[Air-l] extension of the deadline for the submission of abstracts

[kerstin.radde at zegk.uni-heidelberg.de]

Dear list-members,

due to editorial reasons we allow an extension for the submission of  
abstracts for the special issue of the "Online - Heidelberg Journal of  
Religions on the Internet" covering the topic "Virtual Worlds". New  
deadline is  31/1/2007.

For further information see the attached Call for Papers below.

Best regards and a Happy New Year from Heidelberg!
Yours
Kerstin Radde-Antweiler

Dipl. Theol. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
SFB 619 Teilprojekt C 2
Institut für Religionswissenschaft
der Universität Heidelberg
Akademiestr. 4-8
69117 Heidelberg

Tel.: +49-(0)6221-547482
Fax : +49-(0)6221-547424
Email: kerstin.radde at zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
URL: http://www.rituals-online.uni-hd.de




Call for Papers "Virtual Worlds"

In the academic field of "Cultural Studies", like in other cultural and social
disciplines, the relevance of the Internet as new media is constantly  
increasing. New areas of scholarly research are to be found on  
homepages, weblogs, in chat rooms, in newsgroups and in virtual 3D  
environments, where religious and spiritual topics are presented and  
incessantly negotiated. The Internet could be seen as a ?cultural  
context of its own right", as Christine Hine stated in her  
programmatic book "Virtual ethnography". In this respect it has become  
an important part of our cultural and scientific assets, heritage and  
memory. As such it also forms, modifies and creates new cultural  
structures.

Therefore, the challenges of this media provide the scholar with  
materials in a still mainly unexplored field of research, demanding  
new scientific methods and methodologies in order to analyse the  
likewise new realm of religious beliefs and utterances in this virtual  
space.

In the context of Internet Research, Virtual Worlds offer a new  
environment to meet, communicate and perform social and cultural  
activity in a virtual reality, irrespective of geographical and  
real-life body conditions. Examples for such Virtual Worlds -  
understood as digital spaces, occupied in large part by human  
controlled agents, known as avatars, participating in a collective  
virtual space? (Krausnick 2004) - are Active Worlds and The Palace -  
both in use since 1995 - and There since 1998. The most prominent and  
famous example is the privately-owned, subscription-based 3D  
application Second Life that went online for the public in 2003. An  
increasing number of residents use such
environments not only as a kind of virtual playground but as an  
enlargement of their real-life possibilities. And this "virtual life"  
has to be taken seriously: The users are both socially and religiously  
very active and consequently transfer real-life activities into  
virtual space.

For the next issue of the new Journal Online - Heidelberg Journal of  
Religions on the Internet (http://online.uni-hd.de), we are planning  
to edit a special edition with the working title "Virtual Worlds". The  
essays we are inviting should deal with the notions of cultural and /  
or religious activities in Virtual Worlds like Second Life and MMOGs  
such as Everquest, World of Warcraft, etc.

Possible topics or foci of the special issue:
1) Religion and Rituals
2) Methodology
3) Offline-Online Relations

Other topics that correspond to the subject of the issue are equally  
welcome. We
encourage abstracts from all areas of research. Please send title and  
abstract (no more than 350 words) of your proposed paper as well as  
some short biodata of the author/s as email-text to Kerstin  
Radde-Antweiler  (kerstin.radde at zegk.uni-heidelberg.de)
by January 31st, 2007. Later submissions will not be accepted. A  
decision on the contents of the volume will be made on the basis of  
anonymous reviews of the abstracts, and all authors of abstracts will  
be informed by February 28th, 2007. Authors will have to be prepared  
to submit their finished papers (no more than 8000 words) by April  
31th, 2007.
Then, these will be reviewed and possibly returned to the authors with  
suggestions from the editors. It is planned to publish the volume by  
Mid 2007.

Dipl. Theol. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
Centre for European Historical and Cultural Studies
Institute for Religious Studies
Akademiestr. 4-8 D-69117
Heidelberg Germany