Category: CFP

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Reblog> Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 cfp

Tony Sampson has posted this, may be of interest to people who see this blog –

Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 – cfp

Wednesday 23rd March 2016

1-8pm

University of East London, Docklands Campus, Room EB. G.06

Call for 15min Presentations/Position Papers

Following on from the success of last year’s Affect and Social Media research symposium, the emotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at UEL, and in collaboration this year with Cass School of Education and Communities at UEL, will be hosting a second event continuing to explore the relation between social media, affect, feelings and emotions.

Numerous studies from various fields have described interactions with social media in terms of emotional, affective and feely experiences. It is claimed that habitual access to Facebook can have a negative impact on mood and subjective well-being (Kross et al, 2013). Likewise, emotional states experienced on social media can be transferred to others through emotional contagion, ‘leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’ (Kramer, 2014). Similarly, positive emotions, like joy, are regarded as more likely to spread than negative ones (Berger and Milkman, 2010).

This year’s call for 15min presentations/position papers asks contributors to explore emotional, affective and feely experiences with social media. More specifically, we ask contributors to investigate how social media ‘work[s] in concert with bodies in the production of emotional and affective activity’ (Ellis and Tucker, 2015: 177).

We welcome proposals on a wide variety of themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. For example”¦

  • Addiction and social media
  • Affective contagion
  • Affect theory relating to social media
  • Care, emotions and social media
  • Methodologies relating to emotion, affect and social media
  • Consumption, emotions and affect on social media
  • Education, emotions and social media
  • Emotional and affective contagions
  • Emotional social media design (theory and practice)
  • Ethical considerations
  • Felt experiences on social media
  • Social gaming and emotions
  • HCI and emotion
  • Learning, emotion and social media
  • Marketing, emotion and social media
  • Networked emotions
  • Online emotional ethnographies
  • Pervasive computing and emotion
  • Emotions and privacy
  • Emotions and security
  • Sharing emotions
  • Emotions and trust
  • The politics of emotional user experiences

Please send a title, brief outline (100words) and institutional affiliation to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk and E.Theodotou@uel.ac.uk

Activities  Deadlines
Abstract Submission 15th December 2015
Acceptance notification 15th January 2016
Registration for presenters Details to follow
Registration for all participants Details to follow

 

Fees and registration

(Refreshments, after symposium drinks and nibbles and attendance certificate included in all registration types)

Type Fee
Presenters Free
UEL students/academics Free
External students £3
External academics/participants £5

Please keep an eye out for follow up emails regarding registration

Updates will also appear on the Virality blog and EmotionUX news page

https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/

http://emotionuxlab.co.uk/news/

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Reblog> CFP: Deleuzian Geographies

CFP: Deleuzian Geographies

Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting,
March 29-April 2, 2016
San Francisco, California

“We do not yet know the thought of Deleuze. Too often, whether hostile or adoring, we act as if his concepts were familiar, as if it were enough that his concepts simply touch us in order for us to understand them without spelling them out, or as if we had already made a survey of their promises” (Zourabichvili, 2012: 139)

This session speaks to the ever-growing engagement with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in geography and the social sciences. The session will take stock of how Deleuzian (and Deleuzeo-Guattarian) concepts – such as affect, assemblage, becoming, de/re/territorialisation, difference, event, individuation, the minor, and the molecular – have been taken up in geography, productively amplifying key problematics that stage both new conceptual openings and new points of contestation (Sharpe et al, 2014; Woodward and Jones III, 2005).

In particular, we seek papers that respond to Francois Zourabichili’s (2012) call to (re-)engage Deleuze’s philosophy not as a revolution already-made, but instead as a force of creative encounter. Following Deleuze, what are the evaluative terms and stakes of thinking currently emerging in the contact zones of, for example, politics, aesthetics, science, the economy, ethics, and ecology (Ruddick, 2010; Doel and Clarke, 2007; McCormack, 2007; Hynes, 2015; Bonta and Protevi, 2004). We welcome papers then from across the field of geography that explore how Deleuze’s concepts participate in events of thinking that displace extant fields of intelligibility, generating new terms for modifying the conditions of the problems posed by society today. We offer the following ‘conceptual problematics’ and ‘terrains of contestation’ as possible suggestions of some themes that papers might address:

Conceptual problematics:
– Vital materialism and ecologies of nonorganic life
– Dispositions, tendencies, inclinations
– Ethics and the affective production of bodies
– Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and alternative theorizations of subjectivity
– Earth-thinking: geophilosophy and chaosmosis
– Space after Deleuze: the ‘fold’ of topological thinking and the critique of interiority
– Art after Deleuze: encounters in cinema, music, literature etc.
– Politics after Deleuze: micropolitics and desire

Milieus of contestation:
– Deleuze’s differential ontology: coherence in becoming as opposed to that in being?
– New materialisms and a philosophy of the event: theorising matter as tendency, disposition, inclination as opposed to object-oriented, phenomenological and networked theories?
– The politics of affect: thinking an affective politics through the evental lens of singularities, thresholds and individuations as opposed to those that think these politics through objects, conditions, and atmospheres?
– Deleuze and research methodologies: what is the efficacy in experimenting beyond representation, beyond recognition?
– Deleuze and philosophy: are there different Deleuzes (Deleuze- Nietzsche, -Spinoza, -Bergson, -Simondon, -Whitehead) and how do they marry each to the other?

Please submit abstracts of 250 words or less to Andrew.Lapworth[at]bristol.ac.uk by Wednesday 21st October, 2015.

For more information and more general expressions of interest, please contact the session organizers:

Andrew Lapworth, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Andrew.Lapworth[at]bristol.ac.uk

Scott Sharpe, School of Physical, Environmental & Mathematical Sciences, UNSW@Canberra,
S.Sharpe[at]adfa.edu.au

JD Dewsbury, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol,
Jd.dewsbury[at]bristol.ac.uk

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CFP> “Virtuality, Becoming and Life” Deleuze Studies 2016, Rome (11-13 July)

[via Keith Harris]

Here’s a call for the ‘Deleuze Studies‘ conference next year, with a nice, if broad, theme…

The triad of terms in the title is meant to indicate three steps that may build a path through Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy. This path is but one among the many possible, as the titles of the previous conferences reveal. To borrow a term from psychogeography, we may call it a “desire path”, where desire paths represent the alternate routes created by the walkers’ desires and necessities. Though it is an open path, it is paradoxically coherent and unified. Each of its step indeed refers to the other in more than one way.The first term –virtuality– refers both to the central issue of time and to the philosophical friendship between Deleuze and Bergson. As Deleuze’s early writings of the Sixties witness, it was a very close friendship which remained vivid also in his later work on cinema in the Eighties. Both Bergson and Deleuze share the common aim to affirm the coexistence and the continuous and mutual interplay between the past and the present, the actual and the virtual. Such an interplay constitute exactly that process of differentiation which grounds the creative dynamics of all different arts, and notably, of cinema.

The creative and positive movement of differentiation, as a process of metamorphosis, underpins the concept of “becoming“ as a fundamental notion for Deleuze’s overall philosophy and particularly for the text he wrote with Guattari, Mille Plateaux. The notion of Becoming is to be understood as a verb rather than a noun –they write- it is not one, nor two, but something between-two, an interaction between two domains, a boundary and an escape line: it is the becoming-animal, the becoming-music, the becoming child, the becoming-woman. As a reaction against the Platonic idea of Being and Essence, the Becoming refers primarily to Nietzsche’s thought and to his notion of the “eternal return”. Since no living being can resist the becoming, the becoming must be a being in itself, a being that coincides with the process of coming back, in the sense of thinking “the same” from “the different”.

The deeper meaning of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to affirm the becoming not only as essential to life –since life is becoming, multiplicity, and fortune- but as something we need to accept and consciously affirm. To this extent, virtue is not renouncing to all passions but saying “yes” to life. In Deleuze’s last text, life is described as immanent and “unique”; no longer individual but completely impersonal, it is a “total power, a total bliss” It is from this starting point that philosophers – both in Italy and elsewhere – have started developing the idea of an “ontology of the present” – which sets itself as the aim of contemporary philosophy.

Following the path we have proposed, and even imagining something different, we welcome individual proposals for papers, panel proposals, as well as alternative approaches to presentation formats (such dialogues or performative pieces).

The conference will accept papers in English from across a very broad range of areas including, not limited to, the following:

Philosophy

Aesthetics and Artistic Practices
Architecture and Urban Planning

Film Studies
Digital Realm and New Media
Literature and Literary Criticism
Sociology and Politics
Gender Studies
Psychology
Education
Science

Abstracts should be 300-500 words and must include title and three keywords.

Biographical statements and affiliations should be approximately 100 words and must include contact information.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 15th, 2015

PAPER NOTIFICATIONS
We plan to notify the acceptances until February 15th, 2016

SEND TO
call@deleuzeconference2016.org

There’s a website with plenty of information: http://www.deleuzeconference2016.org

and here’s some blurb from it:

Deleuze Studies Conference is an initiative created by the Deleuze Studies Journal, the first of which was held in 2008 at Cardiff. The conference explores the themes related to the works of Deleuze and Guattari and brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.

This year the Deleuze Studies Conference will take place in Italy, at the Department of Philosophy, Communication  and Visual Arts of University of Roma Tre (11th-13th July), aiming to explore the concepts of Virtuality, becoming and life in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought.

 

The conference will be preceded by a Deleuze Camp (4th-8th July), a preliminary intensive research seminar.

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CFP> Transforming work in mobile worlds

Here’s an interesting call for papers from David Bissell and Francis Collins that’s been posted to Crit-Geog-Forum on the ways work is transforming travel and our uses of technology and vice versa, and how that is involved in shifts in how we perform other (perhaps all) aspects of our lives.

Transforming Work in Mobile Worlds

David Bissell, The Australian National University
Francis Collins, University of Auckland

The dynamics of labour has been approached through many different geographical perspectives. In this session we want to explore how the conceptual lens of mobility offers a powerful and provocative way of posing new questions and staging new problems about the practices and affectivities that produce experiences for labouring bodies. Labouring bodies are entangled in various forms of movement and stillness. They involve different configurations of timing, rhythm and habit. Going to work, for instance, for many involves commuting across cities and regions, migrating within and across territories, or undertaking forms of mobile work. There are also distinct temporalities to labour practices that intersect with these mobilities in all sorts of ways – the tenure of a work visa, the rhythms of the workday, or the connections between labour and the timing of lifestages.

Beyond these general assertions about the relationship between temporality, mobility and labour we observe emergent phenomena that are potentially reshaping these connections, inviting us to think them anew. On the one hand there has been a growth in longer-distance commuting as a constitutive feature of some working lives, manifest in mobile work lives, fly-in-fly-out labour, long distance living arrangements and the rise of global work. Similarly, in the realm of ‘migration’ we have witnessed a marked shift towards temporary and circular migration, both in the aspirations and subjectivities of migrants and the governmentalisation of migrant mobilities and lives through temporary migration regimes.

Together, these trends suggest that there might be some profound and intriguing reconfigurations happening in many workers’ lives. But what sorts of transformations are these new working and migratory practices giving rise to? For instance, the trends indicate that these new mobile working practices are changing bodies, changing relationships, changing family forms, changing place attachments, changing communities, and changing the very nature of belonging. This session aims to grapple with precisely these transformations of labour, life and place.

Disciplinarily, this session aims to forge a richer dialogue between mobilities research and migration studies in order to explore how these mobility practices are creating new kinds of subjects; how they are necessitating new kinds of skill; and how new kinds of relationships are emerging. We believe that these new mobile working practices invite analysis through the complimentary perspectives and theoretical resources that mobilities and migration research offers.

We therefore invite papers that explore the relationship between labour mobility and migration, temporality and affect. This could include a focus on the timing and rhythms of social sites like the workplace; the multiplication of labouring bodies through the governmentalisation of time at the border; subjective understandings of timing of lives and labour and its interrelationship with pasts, futures and presents. Other themes may respond to the following questions:

  • In what ways are the multiple temporalities of work being reconfigured through different forms of mobility?
  • How are bodily capacities, thresholds and limits emerging through new working practices, including flexible, precarious or irregular work?
  • How are new temporalities and mobilities of labour generating new forms of aspirations, desire and sense?
  • How might we trace the affective contours of temporality and mobility in labour?
  • What are some of the intersections between forms of mobile or temporary work and expressions of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual difference?
  • What are some of the techniques for exploring the richness of subjective experiences of extended temporariness in migration and/or work life?
  • How are different institutions and organizations implicated in the transformation of work in mobile worlds?
  • What are the implications of the timing and mobility of work and life for experiences of belonging, identity and the generation of community?
  • What connections are emerging between mobile work and other migratory forms such as education, working-holiday, or lifestyle?

Abstract submission: Monday 19th October 2015

Please send abstracts of 250 words max to both David Bissell and Francis Collins. We will contact successful applicants by the 23rd of October 2015. Once selected participants must pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG by October 29th 2015.

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Reblog> CFP An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

Over on the OII blog for the ‘Connectivity, Inclusion and Inequality Group’, Jo Shaw has posted an interesting CFP for the AAG in San Francisco next year. Andy Merrifield will make an awesome discussant!

CfP at AAG 2016: An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

After presenting our paper on the same theme at ICCG 2015 in Palestine, myself and Mark Grahamare planning a session for the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting in San Francisco during Spring 2016. The session aims to provide a space for discussion and research that seeks to ask what a ‘right to the city’ looks like in our increasingly digital world. Interested contributors should read the call for papers below and drop myself or Mark an email to express interest.

 

An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

Organisers: Joe Shaw and Mark Graham (University of Oxford)
Discussant: Andy Merrifield

Henri Lefebvre (2003:251) once talked of the right to information as a complement to the right to the city. Since then, information communication technologies have become integrally embedded into much of everyday life. The speed of these developments has also obfuscated many changes and processes that now envelop and define the urban experience. This includes changes in systems of abstract spatial representation through geographic information, and the economies surrounding this information as a commodity. The representations which are produced and mediated through this digital information are now contributing to an urban space that is densely digitally layered (Graham, M., M. Zook, and A. Boulton. 2013). These digital ‘abstract’ spaces are essential to the production and re-production of our socio-economic world (Lefebvre, 1991). From Wikipedia to Google Maps and TripAdvisor, the code and content that relates to a building is now potentially as important as its bricks and mortar. These processes raise new questions of spatial justice and the urbanization of information: Which spaces are seen, and which are hidden? How is information produced, for whom, and who consumes it? How does information change material places? Who are the powerful actors in these events, and who are powerless? And finally, is the broader concept of an ‘informational right to the city’ now required? If so, how should it be envisioned and put into practice? This session invites submissions concerned with the production, consumption, and governance of urban geographic information, and it encourages research and reflections that seek to rethink what informational rights we have in our hybrid material/digital cities.

 

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. (D. Nicholson-Smith & D. N.- Smith, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford : Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (2003). Henri Lefebvre: key writings. (S. Elden, E. Lebas, & E. Kofman, Eds.). New York: New York.
Graham, M., Zook, M., & Boulton, A. (2013). Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(3), 464–479.

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words to Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk) or Joe Shaw (joe.shaw@oii.ox.ac.uk) by Friday 2nd October 2015. Successful submissions will be contacted by 9th October 2015 and will be expected to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 29th 2015.

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Reblog> CFP: Towards a geographical software studies

Nick Lally has posted this interesting call for papers for the AAG next year in San Francisco, an apposite location for such a discussion 🙂 I am sure that there are plenty of geographers who can and will offer some fascinating reflections on this. I hope you consider contributing…

Toward a geographical software studies

A series of sessions for the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco, March 29-April 2, 2016

Ryan Burns (Temple University)
Nick Lally (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

A growing body of recent geographic scholarship has focused its attention on software and algorithms. Some of these studies analyze geographic technologies –GIS and the geoweb, for example– as such, while others investigate a myriad of digital technologies that have become ubiquitous within the spaces of everyday life. These software/code objects interact with and modulate the world in complex ways, enact processes that connect humans and nonhumans, and become entangled with social, cultural, political, and economic systems. Moreover, software created to visualize data is used to produce knowledge about urban environments and everyday life, but obscure the processes and contexts which underlie its development. Engaging these topics, geographers have developed concepts like the “automatic production of space” (Thrift and French 2002), “software-sorted geographies” (Graham 2005), and “code/space” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) to describe how software and space are co-constituted in the contemporary world. Productive research is building on these topics to explore new ways geographies are produced (Rose, Degen, and Melhuish 2014), governed (Amoore 2011), materialized, represented (Woodward et al. 2015), and lived through software (Kinsley 2014).

This session seeks to bring together a range of spatial thinkers who are producing new studies, theories, and methods for understanding and producing software. We welcome submissions that address all facets of software: the context of its production, its internal operational logics, the material work it does in the world, and its spatial distribution of social and political effects. Suggested themes could include:

“¢ Radical, feminist, or postcolonial political theories of software, software production, and/or hacking. What are the liberatory potentials/limits of coding or software and its critiques?
“¢ The political economy of software, code, attentional economies, and the audience as commodity.
“¢ Methodological contributions for the study of software (deconstruction, ethnography, reading code, reverse-engineering, archival research, hacking, writing software, visual studies, understanding processes, online research, etc)
“¢ Software and visual and affective epistemology.
“¢ The materiality of software and the work it does in the world (the production of space, embodiment, urbanization, social sorting, securitization, infrastructure, etc).

Amoore, L. 2011. Data Derivatives: On the Emergence of a Security Risk Calculus for Our Times. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (6):24–43.

Graham, S. D. 2005. Software-sorted geographies. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5):562–580.

Kitchin, R., and M. Dodge. 2011. Code/space: software and everyday life. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Kinsley, S. 2014. The Matter of “Virtual” Geographies. Progress in Human Geography 38(3): 364-384.

Rose, G., M. Degen, and C. Melhuish. 2014. Networks, interfaces, and computer-generated images: learning from digital visualisations of urban redevelopment projects. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (3):386–403.

Thrift, N., and S. French. 2002. The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (3):309–335.

Woodward, K., J. P. Jones, L. Vigdor, S. A. Marston, H. Hawkins, and D. P. Dixon. 2015. One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization. Annals of the Association of American Geographers :1–16.

Please submit a 250 word abstract to Nick (nlally [AT] wisc [DOT] edu) and Ryan (ryan.burns [AT] temple [DOT] edu) by October 9th, 2015.

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Reblog> CounterText: call for papers

Interesting CFP via Edinburgh Press blog...

CounterText
Call for Papers
Special Issue: Explorations in Electronic Literature
Edited by Mario Aquilina and Ivan Callus

An entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications.
– Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

Is literature surviving? Is it not still electrifying? Might electronic literature be one form of its survival? Does electronic literature mark another stage in the evolution of literature or does it open a new, unprecedented paradigm for the concept of the ‘literary’? This special issue investigates electronic literature’s challenges to established conceptions of literature and literariness. The following will be irrepressible questions. How should authorship, creation and originality be rethought? Can we still speak of ‘literature’ when the letter becomes only one element in works which are characterised by kinetic, visual, ludic, and sensory dynamics? Can we think of the electronic (post-)literary also as an electronic post-letter? And how might this be countertextual?

The apocalyptic threat to literature implied in Derrida’s comment on ‘a certain technological regime of telecommunications’ has not come to pass, nor might we be expecting it to. There can be no doubt, however, that computing technologies and code (the digital affordances enabling electronic literature) can prompt fevered speculation on literature’s evolving futures and platforms. As a result literary criticism, too, changes. Long traditions of aesthetic, thematic and formal discussions of literature are brought into question by electronic literature, as is the meaning of reading more generally (never mind close reading).

However, discussions of electronic literature countenancing technological determinism risk ignoring genealogies of electronic literature founded in long traditions of combinatorics and generative (not quite algorithmic) rules. Is electronic literature, then, a manifestation of a potential always already within the literary rather than simply a technology-determined transformation in the literary? And if it is so, how do we conceive the temporal relation and notional continuities between electronic literature and print literature, for example? Do we speak of supplementation, supplantation, renovation, complementarity, convergence? All these terms seem unsatisfying – but why?

The editors of this special issue of CounterText welcome articles with a focus related to these and related points that explore the connections between electronic literature and the concepts of ‘literature’ and ‘literariness’. The following list indicates some other possible points of discussion:

  • E-lit and new understandings of literary ‘value’.
  • The humanist affinities of e-lit.
  • E-lit and communal understanding of the literary.
  • E-Lit and the expectation of originality.
  • E-lit as a literature of the fragment.
  • E-lit and the problem of the total work.
  • Precursors of the electronic post-literary.
  • The space of e-lit: where does e-lit happen?
  • E-lit and literary criticism and theory.
  • E-lit as literary criticism and theory.
  • The role of the letter in e-lit.
  • Code and literariness.
  • Literariness and digital affordances.
  • E-lit as a space where literature meets other art forms.

Potential contributors to the special issue may email the Guest editor, Mario Aquilina (mario.aquilina@um.edu.mt), or Ivan Callus (ivan.callus@um.edu.mt) for further information. They may also wish to refer to the journal’s site for information about CounterText‘s style sheet (http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/count).

Submissions are to be sent as an email attachment to countertext@um.edu.mt by 14thDecember 2015. Notice of acceptance/refusal will be given by February 2016. Final manuscripts incorporating editorial suggestions and changes will then have to be submitted by 28th March 2016.

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CFP> Mobile Work-Life Arrangements: Exploring conceptual and methodological challenges

This was posted to crit-geog and I thought it looks interesting and wanted to share:

Mobile Work-Life Arrangements: Exploring conceptual and methodological challenges.

 An Interdisciplinary Late-Summer School

9-18 October, 2015
University of Freiburg, Germany

Convened by: COME (Research Group Cultures of Mobility in Europe) and ANTHROMOB (EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network)

Anna Lipphardt (Freiburg); Jamie Coates (Waseda/Sheffield) and Roger Norum (Leeds/UCL)

Funded by Volkswagen Foundation

OVERVIEW
The interdisciplinary field of mobility studies has produced a broad spectrum of theoretical works and structural analyses, driven by research focusing on recent innovation in transport and communication. Within that field, economic and work-related aspects of mobility, are often treated as distinct from other life practices. This late-summer school aims to contribute to the field of mobility studies with respect to two key issues: First, it will turn attention to the interplay between work and non-work (e.g. leisure, family life, well-being) spheres of life linked to mobility. Second, it focuses on the complexities of mobile work-life arrangements as they play out in the everyday lives of an ever-growing number of people worldwide, across the economic spectrum and across diverse professional and socio-cultural fields.
The late-summer school explicitly aims to bring together people studying a range of empirical cases including (but not limited to) research across the following subjects:

  • peripatetic and pastoralist groups
  • transport-sector professionals
  • artists, creatives and travelling entertainers
  • seasonal and project-based labourers
  • academics
  • lifestyle migrants

OBJECTIVES AND KEY QUESTIONS
The late-summer school has two core objectives:

1. Providing a forum for discussing qualitative methodological approaches to mobility, including multi-sited, mobile or trajectory ethnography; life-course and life-world analyses; and newly-emerging ICT-based methods;

2. Exploring the differing forms of knowledge production concomitant with mobile work-life arrangements, it will encourage a critical reflection of the theoretical frameworks, empirical operationalisations and political discourses that implicitly or explicitly inform much research on mobile groups. Our intention is to bring together different epistemic communities, thus fostering a comparative perspective.

Key questions which the late-summer school will address are:

  • How do we develop a critical analytical position in light of the complex entanglements between the political and economic discourses on certain mobile groups, the conceptual approaches of our respective research disciplines, and the emic perspectives of the people we study?
  • What are the advantages, challenges, and limitations of differing analytical models such as multi-sited ethnography, qualitative case study, life-course analysis, or phenomenology in exploring mobile work-life arrangements?
  • How can we compare or generalise insights gained from qualitative studies on specific mobile fields? And how can we employ empirical research to advance theoretical stances on mobility, both within a given research area and across disciplinary divides?

PROGRAMME AND WORKING FORMATS
The programme includes keynote lectures and advanced seminars by Noel Salazar (University of Leuven), Michaela Benson (Goldsmiths University) and Huub van Baar (University of Amsterdam/Giessen University). It also comprises presentations by doctoral students, workshops on mobile methods and representational strategies, informal discussions on practical issues of mobile/multi-sited fieldwork, career and professional development sessions, a film screening, and recreational activities. The working language is English.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR
The programme is aimed at doctoral students working on projects situated in qualitative social research focusing on issues related to mobile work-life arrangements. The common ground for all participants will be their interest in the labour/economic aspects of the mobile empirical fields they study, their footing in qualitative social research, and a shared interest in the epistemology of Mobility Studies. We welcome applications from doctoral students based in disciplines such as cultural and social anthropology, sociology, political science, social work, education, geography, and relevant interdisciplinary research fields including mobility, communication, environmental, transport and labour studies. Doctoral students at any stage of their research – including beginners – are invited to present work in progress and to discuss central research issues with which they are currently concerned. To ensure an open and collaborative learning environment, the number of participants will be limited to a maximum of 25.

APPLICATION
Interested applicants are asked to submit the following materials to the convenors by email up until August 10, 2015:

1. Curriculum Vitae (1 page);
2. Short description of your dissertation project (1-2 pages);
3. Personal statement (1-2 pages) that answers the following:
– Why do you wish to attend the Mobile Work-Life Arrangements Late-Summer School?
– What specific aspects of your dissertation and fieldwork are you most interested in discussing?

Successful applicants will be notified by email by the 3rd week of August.

ACCOMODATION AND TRAVEL GRANTS
It is expected that participants take part in the full duration of the late-summer school. All meals and accommodation will be covered, as will reimbursement for the following travel expenses: up to 150 Euro for participants from Germany; up to 300 Euro for those from other European countries; and up to 800 Euro for students who come from overseas. Participants from developing countries and from countries affected by current economic crises are eligible to apply for full travel funding.

For more information, please see www.mobworklife.net. Please feel free to contact us for specific questions about the programme or application.

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Reblog > Protest and Activism With(out) Organisation

Mark Purcell points to an interesting CFP for  a special issue of the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

Originally posted on Path to the Possible:

Please find details of a CFP for a Special Issue in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy which we hope is of interest and relevance to the group:––-

CFP: Protest and Activism With(out) Organisation

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 The economic, political, social, cultural and environmental crises of our time continue to provoke and inspire a remarkable range of social movements into existence. These multiple forms of protest and activism express and embody a politics of hope – captured both in alternative narratives that envisage new post-crisis possibilities, and through the physicality of collective and popular resistance. In this context, the Special Issue of The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy is particularly intend on interrogating the socio-spatial forms of ‘organisation’ that underpin protest and activism. When taking a closer look at the organisational nature across these activist landscapes for example, it becomes apparent that resistance led through membership-based, co-ordinated hierarchical organisations (e.g. Trade Unions, NGOs) still retains an important visibility and influence in agitating for change. However, in addition perhaps, and in some meaningful waybeyond, these more traditional forms of organised resistance, there exists important diverse and spontaneous forms of everyday activism, one, perhaps, consistent with a more horizontal and anarchistic praxis of self-organisation.

Questioning the relationship between activism with – and without – organisation throws up some interesting and important inter-disciplinary questions. At the most fundamental level it gives us cause to interrogate the very idea of activism: where does activism begin and end? Who gets to be an activist? Seeking to engage a more nuanced understanding of the differences between organized and unorganized forms of activism, provokes the question of how informal experiences of activism, encourage engagement with more organised forms of activism (and vice versa). Is the relationship between the two antagonistic, competitive or complementary to each other? How are organisational forms of activism dictated to by specific social and spatial temporalities, particularly at a time of crisis? Indeed in these (post)modern times is it meaningful to frame the organisation of activism within a binary relationship (either formal or informal)? Rather should we be encouraged to consider them on an organisational spectrum of difference (more formal, less formal and so on)? If desirable, how can a more informed complex understanding of the organisational natures of activism allow us to better recognise, value, strengthen and link up different types of patterns of activism and resistance?

To these ends we welcome papers of up to 8000 words addressing empirical or theoretical aspects focused on organisation of activism and protest, past and present, situated in any part of the world and at any scale.

Deadlines:

 Please send 250-300 word abstracts directly to the Guest Editors, Richard White(richard.white@shu.ac.uk)  and Tricia Wood (pwood@yorku.ca ) by 15 August 2015.

Full papers – between 5,000 to 8,000 words – must be submitted on-line to the IJSSP journal by 01 December 2015.

More information about The Journal for International Sociology and Social Policy can be found here: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=ijssp.