CFP: Children's and young people's rights in the digital age

CFP: Children's and young people's rights in the digital age (Special issue of New Media and Society)

Children's and young people's rights in the digital age
Call for papers for a special issue of NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY

Editors: Sonia Livingstone and Amanda Third
Abstracts due (400-500 words): 15th September 2015

In 1989, Sir Tim Berners Lee released the code that would form the foundation of the World Wide Web, which now boasts an audience of three billion users worldwide. The same year, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the history of the UN. The trajectories thereby set in motion have recently become explicitly intertwined, with growing momentum behind calls for the recognition of the potential of online and networked media for promoting children's rights. At the same time, researchers, child rights' advocates and internet governance experts, among others, are concerned that children's rights are being newly infringed rather than enhanced in the digital age.

While the past quarter of a century has seen the emergence of a significant literature examining the broad issue of children's rights and, in parallel, a burgeoning field of research on children's new media and digital practices in a variety of national and international contexts, the question of children's rights in the digital age has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention, especially compared with the attention paid to adult rights online. Within popular discourse, children and young people are frequently configured as riding at the forefront of the 'digital revolution'. Nonetheless, as high level debates about global internet provision and governance extend their geographic, political and economic scope, the position of children and young people is barely acknowledged. Further, in the twists and turns of often heated policy debates, children's own experiences, voices and interests are vastly under-considered. This special issue thus seeks to contribute to the definition, empirical evidence base, and theorisation of the field internationally.

Not only are children's needs and experiences in the digital age often treated as merely a minority interest but they are also often seen as essentially problematic, as demanding exceptional treatment from adult society or causing unwarranted restrictions on adult freedoms. It is important to recognise the fundamental nature of the challenges - this is not just a matter of 'digital rights' but of all children's rights as they may be being transformed in a 'digital age'. Nor is it just a matter of the exceptional circumstances that apply to children, for addressing the rights of children and young people also has implications for adult rights in a digital age. How does a consideration of children compel a wider re-examination of the concepts both of the digital and of human rights?

If children's rights in the digital age have yet to receive attention in the global North, this is even more acute in the global South. The tipping point has already passed, with two thirds of the world's nearly three billion internet users living in developing countries, many of them children. At present, the evidence regarding their online activities is very patchy, too often drawing on anecdote, practitioners' observations and institutional reports or media accounts. There is thus an urgent need for a scholarly focus on the rights of children and young people within this larger picture of expanding connectivity in the global South. This is vital to foster debates about children's rights informed by dialogues among diverse epistemologies, experiences and normative frameworks.

This special issue seeks to unpack the ways digital media are impacting - both positively and negatively - children's rights today and, in doing so, to reflect on the ways that children's rights might provide a meaningful counterpoint from which to consider the role of 'the digital' in advancing human rights more broadly. Assembling contributions from leading scholars and practitioners in the field internationally, this special issue seeks to bring fully into view the ways in which children's rights - indeed rights generally - may be being reconfigured by the appropriation of digital networked technologies around the world. Submissions will critically examine the normative and socio-technological assumptions embedded in conceptual, policy and practitioner perspectives. To catalyse the debates, we now call for reflective papers of 6000-7000 words analysing key dilemmas or tensions shaping children's rights in the digital age, as well as shorter empirical or practitioner pieces (3000-4000 words each).

Papers on key dilemmas or tensions that respondents to the call might address include:

• The tension between universal or fundamental human rights and the specific rights demanded by the digital age

• The tensions between 'adult rights' and 'children's rights'

• The relationship between children's rights and their citizenship

• Collective rights versus individual rights 

• The tension between 'adult power' and 'children's rights'

• The tension between the universal ('the child', 'rights') and the specific (the lived experiences of children)

• Hierarchies of children's rights in the digital age

• Children's rights in the digital age in the global North and global South

• Empirical or practitioner pieces might address:

• Children's privacy rights and the role of peers and peer culture

• Youth participation rights in the mediated public sphere

• Historical shifts in children's communication rights

• Child protection in the global South: is the internet helping or hindering?

• From principles to practice: applying arguments about digital rights in particular domains

• Who is (or should be) ensuring children's rights online - parents, government, industry?

• Children's creative workarounds to gain health resources online

• Evaluating initiatives for e-learning and other digital educational programmes

• How are children's rights represented or abused in 'big data'

• Digital exclusion as a barrier to children's communication rights

• Rethinking possibilities for children's identity and expression in the network society

• Problems of reputation for networked youth

• Public policy /multi-stakeholder governance regarding children's rights in the digital age

• Children's information rights: what are the dilemmas?

• Education for all - newly possible in the network society?

• Grooming, hacking, cyberstalking, trolling and other crimes against children online

• Meanings/limits of "voice" in participatory research on children's rights in the digital age

• The intergenerational dimensions of children's rights

Please submit abstracts for either the 'dilemma' papers or 'empirical/practitioner papers' by 15th September 2015 to both editors - Sonia Livingstone (s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk<mailto:s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk>) and Amanda Third (A.Third@uws.edu.au<mailto:A.Third@uws.edu.au>).

The editors will invite full papers from selected submissions by early October, with full papers to be submitted for independent review by 1st February 2016. It is anticipated that the special issue will be published via Online First by late 2016.


Professor Sonia Livingstone, DPhil, FBPS, FRSA, OBE
Department of Media and Communications, LSE
S105, St Clements Building, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK
Web: [http://www.sonialivingstone.net<http://www.sonialivingstone.net]www.sonialivingstone.net<http://www.sonialivingstone.net>
Blog: [http://www.parenting.digita<http://www.parenting.digita@Livingstone_S>l]www.parenting.digita<http://www.parenting.digita@Livingstone_S>l
Twitter: @Livingstone_S
EU Kids Online: [http://www.eukidsonline.net<http://www.eukidsonline.net]www.eukidsonline.net<http://www.eukidsonline.net>
TEDx talk: http://ow.ly/wwWiC
Open access papers: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/view/lseauthor/Livingstone,_Sonia.default.html
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard
Fellow and past President, International Communication Association
Books: Meanings of Audiences (2013), Digital Technologies in the Lives of Young People (2014)

CFP: Cultural Studies and Marxism Book Series

Call for Proposals: Cultural Studies and Marxism Book Series

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International   

Book Series Editor: Jaafar Aksikas

The Cultural Studies and Marxism book series is now seeking proposals for original books and edited volumes.  The series is a timely and valuable contribution to the larger field of contemporary cultural studies. The global capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century has prompted renewed interest in critical political economy and Marxist theory. At the same time, publishing institutions committed to a robust articulation between cultural studies, critical political economy, and Marxism are almost non-existent. The series is dedicated to addressing this situation by highlighting and making available important (and emergent) scholarship at the intersection of these three fields.

The aim of the series is to publish important theoretical as well as empirical and historical contributions as the basis for vigorous intellectual debate and exchange among cultural studies practitioners and scholars. We are convinced that a project of this kind can make an important contribution to the revitalization and renewal of the politically committed intellectual project of cultural studies. As such, the series also promises to be a vital component of the struggle to produce useful knowledge that enables us to change the social world we live in and make it better and more humane. 

The peer-reviewed series will publish original monographs and edited collections across the bounds of academic disciplinary agendas, and across the divisions and institutions of cultural studies. We are keen for the series to include as wide a range of voices, practices, formats, approaches, positions, and interests as possible, so while the ‘traditional’ scholarly monograph is welcomed, we would also encourage other formats, such as edited collections, treatises and manifestos. 

The series also seeks to be a space where connections amongst Cultural Studies practitioners across generations and locations are formed. Because the alliances built by Cultural Studies practitioners in the U.S. and the global north are deeply shaped by the global south/Third World perspectives, the series will also be open to contributions from scholars and practitioners in and outside of the U.S., including those who may offer a transnational perspective on practicing Cultural Studies.

Editorial Collective: 

• Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, USA
• Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada
• Iain Chambers, The University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy
• Douglas Kellner, UCLA, USA
• Fredric Jameson, Duke University, USA
• Ranjani Mazumdar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
• Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
• Toby Miller, University of California—Riverside, USA
• Mathias Nilges, St. Francis Xavier University, USA
• Adolph L. Reed, University of Pennsylvania
• Paul Smith, George Mason University, USA
• Carol Stabile, University of Oregon, USA 
• Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada
• Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Editorial Advisory Board:

• Wail Ismail A. Barry, Ain Shams University, Egypt
• Barbara Foley, Rutgers University, USA
• Ann Gunkel, Columbia College Chicago, USA
• Don Hedrick, Kansas State University, USA
• Darko Suvin, McGill University, Canada
• Tiziana Terranova, The University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy 

The series will be published by Rowman & Littlefield International.  More information on the series can be found on our website here: http://www.rowmaninternational.com/series/cultural-studies-and-marxism.

Authors and Editors interested in writing or editing future books in the series should contact series editor, Jaafar Aksikas at BOTH Jaksikas@colum.edu AND Jaksikas@gmail.com 

To submit a proposal, please download the proposal form here: http://www.rowmaninternational.com/working-with-authors/submitting-a-proposal and send it to the series editor Jaafar Aksikas at BOTH Jaksikas@colum.edu AND Jaksikas@gmail.com 

CFP: Rosa Luxemburg and the Contemporary: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Revolution

Call For Papers
Rosa Luxemburg and the Contemporary: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Revolution

This issue of New Formations will propose a rethinking of the legacy of revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg in the twenty-first century. In particular, essays included in the issue will draw on Luxemburg’s writings in order to address pressing issues of the contemporary world. At a time when neoliberal policies strengthen the smooth running of imperialist dispossession and continue to break the oppressed classes through new forms of precariat, debt, marginalisation, militarism and impoverishment, Luxemburg’s inheritance seems to acquire an unexpected poignancy. Luxemburg’s uncompromising commitment to socialism as only alternative to the violence of capitalism can inspire engaged movements fighting social justice in many contexts of the globe. In particular, the issue will focus on Luxemburg’s reflections on imperialism as the forcing of trade relations with non-capitalist surroundings as antidote to the ‘standstill of accumulation’ inherent to the unfolding of capitalism’s history.

Theories of imperialism through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have contended with Luxemburg’s proposition by emphasising its limitations, errors and blind-spots. Yet, do Luxemburg’s theories on imperialism retain any meaning or validity in a postcolonial era? Can Luxemburg’s legacy help redefine the struggle against contemporary forms of neoliberalism, imperialism and accumulation? Can a debate on Luxemburg shed light on the meaning of the postcolonial as historical category and its political and social implications? Can Luxemburg’s thought help to redefine the meaning of social engagement today? The twenty-first century seems to confirm Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction that capitalism would be incapable of becoming universal without damaging the environments, societies and forms of life that are necessary for its reproduction. Contemporary wars, ecological crises, social unrest and the violence of neoliberal economy testify to the paradox that Luxemburg examined in her work: the full domination of capitalism on the planet would correspond to a scenario verging on total destruction and hence the breakdown of capitalism itself. According to Rosa Luxemburg, this ‘barbaric’ aspect of capitalism requires the re-opening of history through active revolutionary intervention.

Confirmed contributors

• Stephen Morton
• Paul LeBlanc
• Peter Hudis
• Helen Scott 
• Rory Castle
• Filippo Menozzi
• Kanishka Chowdhury

We welcome contributions from all disciplines. Final essays will be expected to be 7,000-9,000 words in length. For more information about New Formations see http://www.newformations.co.uk

Deadline for abstracts 30 September 2015
Contributors will be told if their abstracts have been accepted by October 30th 2015
Deadline for full essays: May Day 2016

CFP: Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology

Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies to be published March 2017 edited by Alison Winch, Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim.
We are looking for 7000 word completed essays by 31st December 2015

In what ways does media convergence culture represent, intervene in, exploit and enable intimate relations? How is intimacy being reconfigured under neoliberalism?

On the one hand we are living in atomized and individualistic times where relationships are increasingly strategic and competitive. On the other the media has become, as Beverly Skeggs argues, intensely intimate. This special issue on mediated intimacies aims to explore how understandings of intimacy are (re)constructed and experienced, particularly in digital cultures. In addition, we are interested in the ways in which the apparently alienated entrepreneurial self is constructed through and by forging intimate connections and simultaneously how these networks are mined and monetized by corporate culture.

This special issue of Journal of Gender Studies is developed from a symposium held in July 2014 on Mediated Intimacies where the speakers explored, among other topics, girls’ online friendships, ‘expert’ sex advice in printed media, male seduction communities, and how pornography reconceptualises the very idea of intimacy itself.

Potential papers could explore the affective dimensions of intimate practices reflecting the pleasures and pains of life lived under neoliberalism, including how precarity and class impact on the ways in which intimacy is forged. Because digital culture is primarily corporate driven (Taylor 2014) we are interested in how user-generated media employs self-branding strategies. For example, in the refashioning of the body or gendered and sexual identities, or the ways in which intimacy can be a form of self-promotion.

Feminist and queer perspectives seek to expand the reach of what is constituted as belonging, love, connection and intimacy. Whereas recession culture has reestablished normative gender categories (Negra and Tasker 2014) contemporary digital cultures have the potential to challenge and rework gender and sexual identities (McGlotten 2013). This issue hopes to explore these productive tensions.

Potential papers could also explore how sexuality, sex, sexual knowledges and sexual pleasure function by looking, for example, at Do-It-Yourself porn, sexual subcultures and alternative sex practices. A final consideration underpinning this issue is how different intimacies intersect along axes of class, race, disability, age and geographical location.

Possible topics could include:

● adapting and resisting gendered and sexed identities
● forging new normative gendered identities
● mediatised kinship (families, parenthood and fertility)
● geolocation technology
● dating and hook up apps, sex dating and relationship cultures
● selfies
● role of experts (e.g. sex advisors and agony aunts), including their changing meaning in peer-driven contexts
● mediated romance
● fitness apps and body culture
● use of social networking sites, including instagram, Facebook, Twitter
● self-branding
● the mediation of friendship
● rebranding feminism
● pornography
● monetization of intimacy, including big data, content generation and PR/advertising

Please send 7000 word completed essays by 31st December 2015 through Scholar One Manuscripts: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjgs20/current.

Please direct enquiries to Alison Winch (a.winch@mdx.ac.uk), Feona Attwood (f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk) and Jamie Hakim (j.hakim@uea.ac.uk)

Publication schedule:

• 31 December 2015: Papers to peer reviewers

• March 2016: Comments to authors

• June 2016: Authors final revisions

• September 2016: Final acceptance

CFP: The Media and the Military

CFP: The Media and the Military

The Sage journal Media, Culture and Society (http://mcs.sagepub.com/) calls for proposed contributions to a planned themed issue with the working title ‘The Media and the Military’, co-edited by Katy Parry and John Corner. Military involvement in, and use of, media flows, including forms of social media, has developed significantly in the last decade. In relation to this, media strategies have developed too, with consequences both for military-political relations and military-civilian relations. New lines of visibility and emphasis have emerged alongside continuing strands of the invisible or marginalised.  An indication of the agenda of questions the issue proposes to address would include:

• How do unfolding narratives concerning the military sphere become interconnected with questions of foreign policy and what do these interconnections tell us about wider political debates on military-civil relations?
• How are ‘costs’ (diplomatic, economic and human, including forms of mental and physical injury) variously calculated in relation to the mediation of military activity?
• Do vernacular expressions of recent military experience (e.g. in social media, memoirs, forums) challenge or complement official accounts? How do they relate to the politics of ‘the war on terror’?
• How are national histories variously put to work or displaced in the mediation of contemporary military action?
• What evidence is available about the ways in which public perceptions of the military are constructed, about the tensions at work in that construction and about shifts in evaluation?

Proposals should be a maximum of 400 words and indicate not only the proposed topic but the kinds of approach, methods and forms of illustration/documentation/data to be employed. Proposals for shorter items (including discussion pieces) as well as for conventional length articles (max 8,000 words) are welcomed. The deadline for receipt is 20 September 2015. Proposals should be emailed to John Corner (J.R.Corner@leeds.ac.uk<mailto:J.R.Corner@leeds.ac.uk>) and Katy Parry (K.J.Parry@leeds.ac.uk<mailto:K.J.Parry@leeds.ac.uk>). Selection for invitations to submit first draft papers in the following year will follow within 6 weeks of the proposal deadline, along with details of the planned schedule.
 

CFP: Theme Issue: Surveillance and Performance

Call for Papers: Surveillance and Performance

Theme Issue of Surveillance & Society

edited by Rachel Hall, Torin Monahan, and Joshua Reeves

submission deadline: October 15, 2015 for publication May 2016.

This special issue calls for critical scholarship on the cultural convergence of surveillance and performance in what we call monitored performances. We define monitored performances as embodied human processes that are tracked or verified by surveillance technologies and/or trained human monitors (or some combination thereof). In monitored performances, the fact of having been monitored alters the performance—its meaning, power, form, or value—and/ or places the performer at risk of regulation from within or without. Monitored performances, therefore, are symptomatic of a larger shift toward forms of power that thrive on mobility, enterprise, personal initiative, morality, and health. Take, for example, the performance reviews characteristic of American corporate culture and high-tech industries in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In these professional arenas, workers and technologies “perform . . . or else”—that is, they get fired, defunded, canceled, or discontinued.[1]

This is perhaps best illustrated by the ways in which contemporary security cultures compel citizens to demonstrate their innocence via performances of transparency. Citizens in airports, for example, find themselves performing patriotic transparency for the privilege of mobility. Each time we enter an airport, we are reminded that, just like our bosses, teachers, administrators, and parents, the state asks us to perform—or else. We can also see this shift toward “monitored performances” in popular culture, where there has been a recent turn away from the performance of authentic self-transformation first described by Mark Andrejevic.[2] “Authenticity” has now become an effect of subjects performing self-sameness across different contexts, which requires verification by pervasive surveillance technologies. Reality television, therefore, provides a venue for characters to perform an authentic self, which among other things promotes a sense of naturalness that reinforces cultural norms of whiteness, heterosexuality, and gender roles.[3]

Thinking across security and popular cultures of surveillance, then, can illustrate how performances of transparency and authenticity—performances which must be verified by surveillance technologies and/or trained human monitors—reinforce exclusionary legal, moral, and aesthetic codes and values. Such performances are repeatedly carried out in the name of “reality”—through appeals to objectivity and neutrality in security cultures shaped by the turn to preemptive warfare, and via claims to authenticity and the therapeutic value of remaining “true to one’s self” in popular cultures cultivated by reality T.V. and social networking. These trends become even more troubling as biology and physiology have become the new proving ground for technologically verifiable performances of innocence, fitness, and health. Now that surveillance technologies developed for the security, health, and fitness industries are reaching into the depths of our bodies—measuring heart rates, pupil dilation, and hormonal levels—we are beginning to see new trends in self-scrutiny and self-performance based on the capacities of these technologies to render our bodies more transparent to ourselves, our peers, and the state.

As the power of performance breeds new cultures of monitoring, verification, and accountability, performance provides an innovative lens for reimagining the ways in which surveillance functions in the contemporary moment. For this special issue we are particularly interested in work that acknowledges the asymmetries of power operative across different contexts of surveillance and performance. While some persons and populations are presumed capable of performing well (or at least up to standard) under the pressure of human or technological monitoring, others are presumed incompetent and, consequently, thought to require performance management from without. Within networked social arenas, some individuals enjoy the privilege of self-fashioning while others enjoy hours of time spent gaming and engaging in other types of play that occurs within monitored spaces. Everyday performances of self-improvement or self-sameness serve to validate some subjects as capable of improvement and/or authenticity, while narrow performance standards may discriminate against persons with a wide range of abilities. Yet these developments also give rise to significant space for experiments in resistance and rebellion.

Possible research areas might include (but are not limited to):
· Performances of citizenship under state surveillance in contexts of war, prevention, and disaster
· Prepped citizenship as a post-disciplinary performance of self-monitoring
· New perspectives on reality television
· Media technologies used to measure and monitor health and fitness
· Performance monitoring in schools and the workplace
· Performances of identity in popular cultures of surveillance
· Surveillance as a privileged site of self-fashioning
· Surveillance and the performance of disability and accommodation
· Use of surveillance technologies to perform monitoring functions once performed by medical professionals
· Resisting surveillance and the performance of illegible, low-risk, or threatening identities

This is not intended to be an exclusive listing of possibilities for this issue. Other possibilities are encouraged and can be discussed in advance with the guest-editors: Rachel Hall, Torin Monahan, and Joshua Reeves.

Submission Information:

We welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, review pieces, poetry, artistic, and audio-visual submissions. Submissions will undergo a peer-review and revision process prior to publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All references to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text (e.g., “Author, 2015”).

All papers must be submitted through the online submission system no later than October 15, 2015, for publication in May 2016.

Please submit the papers in a MSWord-compatible format. For further submission guidelines, please see: http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

For all inquiries regarding the issue, please contact the editors.
References:
[1] Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge, 2001.
[2] Mark Andrejevic. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. New York, NY: Bowman & Littlefield, 2004.
[3] Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Emily D. Ryalls. “The Hunger Games: Performing Not-performing to Authenticate Femininity and Whiteness.” Critical Studies in Media Communication (2014): 1-15.