Call for Paper Proposals
2016 AAA Panel: Cyber Anthropology, Data Ethnography, and Ethics
Co-organizers:
Pedram Khosronejad (Oklahoma State University)
Jens Kreinath (Wichita State University)
The increase in the production and dissemination of visual, textual and other types of data in and through the medium of the cyber space challenges the ways in which anthropologists conduct their data ethnography. Today, this insight is a common place in all fields of anthropology, especially media and digital anthropology. However, the degree to which anthropologists rely on data that are produced and disseminated in and through the Internet and various social media outlets has broader ethical implications that have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the academia. Thus, the massive collection and usage of digital data has become a conundrum in ethnographic research, while the ethical guidelines are literally non-existent. For one, the data produced and disseminated in cyberspace are anything else than data in the traditional sense of ethnographic fieldwork, which were first-hand and not otherwise accessible; for another, the anthropologist becomes part of the digital circuit and the reliability and originality of digital data are at stake, since these data already available and can always become subject to manipulation and digital traces can easily be deleted or disappear. Because the ethics of data collection and usage in cyber anthropology has not been yet addressed theoretically, the urgency to address the ethics of data ethnography is high.
Questions that this panel aims to address include, but are not limited to:
- What can be considered as 'data' in the cyber anthropology and data ethnography?
- How can digital data sets to be used for ethnographic research?
- How reliable are digital data and what are the ethical issues involved?
- What are the ethical issues in disseminating visual data in the internet?
- How can one know or trust the data made available in the internet and in social media?
- How and why visual and digital data need to be archived?
In line with the theme of the 2016 AAA meeting in Minneapolis "Evidence, Accident, Discovery," we aim to foster the discussion of these and related questions at one of its venues and we cordially invite paper proposals from the full range of data ethnography and cyber anthropology that are grounded in specific case studies and have the potential to raise broader ethical issues; we welcome topical proposals related to religious minorities, authoritarian regimes, ethnic war, and political resistance, as well as migration and refugees, and self-storytelling.
If interested please contact or send an abstract of 250 words to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> and [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by April 11th 2016.
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Dr. Pedram Khosronejad
Farzaneh Family Scholar
Associate Director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies
School of International Studies
Oklahoma State University
201 Wes Watkins Center
Stillwater, Oklahoma 74078
Phone: 405-744-6179
E-mail: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
www.iso.okstate.edu<http://www.iso.okstate.edu>
| Chief Editor, Journal of Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia<http://acmejournal.org/index.php/acme>, SeanKingston.
| Series Editor, Iranian Studies<http://www.lit-verlag.de/reihe/irastu>, LIT Verlag.
| Series Editor, The Anthropology of Persianate Societies<http://www.seankingston.co.uk/PersianateAnth.html>, SeanKingston.
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