Mobile Utopia Bonfire School

Call for Applications
Mobile Utopia Bonfire School
29 October - 2 November 2017, CeMoRe, Lancaster University
http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cemore-bonfire/

Most people are unaware of the ‘systemness’
of their everyday practices (Urry 2016:73)

From Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to John Urry’s What is the future? (2016), utopia has been a powerful means to explore how societies change. Using utopia as a method to explore and contest futures is a powerful approach (Levitas 2013). It is at once critical, ethical, creative, and integrative.

The Mobile Utopia Bonfire School brings together senior and junior scholars from a range of different disciplines (history, social science, art, design, policy, engineering and more) to explore how futures and utopia as method relate to their research. How does ‘mobilising’ utopia as method help us understand social futures, current everyday practices and their relation to multi-scalar, intergenerational, more-than-human futures? How might ‘mobilising’ utopia as method provide deeper insight and creative leverage? Read more about the background here.

The Mobile Utopia Bonfire School is organised on the fringe of the Mobile Utopia: Pasts, presents, futures Conference – jointly organised by Cemore, T2M, and Cosmobilities, 2-5 November 2017 at Lancaster University. A range of senior staff members, including Simon Bainbridge, Monika Büscher, Joe Deville, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Malene Freudendal Pedersen, Kevin Hannam, Carlos Lopez Galviz, Mimi Sheller will participate. For an up-to-date list, please check here.

To participate in the Bonfire School, applicants should submit a 300 word abstract that describes their research, addressing the following questions: What are you researching? Why? What does or could utopia as a concept or method do for you? Please complete the Application Form available on the website.

Important Dates: 05 June 2017
Submission of Applications: 12 June 2017
Notification of Acceptance: 15 June 2017
Early Bird Registration closes: 25 August 2017
Registration closes :Participation is limited to 25 PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, artists, practitioners.

The Bonfire School provides opportunities to participate in a range of activities, including:
Presentation-based discussions: A speedy, fun series of 3 minute presentations about your research - What are you researching? Why? What does or could utopia as a concept or method do for you? Student, staff, postdoc presentations will be mixed, followed by discussion.

Master classes: (after Erik Olin Wright) Learning in small groups of one member of staff and 1-3 students/postdocs. Each student/postdoc has a total of ten minutes, divided roughly evenly between the student telling the senior researcher something puzzling about their research and them responding with off-the-cuff comments and suggestions. The point here is NOT for students to give a five minute summary of their research, but rather to identify a problem in need of feedback: something puzzling or confusing; a bottleneck in the project; a difficult (perhaps annoying) objection that has been raised by someone; a mysterious finding that doesn’t make sense; an intractable methodological problem; an ethical issue about the research. The senior researcher questions, comments, provides advice, constructive critique. These initial exchanges are followed by discussion.

Mentoring: In pairs or threes staff/students/postdocs discuss successes and failures related to the practicalities of research and career.

Publishing Pleasures: A one to one discussion of publication prospects and practices with Gerhard Boomgarden, senior editor, Routledge Sociology Series in a ‘publication surgery’ session. Please note: Participants wishing to take advantage of this must send in a short outline of a book proposal by 1st October to Aurora Trujillo. This can be rough. To see what might need to go into a book proposal, consult the Changing Mobilities Book Series Form (links available on the website). Scheduling of the sessions will be on a first come, first served basis.

Writing Exchange: Taking inspiration from the activities at the Bonfire school, participants will have the opportunity to produce and exchange a 500-1000 word piece of writing for constructive critique with other participants.

The Mobile Utopia Experiment: As part of the Cemore|T2M|Cosmobilities 2017 Conference (2-5 November), there will be a creative experimental pre-enactment of mobile utopia, with various activities. Participants in the Bonfire School will participate in the experiment. Please visit the website for more information about the experiment.

For further detail, please also see the Preliminary Programme on the website.

Registration Fees
Early Bird (including all meals & facilities): £350
After 15th June 2017: £450

Campus accommodation is available at a reduced rate (around £50 per person/night, including breakfast). Please note that Registration and accommodation for the Conference are separate. We’d be delighted to welcome you. (Early registration is recommended).

Bursaries and Travel Grants
A small number of bursaries and travel grants are available. Allocation is competitive and based on peer review of the research abstract submission. Please complete the Travel Grant Application Form on the website by 05 June 2017. Decisions will be made by 12 June.

Note that the Bonfire School is one of several events and we would be delighted to welcome you for the whole week:
1. Take part in all of it, the Bonfire School, the Mobile Utopia Experiment and the Mobile Utopia Conference 29th October - 5th November 2017
2. Join the Bonfire School to discuss your research and participate in the Mobile Utopia Experiment (you don't have to bring an experiment) 29th October - 2nd November 2017
3. Make a Mobile Utopia Experiment and bring it to Lancaster 1-2nd November 2017

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

With best wishes,

Monika, Carlos and Ian

Monika Büscher, Professor of Sociology
Director Centre for Mobilities Research
Associate Director for the Institute for Social Futures
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, LA1 4YW
Office Hours: By Arrangement - Bowland North B14

CFP:“Digital parenting"

Call for chapters proposal: “Digital parenting"

The book Digital parenting: the challenges for families in the digital age focuses on the opportunities and challenges of digital media for families and changing parenting practices.

Families with young children are usually early and enthusiastic adopters of new technologies, which, in turn shape the family’s communication practices and media consumption habits. The appropriation of digital media into families’ everyday lives is influenced by parenting styles or ethics (Clark, 2013). While providing means for remote parenting and coordinating family life, new technologies pose new challenges to parents, as the practice of sharenting – the oversharing of children’s pictures and personal information (see Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017) - and the increasing reliance on the internet and parenting apps for (health) advice, well exemplify.

The pervasiveness of the internet and mobile media is giving rise to an emergent form of parenting, called “transcendent parenting” (Lim, 2016), whereby parents are faced with the challenges of transcending online-offline social interactions, the multi-media and multimodal environments, and the “timeless time” of parenting. Parents are variously equipped to face the increasing complexity of the digital world and its social and developmental consequences.
The book will explore how socio-economic differences, parenting cultures and parent’s imaginaries, all play a part in shaping the extent to which parents can navigate the contemporary internet and guide their children’s use. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

    •    Sharenting
    •    Mummy bloggers
    •    Parental imaginaries around the internet/touchscreens
    •    Parental mediation of the internet/mobile media (also through cross-cultural analysis)
    •    Changing parenting cultures
    •    The child effect
    •    Opportunities and challenges of the digital among rural families and/or immigrant families
    •    Parenting across generations, including reverse socialisation: grandparents, parents and children
    •    Digital parenting of children with special needs
    •    Digital parenting and health information

The target audience of this book will be composed by students, media professionals, practitioners and researchers working in the field of education, communication, digital art, children and youth studies, new literacy studies and media and information literacy. Contributions should take into account the diversity of target audience and facilitate flow in reading.

Giovanna Mascheroni, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Sociology of Communication and Culture, Department of Sociology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, Cristina Ponte, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Sciences, FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, and Ana Jorge, PhD, Lecturer, Faculty of Human Sciences, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal, are the editors.

Publisher: Nordicom - Nordic Information Center for Media and Communication Research, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
http://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publikationer

Articles:
Between 3000 and 4000 words

Time Schedule:
Book Description + Call for chapters:  early May 2017
Submission of abstracts (500 words): 1st June 2017
Notification of acceptance/refusal: 1st July 2017
Full chapter submission: 15 October 2017
Editor’s feedback: early January 2018
Submission of final chapter: 28 February 2018
English Proof Reading: April 2018
Graphic Edition: April 2017
Graphic Design: Jul 2018
Print + pdf: September 2018

Submission Guidelines for Nordicom’s Publications will be sent to authors of selected abstracts.

Contact:
Ana Jorge | anajorge@fch.lisboa.ucp.pt
Giovanna Mascheroni | giovanna.mascheroni@unicatt.it
Cristina Ponte | cristina.ponte@fcsh.unl.pt
For questions regarding Nordicom:
Ingela Wadbring  | ingela.wadbring@nordicom.gu.se

Earn a Certificate in Social Media Analysis from Boston University w/ Gratis Access to Crimson Hexagon

Earn a Certificate in Social Media Analysis from Boston University w/ Gratis Access to Crimson Hexagon

Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

http://sites.bu.edu/social-media-analysis/

Making Social Media Matter is a hands-on, 3-day workshop designed to equip attendees with the knowledge and skills to quickly analyze and visualize data from popular social media platforms such as Twitter.

The tools demonstrated in this workshop for network analysis, machine learning, and geolocation are at the forefront of social media research and will equip attendees — even those with no computational training — with expert understanding of how to collect, analyze, visualize, and interpret social media data for internal and public use.

In addition to covering the theoretical bases of working with and modeling big data, the training in this workshop will include access to and use of leading data platforms, namely Crimson Hexagon, the Boston University Twitter Collection and Analysis Toolkit (BU-TCAT) and Gephi.

Media professionals, research analysts, scientists, college students, and anyone wanting to make sense of social media will benefit from attending this workshop. All participants that successfully complete this workshop will:

• Earn a Certificate in Social Media Analysis: Principles and Practices for Big Data from Boston University.
• Have free access for 3 weeks to the industry-leading ForSight data analysis platform from Crimson Hexagon.
• Receive training in exclusive data analysis tools including the BU-TCAT that can collect and analyze millions of units of social media content.
• Go beyond dashboards and dive deep into data to take their analytic skills to another level of conceptual and practical understanding.

The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?

The Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London is hosting its annual conference on Saturday 6th May. This year's theme is The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?

This international conference aims at exploring the digital everyday, understood as the transformation of everyday life practices brought about by digital technology. From how we buy, walk around, get a cab, love, break up, go to bed, meet new people and sexual partners to the way we rate services, turn on the fridge, exercise, eat, use social media and apps, Big Data is reshaping some of the most basic activities in our lives. We will also explore a number of overarching dynamics and trends in the digital world that contribute to these transformations, including: processes of digital individualisation and aggregation; the elisions of spatial and temporal barriers; trends towards quantification and datafication; and the dialectic between control and alienation.

We will have keynotes by Judy Wajcman, Susanna Paasonen and Taina Bucher and panels on play, self, labour, love, surveillance and place in the digital world. The draft programme is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/Digicult/CDC-programme-FINAL.pdf.

The conference fee is £15 (£10 for students) and registration is open at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/eventrecords/2016-2017/Digicult/The-Digital-Everyday-Exploration-or-Alienation.aspx

CFP: Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Call for Papers – Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures invites essays about any and all aspects of young people’s texts and cultures. While we are especially interested in publishing essays that approach young people’s texts and cultures from an interdisciplinary perspective – cultural studies, for example – we welcome essays that engage such texts and cultures from an historical, philosophical, sociological, geographical, museological, criminal justice, music, arts, literary, film, screen, or media studies perspective. By “texts” we mean everything from picture books to toys, comics, music, video games, and playgrounds.

Topics on which we are particularly keen to explore at this time include:

•  cultural functions and representations of “the child”
• technology and childhood/technologies of childhood
• youth and popular musical cultures and scenes
• diaspora and cultural memory
• girls, girlhood, and girls’ cultures
• discourses of childhood and youth in films for, about, and by young peopleyouthful activities queering heteronormative and homonormative ways of being
• youth cultures challenging notions of legality

The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2017.

Inquiries may be directed to Larissa Wodtke, Managing Editor: l.wodtke@uwinnipeg.ca

Further information about submission guidelines is available at: http://www.jeunessejournal.ca

CFP: #SCREENTIMEBU: Fake News, Real Emotion, and The Mediated Self

#SCREENTIMEBU: Fake News, Real Emotion, and The Mediated Self

GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE

Deadline for Abstracts
May 22, 2017

Conference Date
June 22, 2017
9am - 5pm

The graduate students of Boston University’s Division of Emerging Media Studies are calling for abstracts for their third annual conference on emerging media. #ScreentimeBU is a graduate conference that provides a platforms for students to showcase their research and to network with peers in emerging media studies.

#ScreentimeBU aims to explore the civic, social, and psychological implications of today’s media landscape. This conference is an opportunity to bridge diverse perspectives on the roles of users and technology in new media and to lay the groundwork for future research in the field.

Emerging media studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field, and as such we welcome abstracts from a variety of disciplines on a range of topics centered around our conference theme: Fake News, Real Emotion, and The Mediated Self. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Alternative media, and citizen journalism
• 
How emerging technologies change journalism and civic engagement

• Online relationships, communities, and social networks

• Big data analysis and machine learning

• Media effects and changes in digital media consumption

• Self-presentation on social media and digital privacy concerns

• Video games, virtual reality, and augmented reality


The conference is free of charge for both attendees and speakers. For additional information about the conference, please visit http://sites.bu.edu/demsconference/ (website will be updated with additional details in the coming weeks).

Deadline for Abstracts: May 22. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to demsconf@bu.edu. Include your name and institutional affiliation (department/university), program and year of study, research focus/interests, and contact information (email and phone number) with all submissions. Abstracts will be peer reviewed, and applicants will be notified of their acceptance on a rolling basis no later than May 29.

#ScreentimeBU Abstract Team
Division of Emerging Media Studies
College of Communication
Boston University

CFP: Social Media and Communities

CFP: Social Media and Communities -- a "mini track" at the
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, (HICSS-51)
January 3-6, 2018, Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Full paper submission deadline, June 15

We call for papers that address social networks and communities supported and/or complemented by social media for work, learning, socializing, economic and/or political processes, and/or that address theory, design, practices, use or evaluation of such social media use. ‘Communities’ is taken in a broad sense, including communities of practice, epistemic communities, or communities of inquiry, as well as fully virtual communities, and social media use that supports or complements geographically based community. We particularly encourage papers that:

• advance our understanding of social network growth, formation, structure and outcomes through social media;
• explore how socio-technical affordances relate to social media use and outcomes;
• evaluate design of social media technologies and practices for effective community development and maintenance; and
• develop theories, models and principles of social media design, use and outcomes.

We encourage the submission of exploratory and theoretical papers, as well as empirical studies.

HICSS 51 and the "Big Island"

The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, in its 51st year, is one of the longstanding scientific conferences and is highly ranked among information systems conferences. Diverse disciplines unified by a focus on information technologies are woven together in a matrix structure of tracks and themes. By attending HICSS you are not only reaching the audience of your track and mini-track; you also have the opportunity to learn about what is happening in related fields and meet leaders in those fields. Other mini-tracks within the Digital and Social Media track are particularly relevant: see http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-51/digital-and-social-media/

With five of the world's seven climate zones, and a mixture of Hawaiian and immigrant cultures, the "Big Island" of Hawaii offers diverse outdoor activities, good food, and cultural activities.

Please see http://www.hicss.org/ for conference, venue and submission information. Papers are due June 15, 2017

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Dan Suthers (Primary Contact)
University of Hawaii at Manoa
suthers@hawaii.edu

Karine Nahon
University of Washington and the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya
karineb@uw.edu