IV International Congress Move.net on TIC and Social Movements
11 and 12 November 2021
This CFP for the IV International Congress Move.net on TIC and Social Movements is structured along the following thematic lines:
The past few years have seen a rapid increase in the number and variety of technologies embedded in and passing through home environments. Researchers increasingly recognize the distinct nature of the home as a site of research. The past four decades have seen a significant shift in the technology environment from the "media home" (Spigel, 2001) to the "smart home" (Woods, 2021). We have seen significant additions to the abundant digital ecology of the home, increasing the number of digital access-points and available services, and intensifying the data-circulation in connected homes. The home is a site of mundane, private, usually hidden but highly significant everyday practices (Pink et al. 2017). Yet it is also increasingly becoming a part of national healthcare infrastructures through the deployment of welfare technologies, and energy policy through smart meters. During the "global lockdown" caused by the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, technologies took a prominent role as the home transformed itself into a site in which activities such as learning, parenting, work, entertainment, and remote medical care intermingled.
The increasing complexity of the digital infrastructures and the experiences, spaces, visions of the home in a current era of connected homes and connected living poses particular challenges for conducting research in such an environment. This also calls for methodological innovations that shape how we see the home as a research site and how we engage with it.
Critical ICT infrastructures and platforms
14th CMI International Conference
Hybrid (online/In-person): 25-26 November 2021
ICT infrastructures and platforms are increasingly pervasive and critical for societies, systems and organizations and for individuals. It is, therefore, of great importance that efficient and resilient infrastructures are developed and deployed and that disruptions of services caused by either cyber-attacks or other interruptions of services are mitigated. Also, as digital platforms constitute crucial communication infrastructures for societies, it is important that such platforms contribute to democratic processes and economic and social fairness.
The 14th CMI conference will be concerned with these topics from different complementary angles: The development and deployment of fast and efficient communication infrastructures including cloud and edge technologies; resilience of ICT systems in order to increase cyber security and mitigate cyber-attacks; institution of social practices and governance approaches that will promote democratic discussions and processes, contribute to economic and social development, equity and fairness, and protect privacy.
Created two years ago, the Group on Ethics and the Digital in Information-Communication research (GENIC) is now an accredited working group of the French national scientific association for information and communication science (Société Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication - SFSIC). The group promotes work on questions of ethics affecting all information-communication processes, in a context marked by the growing presence of digital technologies, through the analysis of phenomena, practices, social interactions. Indeed, all fields of research are touched by ethical questions (we refer the reader to the volume Dynamics of Information-Communication Research edited by the Conference of French Research Centers in Information-communication Sciences), take for instance the research fields related to the media, to legal, communicational, or organizational issues, or the role and the place of technologies in methods of research and scientific publication, in particular through the design of algorithms and data processing.
Beyond analyzing research practice, work in information-communication ethics should also take into account the logics of actors and their productions embedded in discursive, socio-economic, cultural, political and regulatory realities of digital and communication practices. Faced with a generalization of social controversies, whether related to the health crisis, the environmental crisis, public health issues, etc. it appears essential today that information-communication researchers participate in public debates around ethics and prepare those on the questions to come.
Today, personal data is gathered through the welfare state and healthcare providers; societal infrastructure (electricity, water, demographics, voter statistics, etc.); and voluntarily sharing of our data through use of smartphones, wearables, social media, streaming services, games, and more. Data is gathered, coordinated, and analysed to gain insights into our everyday lives; thus, members of contemporary digitalised societies live in what David Lyon refers to in his book of the same name, The Culture of Surveillance (2018).
With ubiquitous surveillance the “new normal”, Nordicom and external editors invite contributions for an anthology focusing on the cultural, mundane, and everyday-life aspect of online surveillance – in Lyon’s words, “the participation and engagement of surveilled and surveilling subjects” (2018: 6).
Studies addressing the Nordic countries and their contexts and perspectives will be of particular interest, but studies focusing other countries may also be considered (not least if they are of a theoretical, philosophical, or universal character – an example could be online surveillance from a human rights perspective). A central question to be explored is how online surveillance is perceived and handled by citizens in the Nordic countries – whether it is through acceptance, adaptation, and resistance. Among others, the following are questions to be posed:
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.
The phenomenon of underage influencers on video platforms is experimenting an unrelenting growth in the consumption, activity and presence of brands in relation to audiovisual content and on the potential for influence and social transformation of some of this content. All of this contributes to increase the complexity and associated problems as it is a phenomenon that is only partially regulated in current legislation. There are new and emerging research challenges in relation to the audiences involved: minors who created content, parents or legal guardians, YouTube (YT) Professionals, followers, teachers, scholars and researchers and the society at large.
Being an influencer is one of the top 10 most desired professions by Spanish minors (Adecco, 2018). Immersed in a culture of participation (Jenkins, 2006; Aparici & Osuna, 2013), YT offers a space where audiovisual content can be hosted and that allows users to interact with it through searching, sharing and commenting on such contents around which they build online communities. Minor creators express their identities through videos that reflect their perspectives on life and in turn exert influence upon their community of followers (Tur-Viñes, Nuñez- Gómez and González-Río, 2018). This social system is based around audiovisual content with several implications for government regulation, self-regulation, advertising, communication and education.
8th edition of the Conference on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Social Media Corpora
Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Thursday 28 – Friday 29 October 2021
The Digital Inclusion, Policy and Research Conference (DIPRC)
Tuesday, September 14 2021
The conference will be free to attend and held online
In this third edition of the Digital Inclusion, Policy and Research Conference (DIPRC) 2021, we invite scholars and practitioners to talk about their latest work in what many consider as a crucial point for digital inclusion, digital divides and data literacy. Who got left behind and struggled the most during the pandemic? What new digital practices emerged from the pandemic to help people manage their well-being and survival? Did technology interventions such as contact tracing apps actually help manage the pandemic? How did different communities organise to assist each other via digital means? How did different governments and local municipalities respond to digital literacy challenges? How is mainstream media implicated in how we understand what is happening?
Emerging from the concept of “digital disengagement” – a framework developed by the editors to examine digital media from the point of disconnection, refusal, and opting out – this book brings into interdisciplinary dialogue two critical key areas of concern in the context of COVID-19. The first one is what we call “pandemic digitalities” – the rapid and extensive increase, reliance and shifts in meaning of digital technologies in the age of COVID-19 and post-COVID futurities across various spheres in science, technology and society: from public health, to education, to politics, to everyday life. The second concerns the politics of refusal, the right and even the viability to opt out of digital technologies, networks, tracing surveillance, and databases.
At this unique moment in time, both have global spread and significance: the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every society globally; so do digital technologies and networked communication. Crucially, “global” should not be mistaken for “universal” – while both the virus and digital technologies are spread around the world, their adoption, use and impact are profoundly different both across, and within different countries, societies and communities. Within the growing field of Disconnection Studies, research on opting out and digital refusal has focused almost exclusively on “the West”/“global North”. To this date, no literature addresses in great depth the implications, consequences and (im)possibilities of opt out in the quickly changing digital landscape and lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a rapid and sudden digitisation in times of crisis.
In August 2020, the UK government’s black-boxed algorithm for deciding students’ grades made headlines. It had allegedly lowered the results of 40% of students, most of which from lower-income schools, thus crushing many students’ hopes for entering prestigious universities. Students went out to the streets and protested, memorably chanting “Fuck the algorithm!”. This recent case is just one of many that highlight a clear need for critical and empirical attention on algorithms and the work that they do, given their increasing importance in shaping social and economic life. There has been important work through critical studies that catalogue the multifaceted domination of algorithmic life and points of liberatory design out of it (Eubanks 2018, Costanza-Chock 2020), while recognising epistemological cleavages between powers of critique and scientific practice (Moats and Seaver 2019) in the seemingly impenetrable nature of “black boxed” algorithmic life (Pasquale 2015). Much critical scholarship tied to algorithms focuses on the ills of algorithms, or the ways in which a normativity can be developed around an ethical, equitable or fair expression of computation via design (see ACM FAccT). Other responses include consideration of critical practices that advance data science in ways that identify and create social and organizational arrangements necessary for a more ethical data science (Neff et al. 2017) or move towards data justice (Dencik et al. 2019, Taylor 2017, Johnson 2014) to offer equity as design goals. Yet Critical Data Practices are also taking an antagonistic turn, focussing on ways to actively employ algorithms for everyday, social, and political agency, influence, or resistance.
The ResisTIC research team is pleased to announce the following call for articles for the Terminal journal (open access, free-of-charge for authors). A French version is available here and contributions are accepted in both French and English. Activists facing “digital sovereignty”. Reactions and new mobilizations in the post-Soviet space.
The digital space, initially managed in a global, international and multi-stakeholder way, has in recent years been pushed towards a dynamic of national “digital sovereignties”. States are seeking to extend their sovereignty in and through digital space, to legislate, impose constraints or guarantee freedoms.
In this issue, we aim to explore the reactions to this trend by activist individuals and groups in various post-Soviet countries. These phenomena may include mobilizations for the protection of human rights in the digital age, media activism, forms of action led by technical experts and hackers, or reactions from more traditional activist and political worlds to the proliferation of digital tools and their “sovereignization”. We are also interested in actors’ mobilizations in favor of a sovereign national cyberspace that should meet security and “moral” criteria specific to each nation.
ICA Virtual Pre-Conference 2021
‘Visions of Change: Communication for Social and Environmental Justice’
Pre-Conference date: 27 May 2021
Division/Interest Group Affiliation: Visual Communication Studies Division, Environmental Communication Division, and the Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group.
A key challenge for representing environmental crises such as climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and toxic pollution is contextualizing the crises through a diversity of accounts and time scales. Candis Callison (2020, 2017, 2014) stresses how accountability and justice are impossible without recognition of the particular harms perpetuated by long-standing political, economic, and cultural systems of oppression. The ongoing violence of imperial capitalism are consistently removed from view through cultural processes of erasure whereby ecological crises are “decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time” (Nixon, 2011: 11).
Fronteiras Journal, Brazilian journal of communication, announces call for papers for a special issue on misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms.
Please feel free to circulate this announcement widely.
The emergence of disinformation and misinformation on digital platforms, through the so-called fake news and new forms of circulation, requires efforts from many areas. The presidential elections in Brazil in 2018, as well as the 2016 US elections, revealed the power of affect in circulation of narratives about untrue events. Misinformation and disinformation is especially complicated when it finds circulation on WhatsApp groups. Other problems are orchestrated use of automated accounts, algorithmic biases, practices of content moderation and other forms of governance. In the context of Covid-19 pandemic, disinformation and misinformation is spreading very fast, and the contents are replicated without any confirmation or scientific evidence. World Health Organization adopted “infodemic” to name not only what is untrue, but also the excess of information. At the same time, deep fake is now dealt with edited images and videos in fictitious situations, enhanced by the action of AI, machine learning and bots.
