[Air-l] Call for Papers: Communication Technologies of Empowerment

[Francisco Seoane]

Call for Papers
ICS Postgraduate Conference
Communication Technologies of Empowerment

Leeds, United Kingdom - Friday, May 18, 2007

The Institute of Communications Studies (ICS) at the
University of Leeds will be hosting a postgraduate
conference for the presentation and discussion of
research in communications performed by PhD students.
Under the title “Communication Technologies of
Empowerment”, this meeting seeks to bring together new
scholars who are studying how the latest developments
in communication are affecting our democracies by
enabling new forms of political participation and
citizen engagement.

Whether you live in an established democratic system,
a country in transition to democracy, or under an
authoritarian government, new communication
technologies are likely to have changed your political
environment. The recent popular upheavals in Ukraine
and Lebanon were in great part conducted through
mobile phone messages. In Western Europe, the riots in
the Parisian suburbs and the protests in Spain against
the Aznar government regarding the authorship of the
Madrid terrorist attacks would have been very
different if the Internet and mobile phones had not
become an integral part of our everyday lives.

Meanwhile, traditional politics is trying to catch up
with the digital age. Political parties are seeking to
domesticate these new forms of horizontal
communication, and so are governments, with
potentially threatening consequences. Paradoxically,
new technologies of communication can serve both to
empower citizens and to survey and control them. A
recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace has shown that networked
technologies can be effectively used by authoritarian
governments to strengthen their repressive regimes.

New forms of communication have become a key tool for
global social movements. Whether their struggles are
focused on questions of global justice, class, gender,
race or the environment, activists have found in the
decentralized and inexpensive nature of the Internet
and mobile telephony the media they needed to organise
themselves and make their actions public.
Interestingly, these technologies are also being
mastered by those actors who want to challenge the
national and international orders through violent
means. This reminds us that terrorism is in great part
a communicative phenomenon, today more than ever
before.

If your research deals with questions such as the ones
outlined above, or with issues related with the
interplay of media, new technologies, citizenship,
democracy and politics, we hope to hear from you.
Please submit an abstract with a general description
of your future research paper, indicating your topic,
theoretical framework, research questions or
hypotheses, method and expected results. The abstract
should not exceed 500 words. If your proposal is
accepted, we will ask you to provide a full paper.
After your presentation, the paper will be published
on the ICS website. 

Please, remember to include your full contact
information: Name, e-mail and postal address,
telephone number and academic affiliation for each
author.

Your paper presentation will be discussed and
commented on by members of the academic staff from the
Institute of Communications Studies who have expertise
in your topic, method, or theoretical framework. This
can be a golden opportunity for you to refine your
thoughts, openly share your concerns, and receive
constructive criticism from professors and fellow
postgraduate students working in your area. It is also
a great chance to start building or expanding your
professional and academic network.

Deadlines:
- Deadline for proposals: January 31, 2007.
- Deadline for full papers: April 30, 2007.

Contact and electronic submission:
- Qian (Sarah) Gong – q.gong at leeds.ac.uk
- Anna Zoellner – csaz at leeds.ac.uk

Conference website:
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~icsfsp/index.htm




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Francisco Seoane Perez
Provisional PhD student
Institute of Communications Studies
University of Leeds
E-mai: icsfsp at leeds.ac.uk
Webpage: http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/staff/f.perez


		
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