[Air-l] Fwd: CFP: Internationalizing Internet Studies (1/31/06; collection)

[Tarleton Gillespie]

'Internationalizing Internet Studies'

Call for papers for a edited collection by
Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney) & Mark McLelland (University of  
Wollongong)

 From the mid-1990s onwards, the Internet has shifted fundamentally  
from its co-ordinates in English-speaking countries, especially North  
America, to become an essential medium in a wide range of countries,  
cultures, and languages. According to October 2005 statistics,  
Chinese language now represents 14% of all Internet communication and  
media use, Spanish 9% and Japanese 9%. At 35% and falling, English  
use is now a minority in terms of overall online language use.  
However, communications and media scholarship, especially in the  
Anglophone world, has not registered the deep ramifications of this  
shift - and the challenges it poses to the concepts, methods,  
assumptions, and frameworks used to study the Internet.

The vast body of Anglophone scholarship into 'the Internet' is  
predicated on research on and about English-language websites by  
academics and other researchers working and publishing in English.  
Despite the fact that there is also a large body of work being  
produced by scholars in non-English-speaking cultures and locales,  
hardly any of this work is being translated and it has had little  
impact on theorization of the developing fields of Internet and web  
studies.

The purpose of this anthology, 'Internationalizing Internet Studies',  
is to acknowledge that Internet use and Internet studies take place  
'elsewhere' in various national and international contexts. We seek  
to uncover how non-Anglophone uses of the Internet might challenge  
certain preconceived notions about the technology and its social  
impacts as well as the manner in which Internet studies is taken up,  
valued and taught outside the circuits of understanding prevalent in  
Anglophone academia. Through bringing together researchers whose  
daily experience of the Internet is mediated through non-Anglophone  
languages and cultures as well as researchers situated within the  
Anglophone academy whose work focuses on cultures outside North  
America and Europe, we hope to promote the visibility of work already  
being done outside the Anglophone world. We also aim to encourage new  
work that critically engages with Anglophone Internet scholarship  
that is based on research into diverse locales and draws upon a range  
of intellectual traditions.

Accordingly, we wish to gather together a distinctive collection of  
contributors who can illuminate the key features of the Internet's  
internationalization, surveying exemplary Internet language groups  
and cultures. We hope to encourage explorations of the distinctive  
features of the consumption and use of the Internet by various  
language groups, and how this expands and questions taken-for-granted  
notions of Internet studies.

We are also interested in contributions that reflect upon this  
cosmopolitan turn in the Internet, and what it signifies for our  
methods, tools, and concepts of Internet studies - and for media,  
communication, and cultural theory themselves. Here we are concerned  
with the debate - yet to emerge - on the internationalization of  
'Internet studies'.

Contributions would be welcomed, but are not restricted to, the  
following topics:

* non-anglophone language communities use of the Internet

* Asian countries and communities use of the Internet (especially  
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)

* mobility and the Internet:  how the Internet is deployed by people  
on the move across borders * use of the Internet by diasporic  
communities * Internet use by minority language speakers in majority  
Anglophone and other language contexts * Indigenous use of the Internet

* how particular Internet technologies (websites, peer-to-peer  
technologies, blogs, social software, mobile Internet)  have been  
shaped and are used by different language and cultural groups

* cell phone, mobile and wireless technologies and the  
internationalizing of the Internet

* how does this change our understanding of Internet cultures and  
cultural histories?

* what the implications of internationalizing of the Internet for  
debates concerning cultural citizenship and media diversity? (not  
least Internet governance, open source and commons debates)

* what are the implications of increasing 'global governance' of the  
Internet for local and countercultural communities? * how is Internet  
studies responding to the internationalizing of the Internet - what  
new concepts, methods, locations and relationships does it need?


Timeframe:

  Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to both editors  
outlining your proposed contribution to the edited collection by 31  
January 2006. We will advise acceptance by 1 April 2006.

We will be holding a workshop on 'Internationalizing Internet  
Studies' in Brisbane on 27 September 2006 immediately before the  
Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Annual Conference 7.0, and  
hope that we will be able to invite some contributors to attend and  
present drafts of their full papers. (We expect limited travel  
bursaries will be available for those attending from outside Australia).


About the Editors:

 From January 2006, Dr Gerard Goggin (g.goggin at uq.edu.au) will be an  
ARC Australian Research Fellow in the Department of Media and  
Communication, the University of Sydney. He has published widely on  
Internet and new media, including Digital Disability (2003), Virtual  
Nation: The Internet in Australia (2004) and Cell Phone Culture  
(forthcoming 2006).

Dr Mark McLelland (m.mclelland at uq.edu.au) is a Lecturer in the School  
of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of  
Wollongong. Recent Internet-related publications include Japanese  
Cybercultures (2003) and Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the  
Internet Age (2005).