Greetings all!
This is my first post here, but it seemed there were potential
contributions to be made to this book by crit geographers. If this is
not a suitable type of post just let me know.
Sincerely
Tracey
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christian Fuchs <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 9:33 AM
Subject: [liberationtech] CfP: Book "Social Media, Politics and the State"
To: [log in to unmask]
*Call for extended abstracts for an edited collection
-‐
Please circulate widely*
Social Media, Politics and the State:
Protest, Revolutions, Riots, Crime, and Policing in the Age of
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Edited by Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs
http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/CFP_SMPS.pdf
“Social media” is a new buzzword, marketing ideology and sphere of
imagination in which contemporary techno-optimistic and
techno-pessimistic visions are played out. Social media platforms like
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have made a considerable impact on
contemporary life. A growing corpus of research considers how these
platforms have affected marketing, identity construction, social
coordination and privacy. The scholarship that this collected volume
addresses looks at how state power and politics are both contested and
exercised on social media.
Because social media are saturated in contemporary life, they have
become a tool and a terrain for conflicts between states and a
multitude of organized and autonomous actors. Social media are
celebrated for “levelling the playing field” by empowering otherwise
powerless actors. The ‘Green Movement’ during the 2009 elections in
Iran was globally broadcast on Twitter. Marginalized political groups
can now promote their agenda on free and easy-to-use platforms. Even
rioters and other actors breaking the law can organize and discuss
their exploits on these platforms. Yet in practice, social media often
lead to asymmetrical power relations, as a result of asymmetrical
relations of online visibility.
Studying social media politics, there are on the one hand
techno-optimistic approaches that claim that social media helps to
revive democracy (examples of such talk include the focus on “Twitter
revolutions”, “YouTube democracy”, or a “Twitter public sphere”) and
on the other hand techno-pessimistic approaches that claim that social
media are a new threat to democracy (examples of such talk include
focus on the omnipresence of criminal threats, harassments, terrorism
and violent extremism on social media, the talk about “Twitter and
Blackberry riots”, the stress on the end of political activism due to
the lack of real-life contacts between activists and citizens, the
focus on how the police and repressive regimes monitor social media in
order to repress political activism, etc). The focus of this collected
volume is different in that it seeks contributions that give a
realistic assessment of the relationship between various forms of
collective action (e.g. the Arab spring, the Occupy movement,
contemporary student protests, contemporary social movements in
Greece, Spain, and other countries, Anonymous, WikiLeaks, various
forms of terrorism, various forms of crime, various forms of political
activism, etc) and state power (the police, various political regimes,
intelligence, the state-industrial surveillance complex, the
neoliberal regime of governance, etc) on social media.
In the Iranian protests in 2009 just like in the Arab spring,
activists have used social media as organizing and communication tool
in their protests and governments have tried to censor and monitor
social media, often with the help of surveillance technologies
produced and exported by Western companies. WikiLeaks has tried to
make the power of state actors transparent with the assistance of
online leaking, and political opponents of the project have answered
with boycotts and large-scale campaigns. Anonymous has advanced a
networked form of political hacktivism and is facing the
criminalization of distributed denial of service attacks and
politically motivated cracking as well as prosecution of some of its
activists. Organizations concerned about police brutality, including
discriminatory and racist practices have turned to social media in
order to ‘watch the watchers’ (regional CopWatch branches on Facebook,
leaking personal data about abusive police officers to the public,
drone and citizen journalism of police activities during political
protests). However, these very sites render political activists
visible to the police, and the police have developed an interest in
monitoring social media and using them as surveillance tools. Social
media and mobile phones have been used as communication tools in the
London and Vancouver riots in 2011, to which the police answered with
an offensive of policing social media, developing new social media
surveillance tools, and publicly declaring the need for laws and
technologies that enable the control of riots, crime and terror. Since
the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, Europe has
experienced an electoral shift towards the right in many countries and
a growth of right-wing extremism and fascist activism that has
culminated in Anders Breiviks’ mass killing of 69 people. The public
and the police have since asked if Internet- and social
media-monitoring and control can prevent such massacres, by detecting
early warning signals and help catch criminals and terrorists before
they attack. Privacy and civil society activists are the same time
concerned that social media policing and surveillance bring about a
totalitarian society, in which innocent citizens are criminalized and
discriminated against, and in which social media policing turns
against civil society, minorities (especially people of colour) and
political activists, that conservative law and order politics are
advanced, and that a techno-deterministic ideology emerges that
overlooks the societal causes of crime and terror and believes in a
technological fix to societal problems that are rooted in modern
society’s power structures.
We are explicitly neither interested in contributions that tell
readers which great opportunities or threats various forms of
collective action on social media pose, nor in contributions that
focus on opportunities or threats posed by various forms of state
action on social media. We are rather exclusively interested in
contributions that address how collective action and state power are
related and conflict as two-sides of social media power, and how power
and counter-power are distributed in this relationship.
We are compiling a collection of research papers that address one or
more of the following issues:
-Social media and the Arab Spring, and related regime conflicts
-Social media and the Occupy movement
-Social media and student protests / austerity protests
-Social media and riots / social unrest in urban areas
-Social media and political protests and activism
-Social media and marginal political groups
-Social media, right-wing extremism, and fascism
-Social media and religious violence
-Social media and organized crime
-Social media and policing
-Social media and police violence
-Social media and the state-industrial surveillance complex
-Social media and Anonymous
-Social media and WikiLeaks
In particular, we invite research that considers a) the two-sided
nature of power in relation to social media and politics, and that is
b) theoretically focused, c) critical in nature and d) empirically
rigorous.
-All chapters should give attention to theoretical question that
address what political power is all about in general and today and how
this relates to social media:
What is the state? What is power? What is politics? What is the
police? What is surveillance? What is activism? What is civil society?
How does the relationship between collective action and state power
look like in modern society?
-Which critical theories that conceptualize these phenomena are there?
Which of these theories are feasible in the context of social media?
-How can the relationship of collective action and state power be
theorized and how does this relate to social media?
-What does it mean to study social media, politics and the state critically?
-How should the concepts of power and counter-power be theorized? How
can such a theorization be applied to social media?
-How can the power relations and asymmetries between collective actors
and state apparatuses be conceptualized, theorized, and empirically
studied in a realistic and dialectical way?
Final versions of chapters should be no longer than 8000 words,
including references and notes. We intend to submit a full proposal to
Routledge, who have expressed an interest in this collection.
We are currently seeking extended abstracts of 800-1200 words. Please
send extended abstracts, along with a brief bio to
[log in to unmask] no later than Monday, October 15th, 2012.
Tentative schedule:
Extended abstracts due: Monday, October 15th, 2012
Notification of accepted papers: Thursday, November 1st, 2012
First draft of chapters due: Monday, April 1st, 2012
Feedback on chapters returned: Monday, June 3rd, 2012
Final versions of chapters due: Monday, July 15th, 2012
In order to be considered, abstracts should adhere to the following
style (800-1200 words in total, please address each aspect separately
and include the specific headlines in your abstract):
a) Contribution Title
b) Full name of the author(s)
c) Institutional affiliation(s)
d) Postal address(es)
e) e-mail address(es)
f) Telphone number of the corresponding author
Structured Abstract
1 Purpose:
What are the overall task and research question the chapter addresses?
2 Scope:
What is the scope of the analysis (time period for the analysis,
geographical scope, which phenomena are included in the analysis,
which one excluded and why, which spheres of society and their
interrelations are taken into account (politics, state, economy,
ideology, etc))?
3 Method:
Which theoretical approaches and empirical research methods are
employed for answering the research questions and attaining the
chapter’s task? How does the chapter employ and apply critical social
theories for studying social media, politics, the state, power and
counter-power? How is the power relationship of collective actors and
state power taken into account?
4 Results:
What are the main results presented in the paper?
5 Recommendations:
What are the main recommendations for society that the research allows
to draw from a critical and ethical perspective?
6 Conclusions:
What are the main conclusions of the conducted research for politics,
society, academia, the research field of Critical Internet and Social
Media Studies, and the public?
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--
Tracey P. Lauriault
Post Doctoral Fellow
Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
http://datalibre.ca/
613-234-2805
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