Dear Mailbase,

I am just forwarding below this latest CFP. Please send any queries or
abstracts to Heather Horst.

And ... happy new year to everyone especially to new members for 2005. We
are now a cyber community of over 350 members worldwide and sometimes we
even get to meet up at conferences. On that note please see our Society for
Caribbean Studies final call for papers - deadline 7 January. If you've just
joined and missed it then let me know.

Best wishes

Sandra Courtman
Mailbase administrator

-----Original Message-----
From: Heather Horst [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 31 December 2004 23:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CFP: Return to Cyberia: Technology and the Social Worlds of
Transnational Migrants


Dear Editors for Caribbean Studies,

Could you kindly forward the following call for papers on the Caribbean
Studies newsgroup?

With appreciation,
Heather A Horst

------------------------------------------------------
Call for Papers:
Return to Cyberia: Technology and the Social Worlds of Transnational
Migrants (Anastasia Panagakos and Heather A. Horst, editors)

We are seeking authors for a special issue of Global Networks on the use
of information and communication technologies among transnational
migrants. Global Networks (http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/glob)  is
a peer reviewed journal that publishes four times a year and qualifies
for the ISI Social Science Citation Index.  Please send 250 word
abstract and contact information to Anastasia Panagakos at
[log in to unmask] by January 21, 2005. Apologies for any cross
listings.

This volume constitutes a "return" to Cyberia, the concept coined by
Arturo Escobar a decade ago to describe, in part, how various
communities adopt or reject new technologies based upon cultural,
political, and economic factors. Since then social scientists have
sought to understand how changes to social life is brought about by
cyberculture - the computer, information, and biological technologies
considered to be
hallmarks of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.   Information and
communication technologies (ICTs), such as the Internet and cellular
phones, were primarily made available to individuals living in western,
industrialized countries, a fact which led many scholars to suggest that
ICTs advanced a new axis of inequality based on race, class, gender, and
even geography.

In the last five years, however, there are suggestions that the "digital
divide" has started to shrink as computers and digital technologies
become cheaper and more ubiquitous (Miller and Slater 2000). As David
Hess notes, the effect of "cosmopolitan technologies" on Third World
groups in particular are poorly understood, particularly regarding
issues of cultural homogenization, hybridization, and the creation of
new differences.  For transnational populations in both the first and
third worlds, ICTs have become a way to sustain networks, build ethnic
and political solidarity, establish hierarchies (class-based and
otherwise), and create outlets for personal expression while living
between and within the social worlds of home and host countries,
diasporas, dominant societies and ethnic enclaves.

"Return to Cyberia" seeks to evaluate the contemporary moment of social
science of new cultural and social forms influenced by rapidly evolving
technologies in this first critical decade through a variety of
ethnographic case studies and by addressing the following issues: What
are the challenges of conducting research on-line, in virtual places as
well as through more traditional modes of inquiry?  How has virtual
research created, resolved, or otherwise altered traditional research
methodologies and to what end? Is a virtual social scientist accountable
to the community of study or does virtual research herald a return of
the colonialist voyeur?  Are ICTs controlled by certain segments of
transnational populations, thereby exacerbating internal hierarchies
based on class and education, or have they become tools for the common
person as well?  As Mark Graham and Shahram Khosravi conclude in their
study of Iranian diasporic cyberspace, cultural capital accrued
virtually does not translate into real life. What then are the costs and
benefits of participating in virtual communities spread over vast
distances?  How do new ICTs transform the relationships between those
who migrate and those who stay?  What forms of ICTs become incorporated
into transnational networks and why? Finally, what are the consequences
for communities that do not or cannot embrace ICTs to same degree as
other communities? Will global technological interconnectedness become a
21st standard for gauging inequality or will it eventually promote new
equalities?

Anastasia Panagakos
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dept. of Human and Community Development
University of California, Davis
[log in to unmask]

Heather Horst
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Anthropology
University College London
[log in to unmask]

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