Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communications


The Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communication (SSSMC) is intended to facilitate the international advancement of cross-disciplinary mobile communication studies. It is intended to serve as a resource and to support a network of scholarly research as to the social consequences of mobile communication.




Tuesday, September 20, 2016

CFP: Mobility, Mobile Media, and Health in Asia: Culture, structure, agency


Call for Book Chapters

Mobility, Mobile Media, and Health in Asia: Culture, structure, agency

Editor: Mohan J. Dutta, Provost’s Chair Professor, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore

Book Series: Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications

Series Editor: Sun Sun Lim, Associate Professor, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore
Overview:

In the proposed book, we examine the nature of mobility in mobile health, exploring the ways in which Asian mobilities configure into mobile media and health. The overarching framework of the book explores the intersections between mobile media and health, contextually situated in Asia and theoretically informed by Asia-centric conceptual maps for engaging with the linkages between mobile media and health. In one segment of the book, we examine mHealth projects across Asia, examining the overarching frameworks that constitute these projects, the underlying assumptions, the articulations of culture, and the expressions of agency as communities negotiate their access to and experiences with mHealth solutions. Drawing upon the overarching framework of the culture-centered approach, the book examines the flows of material, labor, and participation in mobile health interventions. Attention is paid to the ways in which mHealth interventions are conceptualized in community contexts!
the role of these interventions in engaging with communities, and the constitution of community agency in mHealth interventions.  In another segment of the book, we explore the ways in which health is constituted in Asia in the uses of mobile devices. Attention is paid to the vulnerabilities and risks to health constituted by mobile media, and the ways in which communities at the margins negotiate these health risks. The Chapters in this section will explore the health consequences of mobile media uses, and how mobile media products and artifacts are negotiated in the overarching context of health.

First, this edited book calls for scholarship across Asia that explores critically the interplays of power and control in mHealth interventions, addresses cultural context, and/or pays attention to the ways in which community agency is conceptualized in the ambits of mHealth Interventions. Based on the cases explored in the book, the overarching framework will examine Asia-centric concepts of health, culture, and technology as conceptualized in the ambits of mHealth Interventions. The book will provide an overarching structure for comparing mHealth cases across Asia, thus developing key theoretical anchors for exploring the linkages between mobility, culture, and structures as communities enact their agency in negotiating mHealth.

Second, the book calls for scholarship in Asia that explores the intersections of mobile media and health, and the juxtaposition of mobilities in/through mobile media in the backdrop of health outcomes. Chapters may explore the health outcomes attached to the manufacturing/production/disposal of mobile media, the health outcomes of mobile media uses, and the ways in which health risks/vulnerabilities are negotiated through mobilities afforded by mobile media in Asia. Based on the conceptual anchors offered by Chapters covering Asia, this section of the book will offer comparative conceptual nodes for theorizing health, mobility, and mobile media located in Asia.

Call for abstracts:

Please submit abstracts outlining the paper. Papers submitted for the book may be theoretical pieces, empirically based pieces, or case studies comparing multiple cases. The important thing is that the Chapters be grounded in the context of Asia and seriously attend to the ways in which context configures in the theorizing of mobility, mobile media, and health. The abstract should spell out how the chapter contributes to the theorizing of mobility and health centered in Asia, drawing on culturally situated concepts that originate from and situate themselves in the Asian context. Abstracts should be no more than 1000 words long. Abstracts selected for submission will be invited to be developed into full papers (between 8000 and 10,000 words in length). Please submit abstracts to cnmmohan@nus.edu.sg


Timeline:

Call for Abstracts Issued: September 22, 2016

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 30, 2016

Authors Notified: November 15, 2016

Chapters Due: April, 2017

Revisions Requested: May 2017

Final Versions Due: July 2017

Monday, September 19, 2016

CFP: General Online Research conference (GOR 17)

Call for presentations and abstract submissions for the General Online Research conference (GOR 17)
15-17 March 2017, Berlin, Germany.

The conference language is English.

Deadline for abstract submissions:
Until 15 November 2016: abstract submissions for tracks A, B, C and GOR Thesis Award 2017 competition
Until 1 December 2016: abstract submissions for GOR Best Practice Award 2017 competition
Until 24 January 2017: submissions for posters and GOR Poster Award 2017 competition

GOR is organized by the German Society for Online Research (DGOF, http://www.dgof.de) since 1997.
Local Organizer: Prof. Dr. Holger Lütters, HTW Berlin (University of Applied Sciences)

Further information at http://www.gor.de

Main topics: Online Research Methodology, Data Science & Big Data, Electoral Research & Political Communication and Online Market Research

All submissions relevant to digital research are welcome. Presentations in the past years covered a broad range of topics, be it online surveys or research methodology concerning the Internet or social aspects of the Web as well as online market research. Since 1997, GOR has been attended by more than 300 researchers and other professionals each year who want to stay on top of new developments and best practices for their work in academia and business.

This year the conference seeks submissions in:
  • Internet Surveys, Mobile Web, and Online Research Methodology (A)
  • Big Data and Data Science (B)
  • Electoral Research and Political Communication (C)

The programme committee invites presenters from academia, business, official statistics, the government and all other sectors.
The quality is maintained by a double blind peer reviewing system.
We look forward to receiving your abstract submission.

You can find the complete call for papers and further information at http://www.gor.de.


Sunday, September 18, 2016

CFP: Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age

CFP: Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age
Issue X, 2017
Intersections: At the Technophysics of Space

Editors: Georgios Tsagdis (Westminster Law & Theory Lab), Susanna Lindberg (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)

Deadline for proposals (300 words): 15th October, 2016
Intersections: where technology encounters space. Where the technological transformation, organization and manipulation of what appeared to be the incontestable, unalterable terrain of physics – a fundamental element of nature – challenges the pace of thought. Can our discourses keep up with the transformation that they, as logoi, at the intersection with techne, have wrought? What compasses and cartographies, what instruments of navigation and observation, do our new territories, environments, multi-scapes and horizons exact?

Interpreted by Plato as receptacle (chōra), by Aristotle as place (topos), by Descartes as extension, by Leibniz as principle of individuation, by Kant as transcendental condition of apperception-throughout its history from antiquity to modernity, space has been thought as constant or given the theoretical articulations of which would transform only to reinstate it as an immutable foundation. The same logic continues to govern physical theories of general gravitation and general relativity, as well as mathematical theories of topology, which despite breaking with the idea of space as a single universal dimension, remain attached nonetheless to the idea of a general theory of space. The generality of such theoretical approaches makes them blind to the singularity of the artificial spaces created by contemporary technologies, and their universality makes them miss the locality and provisionality of a technologically furnished space.

Accordingly, technology creates and follows a logic that undertakes a reconfiguration, a reconstruction of ‘natural’ space. Technologies of writing and painting (graphein), by enabling a simultaneous co-presence of absent events, didn’t only dissociate presence from lost moments of time, but also presence from distant places. One hardly notes the disappearance of natural space anymore: information technologies have accustomed us to it, but the most diverse technologic forms supplement and intensify the phenomenon. The friendly face on the screen does not appear as the emission of a satellite. The co-presence of ubiquitous re-productions across the globe does not need an original anymore. In retrospect, historical technics appears as an artifice, which could only negate space understood as primordial constancy. It would seem, however, that we have reached a point in which this negation constructs space as absence. In the era of the holo-gram, a total writing of non-presence, place is no more. Technology, which offered space a logic of presence, now structures and striates its function as a manifold order of absence.

Deleuze and Guattari’s territories, Foucault’s heterotopias, Derrida’s spectrality, Baudrillard’s hyperreality, Serres’s networks, Auge’s non-places, Bauman’s liquidity and Latour’s ANT, are some of the diverse loci of reflection, through which contributions might attempt to approach the transformation of:

  • SOCIAL SPACE: digital environments, accessible only through technological devices and programs; new and renewed technological modes of encounters, interactions and mediations and the ensuing spaces; the construction of evermore encompassing networks; the proliferation of signifiers as building blocks of social space; (post-)urban habitats and the transformation of the human body; techno-consumerism.
  • GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE: digital grids where ‘nature’ no longer provides the ground of orientation, making coordination and postioning possible solely through technology (i.e. GPS); the transformation of landscapes, the oceans and the atmosphere and the onset of the anthropocene as a recasting of space itself; outer space as a vantage point of new inner spaces.
  • POLITICAL SPACE: technological walls (e.g. limits in internet) instead of physical frontiers; differential access to technological systems of information, communication, etc and the formation of new geopolitics; the exploitation and monopolization of world-resources and the violent disavowal of world-problems; the spatiality of the technological erosion of sovereignty; the fragmentation of political ideologies, agile political identities and shifting political territories.
  • NATURAL SCIENCE: technological modelization instead of empirical research on natural objects; knowledge as flows of accelerated information, as well as its academic and ethico-political implications; the manufacture of life and its spaces; the space of science itself as a technological product.
  • ART: the dominance of virtuality and of an highly technological aesthetic experience in non-real spaces; avatar subjects and objects of art; conceptual art and architecture as space-less celebrations of the absent work, in the face of infinite technological possibilities.

Original contributions including but not limited to the aforementioned themes are welcome. Please send your proposals to: georgiotsagdis@outlook.com, susanna.e.lindberg@hotmail.com.

DEADLINE: Proposals (300 words): 15th October, 2016 & Completed Articles: 15th March, 2017.
ESSAY LENGTH: min. 25,000 and max. 34,000 characters.


Friday, September 16, 2016

CFP :The 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media


The 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017)
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Montreal, Canada: May 15-18, 2017

http://icwsm.org/2017/submitting/call-for-papers/

The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. Research presented at ICWSM blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

ICWSM, now in its eleventh year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science, and previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon network science, machine learning, computational linguistics, sociology, communication, and political science. The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a fast growth of the conference and a competitive acceptance rate around 20% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The accepted papers will be open access and have equal time for a full oral presentation. Full papers will also have the opportunity to display their paper as a poster at the venue.

For ICWSM-17, in addition to the usual program of contributed talks, posters and demos, the main conference will include a selection of keynote talks from prominent scientists and technologists. Building on successes in previous years, ICWSM-17 will also hold a day of workshops and tutorials in addition to the main conference.

Please see the full call for disciplines, topics, and types of social media. http://icwsm.org/2017/submitting/call-for-papers/

Paper Submission Categories
Please note that the formatting and submission instructions in the author kit are for final, accepted papers; ICWSM submissions are anonymous, and must conform to all detailed instructions for blind review (Detailed guidelines). In addition, the copyright slug may be omitted in the initial submission phase and no copyright form is required until a paper is accepted for publication.

This year there are three submission options; ICWSM is introducing a new paper format, Dataset Papers, for researchers whose primary contribution is to provide new data resources and methodological novelty in procuring those resources.

Full paper format: 
Full paper submissions to ICWSM are recommended to be 8 pages long, and must be at most 10 pages long, including figures and references. The final camera-ready length (between 8-10 pages) for each full paper in the proceedings will be at the discretion of the program chairs. All papers must follow AAAI formatting guidelines.

Dataset paper format: 
Dataset paper submissions must comprise two parts: a dataset or group of datasets, and metadata describing the content, quality, structure, potential uses of the dataset(s), and methods employed for data collection. Descriptive statistics may be included in the metadata (more sophisticated analyses should be part of a regular paper submission).
Datasets and metadata must be published as part of ICWSM data sharing service and the papers will be part of the full proceedings. Dataset paper submissions must be between 8-10 pages long. All papers must follow AAAI formatting guidelines.

Poster and demo paper format: 
Poster paper submissions to ICWSM must be 4 pages long, including figures and references. Demo paper submissions to ICWSM must be 2 pages long, including figures and references. All papers must follow AAAI formatting guidelines.

Anonymity: Paper submissions to ICWSM must be anonymized.

Social sciences and sociophysics papers with optional publication: We will be continuing the 'social science and sociophysics' track at ICWSM-17 following its successful debut in 2013. This option is for researchers in social science and sociophysics who wish to submit full papers without publication in the conference proceedings. While papers in this track will not be published, we expect these submissions to describe the same high-quality and complete work as the main track submissions. Papers accepted to this track will be full presentations integrated with the conference, but they will be published only as abstracts in the conference proceedings.

Ethics: We encourage the authors to obtain ethical approval for experiments with human subjects from their corresponding institutions' Internal Review Board (IRB) and demonstrate this information as part of the submission.

Please see the call for papers ( http://icwsm.org/2017/submitting/call-for-papers/) for template and
additional guidelines.

ICWSM 2017 - Important Dates
Proposals: December 12, 2016

Papers, Posters, and Demos - http://icwsm.org/2017/submitting/call-for-papers/
Abstract Submission: January 6, 2017 (by 23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
Full Papers Submission: January 23, 2017 (by 23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
Paper and poster notifications: February 28, 2017
Camera Ready Version Due: March 10, 2017

Tutorials - http://icwsm.org/2017/submitting/tutorials/
Proposals: January 25, 2017
Notification: February 15, 2017

ICWSM 2017, Montreal, Canada
Tutorials and Workshops: May 15, 2017
Main Conference: May 16-18, 2017

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Alice Marwick, & Winter Mason
ICWSM 2017 Program Co-chairs

Vanessa Frias-Martinez and Sarita Schoenebeck
ICWSM 2017 Tutorials Chairs

Munmun De Choudhury, Brian Keegan, Jürgen Pfeffer
ICWSM 2017 Workshops Chairs

CFP: Mobile Cultures of Disaster Conference

Mobile Cultures of Disaster Conference



23 March - 24 March 2017

City West Campus
University of South Australia
Adelaide, Australia


According to a growing body of literature, the dangers and hazards that people around the world face in the 21st century are in many ways unparalleled. In order to confront these problems, there is a growing recognition that disasters and other social disruptions are cultural matters. This has stimulated research across the Asia-Pacific on the cultural determinants and consequences of disasters. However, the extent to which these concepts differ or intersect between various social contexts has remained less well- explored. Additionally, there is a need to further investigate how disasters cultures are mobile, in that culture is a phenomenon that circulates, as acutely evident in the rise of social media.

The aim of the conference is to bring together prominent academics, specialists and policy analysts across the world to investigate the cultural and mobile aspects of disasters. The conference principally seeks to stimulate research on how disasters are mobile and cultural phenomena. It asks participants to consider how disasters circulate around various parts of the world. This refers to the ways in which disasters involve movement and cultural exchange in terms of how they are managed, experienced and socially constructed.
Speakers

The full list of confirmed speakers will be available shortly.

Call for Papers

We invite the submission of abstracts that bear upon at least one of the following research questions:
  

  • How can some disasters, such as the 3.11 triple disaster in Japan, be conceptualized as ‘mobile’ social breakdowns?
  • What are some of the methodological challenges related to studying ‘disasters’ on the move?
  • How do global transformations in mobility (from mass travel to social media) impact upon disaster management/recovery and cultural understandings of disasters?
  • In what ways do disasters involve cultural inter-change?
  • What role do ICTs and other communicative technologies play in the experience and management of disasters?
  • What forms of ‘mobility’ and/or ‘immobility’ can be linked to disasters?
Abstracts of no more than 200 words should sent to Dr Eric L. Hsu at eric.hsu@unisa.edu.au by Monday 17 October 2016. You will be notified of acceptance no later than the Tuesday 15 November 2016.

Key dates

    Call for for Papers open: Friday 26 August 2016
    Call for Papers close: Monday 17 October 2016
    Applicants notified: Tuesday 15 November 2016

Acknowledgements

The conference has received generous funding from the Japan Foundation and is also supported by Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia, the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University, and the College of Sociology at Rikkyo University. Due to this support, there are no registration fees for the ‘Mobile Cultures of Disaster’ Conference.