends to provide a site that enables the feminist film scholars to explore a range of topics and issues that include what it means to do women’s cinema in Korea and the relationship between activism and cinema, as well as addressing gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and the #MeToo Movement within the Korean film industry and wider fields. In addition, the conference seeks to illuminate the current status of women’s cinema and to envisage future trends.

*CFP* "POLITICAL IMAGINATION: RETHINKING OUR VOCABULARY", LEXICAL WORKSHOP

Political Imagination: Rethinking Our Vocabulary Lexical Workshop

Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University

September 29 & 30, 2021

 

 

Political imagination is a concept that can be traced to a 200- year tradition of political thought and has returned to the public discourse in recent years in the context of theoretical artistic and activist conversations. In this workshop we seek to join this conversation by developing lexical concepts to explore Political Imagination and Imagination as Politics. Theories of decolonization, environmental justice discourses and activist groups around the world as Extinction Rebellion, Standing Rock, the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter use a political imagination rhetoric not only to criticize, challenge and oppose political realities but also to offer alternatives for them. At the same time, artists, writers and filmmakers are producing more and more cultural artifacts that engage with questions of futurism, alternative pasts, dystopias and imaginaries.

*CFP* "THE AESTHETICS OF TRAVEL", VOLUME 65 (02/2022), THE POLISH JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS

This upcoming issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics calls for submissions focused on the associations between traveling and aesthetics, both understood broadly. There is a necessity for interdisciplinary dialogue between Aesthetics and different fields of research related to traveling. Aesthetics is the study of perceptions, experiences, and speculative developments. The practice of traveling reaches from the importance of nomadism for forming human culture up to the idea of Bildung (moral, intellectual, cultural, and artistic formation). Narratives about travel may come from Western written and oral tradition, such as Homer’s Odyssey, and film genres such as Westerns, Sci-fi, or Road trip cinema. Various types of travel literature could include logbooks and texts that support learning about living in a way that necessarily encompasses alterity. 

Traveling invokes a type of self-knowledge that is dislodged from a homeland and is connected to ritualistic reunions sustained through an oral tradition, the extraordinary adventures of a people. Travel transmits knowledge about the world for future generations. Through the experience of distance and strangeness, traveling creates an authentic space for cosmological and philosophical investigations, exploration, nostalgia, and personal, collective, scientific, or territorial discoveries, above all. In the category of space, fictional and narrative aspects find imaginary projections and territorial explorations from which knowledge emerges, individuating itself by an investigative perspective and observation. A new personality—a new Self and new Selves—appears from unknown space and time. The essential and precise subject matter for this issue is to deal with the representation of traveling and the imaginary, even if trips are objective and documented. Papers should include studies about the bond between the objective and the subjective, the individual and the collective, united with memory, time, and space.

*CFP* "DISSENT AND COMMUNICATION: VOICES AND DISCOURSES IN THE ERA OF ALTERNATIVE FACTS", MEDIAFLOWS CONFERENCE 2021

 

"Dissent and communication: voices and discourses in the era of alternative facts"

Mediaflows Conference 2021

Universidad de Valencia

27, 28 & 29 October 2021

 

In order to present a paper at the Mediaflows Conference 2021 ‘Dissent and communication: voices and discourses in the era of alternative facts’, a 250-word proposal should be sent through the specific form available at this link until 15 July 2021. The conference accepts papers in Spanish and English.

The conference accepts papers in face-to-face mode (health circumstances permitting) or virtual mode (by sending a video or participating online).

*CFP* "SCIENCE FICTION: ACTIVISM AND RESISTANCE", VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Science Fiction: Activism and Resistance

Virtual Conference

9-11 September 2021

London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC)

 

In an age when Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Decolonise the Curriculum, Refugees Welcome, and movements for global solidarity with oppressed populations have become part of mainstream discourse, it is vital to re-examine the relationship between activism, resistance and the mass imagination vis-a-vis science fiction. As a genre dedicated to imagining alternatives, science fiction is an inherently radical space which allows for diverse explorations of dissent. It is, also, a space that has been rightfully critiqued for its historic inequities favouring white cishet men (as recently addressed by Jeanette Ng during the 2019 Hugo Awards among others). There needs to be reckoning with how precarious bodies engage in activism and resistance in the context of their material realities and restrictions. Therefore, we must deny universalising a single experience as “radical enough” and instead acknowledge how communities in the margins – queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, BIPOC, immigrants and refugees, religious minorities, indigenous populations, casualised workers, the homeless and unemployed – have specific ways of subverting and undermining the system, as well as specific stakes and reasons to do so. It is imperative to not only revisit how science fiction has been a space for activism and resistance, but also resist and challenge the genre’s shortcomings.

*CFP* "MACHINE VISION IN CONTEXT: POLITICS AND PRACTICES OF COMPUTATIONAL SEEING", SPECIAL ISSUE, PHOTOGRAPHIES JOURNAL

This special issue will bring together interdisciplinary scholarship that engages critically with the evolving, recursive interrelations between machine vision and photography.

The heightened capacities of machines to ‘see’ and visually categorize the world have been the subject of numerous recent journalistic exposés and public outcry. Whether critiquing the role that machine vision plays in efforts to track, detain, and penalize targeted communities, or charting the incorporation of similar technologies into urban infrastructures, self-driving cars and ‘smart’ appliances, there is a growing awareness that it is reshaping what is seen and what counts as seeing. Online, recognition algorithms increasingly automate the tasks of tagging, categorizing and extracting meaning from the “unmanageable and unassimilable” accumulation of images circulating across networked environments (Henning 2018). Within this context of volume, scale, and distributed production, the photographic image appears to have receded from the realm of human perception (Zylinska 2017), working instead as an ‘operative’ agent (Hoelzl & Marie 2015) that drives and draws together the constellation of hard and soft platforms that comprise the contemporary mediascape (Dvořák and Parikka 2021; Mackenzie & Munster 2019). Images and their audiences are being ‘put to work,’ as the solicitation and generation of metadata as well as the non-human recognition of pixel- and user-based patterns facilitates the improvement and expansion of computerized vision (Sluis 2020).

*CFP* "CULTURA DIGITAL, NUEVAS FORMAS DE OPRESIÓN, RESISTENCIA Y SUBVERSIÓN", NÚMERO DICIEMBRE 2021, VIRTUALIS: REVISTA DE CULTURA DIGITAL

El desarrollo de la tecnología digital responde a una epistemología que fortalece la estructura y la cultura hegemónica: patriarcal, eurocentrada y capitalista. De tal forma, predomina la idea de lo que Paola Ricaurte (2019) denomina como el vigente y pujante paradigma de datos, el cual amplifica las formas históricas de colonización y opresión. En consecuencia, emergen inéditas formas de disciplinamiento del cuerpo social, tales como la represión algorítmica, la apropiación de datos y la fabricación del consentimiento (Treré, 2016). Este escenario se agudiza por la creciente plataformización de la vida social, la cual concentra el poder y compromete los valores asociados al bien común (Van Dijck, 2020).

En este contexto, Tendayi Achiume investigadora de la Universidad de California y relatora especial sobre racismo en las Naciones Unidas, señala que la inteligencia artificial, el reconocimiento facial, los algoritmos y abuso de macrodatos fomentan la discriminación y el control social de grupos que son frecuentemente racializados y criminalizados, como son las personas migrantes, transgénero, afrodescendientes e indígenas (ONU, 2020).

*CFP* "SEEING THE (IN)JUSTICE OF SUSTAINABILITY: VISUALIZING INEQUALITY AT THE CENTRE OF CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA

We know that environmental change due to massive global warming negatively influences the world’s poorest and most-marginalized the most, as do the corporate and collective actions themselves that drive greenhouse gas emissions. With greater urgency, media scholarship – and practice – must now turn to the wicked problems associated with forms of human inequality that are sometimes linked to efforts to develop local and global sustainability: racialized gentrification of urban areas to form wetlands creates a forced migration of residents. The development of environmentally sound (and expensive) housing pushes out the poor. Mainstreamed media narratives of climate change activists elevate particular people and parts of the world over others. And yet such effects of sustainability are often invisible or missing from mediated discourses and arenas.

As notions of sustainability become more normalized as key to our shared social futures, they can remain tied to long-standing issues of racialized environmentalism shaping government and corporate decisions, as well as individual and collective interpretations of curbing climate change. ‘Climate change is the result of a legacy of extraction, of colonialism, of slavery’, Elizabeth Yeampierre, cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance, told PBS in the US in 2020. ‘The truth is that the climate justice movement, people of color, indigenous people, have always worked multi-dimensionally because we have to be able to fight on so many different planes.’ We share in this concern.

*CFP* "VISUALIZING CLIMATE CRISIS", NEW ISSUE, VISUAL STUDIES JOURNAL

Visual Studies Journal in collaboration Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool invite thematic and illustrated essays in traditional format (6-8,000 words) that critically and conceptually examine how we come to see, understand, and respond to climate crisis. 

By foregrounding the visual as an optic to better understand and examine these pertinent and timely issues, we welcome proposals that examine:

• How artists, activists, communities, and institutions deploy the use of photography and visual culture as a way of understanding the past, present and future impacts on communities, audiences, and people around the globe.
• Specific works of art and art practices that either historically or contemporaneously explore issues of climate crisis.
• Critique the role and relationship between galleries, museums, institutions and issues of climate crisis, advocacy, and education.
• Climate migrancy, the history of land and water management, food, and agricultural processes and/or the impact of food, clothing, and electrical consumption in relation to climate crisis.
• Food, biodiversity, recycling, land and water use, climate and race justice, architecture, non-human animals, and alternative energy sources as issues related to the climate crisis, either negatively or positively.

*CFP* "WOMEN'S WORK IN PR", EDITED COLLECTION

This edited collection prioritises women's experience and histories in the public relations workplace. The experience of women’s everyday lives in public relations roles across the world is often under recorded and while the body of knowledge of this area is growing, this collection aims to use academic writing and research as a way to further highlight, record, and understand the experience of a constitutive part of public relations that is usually unseen or hidden - that of the working lives of women in public relations roles across the world. The aim of this edited collection is to demonstrate the breadth and range of feminist public relations study on women's work, taking a step (or more) away from the management-based writing on public relations and towards a space where marginalised voices and the lived experiences of women at all stages in their career are considered and foregrounded.

Public relations defines itself as a strategic management function – that is how it wants to perceive itself, and that is how it wants others to see it. However, what this collection does is shift the gaze of public relations scholarship in order to forefront the women who 'do' this (and other) public relations activities both in the office and when placed in a domestic environment by COVID-19 restrictions. It places centre stage the experiences not just of the 'typical' young public relations professional but those who are often ignored in public relations research.  This can include older practitioners, freelancers, and those working in marginalised occupations (such as the sex industry and for 'unethical' causes such as tobacco) and those working in non-western countries.

*CFP* "MEDIA, POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST", BOOK CHAPTER

We are seeking a limited number of contributions for a forthcoming interdisciplinary edited volume that examines the intersection between media, freedom of expression, political participation, and human rights in the Middle East. The book is currently under contract with Routledge and is due to be published during next year.

You are invited to submit a 250-word abstract and a short biography by June 10, 2021. We welcome theoretical, empirical, or professional contributions of the highest standard on the following topics related to the Middle East including:

• Media and political participation after the Arab Spring 
• Media and human rights in the MENA region
• Media and freedom of expression   
• Online civic engagement and democracy  
• Internet-based activism and political participation 
• Media and democratisation in the Middle East 
• Other topics related to the above are also welcome.