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Dear colleagues, Please pass on to your PhD students. With thanks Call for Papers ICS Postgraduate Conference: Communication Technologies of Empowerment Leeds, United Kingdom, May 18, 2007 The Institute of Communications Studies (ICS) at the University of Leeds will be hosting a postgraduate conference for the presentation and discussion of research in communications performed by PhD students. Under the title "Communication Technologies of Empowerment", this meeting seeks to bring together new scholars who are studying the ways in which the latest developments in communication are affecting our democracies, by enabling new forms of political participation and citizen engagement. Whether you live in an established democratic system, a country in transition to democracy, or under an authoritarian government, new communication technologies are likely to have changed your political environment. The recent popular upheavals in Ukraine and Lebanon were in great part conducted through mobile phone messages. In Western Europe, the riots in the Parisian suburbs and the protests in Spain against the Aznar government regarding the authorship of the Madrid terrorist attacks would have been very different if the Internet and mobile phones had not become an integral part of our everyday lives. Meanwhile, traditional politics is trying to catch up with the digital age. Political parties are seeking to domesticate these new forms of horizontal communication, and so are governments, with potentially threatening consequences. Paradoxically, new technologies of communication can serve both to empower citizens and to survey and control them. A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has shown that networked technologies can be effectively used by authoritarian governments to strengthen their repressive regimes. New forms of communication have become a key tool for global social movements. Whether their struggles are focused on questions of global justice, class, gender, race or the environment, activists have found in the decentralized and inexpensive nature of the Internet and mobile telephony the media they needed to organise themselves and make their actions public. Interestingly, these technologies are also being mastered by those actors who want to challenge the national and international orders through violent means. This reminds us that terrorism is in great part a communicative phenomenon, today more than ever before. If your research deals with questions such as the ones outlined above, or with issues related with the interplay of media, new technologies, citizenship, democracy and politics, we hope to hear from you. Please submit an abstract with a general description of your research paper, indicating your topic, theoretical framework, research questions or hypotheses, method and expected results. The abstract should not exceed 500 words. If your proposal is accepted, we will ask you to provide a full paper. After your presentation, the paper will be published on the ICS website. Please, remember to include your full contact information: Name, e-mail and postal address, telephone number and academic affiliation for each author. Your paper presentation will be discussed and commented on by members of the academic staff from the Institute of Communications Studies who have expertise in your topic, method, or theoretical framework. This can be a golden opportunity for you to refine your thoughts, openly share your concerns, and receive constructive criticism from professors and fellow postgraduate students working in your area. It is also a great chance to start building or expanding your professional and academic network. Deadlines: - Deadline for proposals: January 31, 2007. - Deadline for full papers: April 30, 2007. Contact and electronic submission: - Qian (Sarah) Gong - [log in to unmask] - Anna Zoellner - [log in to unmask] Conference website: http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~icsfs Dr Katharine Sarikakis Postgraduate Research Tutor Institute of Communications Studies University of Leeds Houldsworth Building Leeds LS2 9JT International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics Managing Editor http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/mcp