[Air-L] CFP: Special issue of Social Media + Society – Infancy Online

[Tama Leaver]

Dear colleagues,


Special Issue of Social Media + Society

http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202332


Infancy Online


Eds Tama Leaver (Curtin University) and Bjorn Nansen (University of
Melbourne)



>From the sharing of ultrasound photos on social media onward, the capturing
and communicating of babies’ lives online is an increasingly ordinary and
common part of everyday digitally mediated life. Online affordances can
facilitate the instantaneous sharing and joys of a first smile, first steps
and first word spoken to globally distributed networks of family, friends
and publics. Equally, from pregnancy tracking apps to baby cameras hidden
inside cuddly toys, infants are also subject to an unprecedented
intensification of surveillance practices. Reflecting both of these
contexts, there is a growing set of questions about the presence,
participation and politics of infants in online networks. This special
issue seeks to explore these questions in terms of the online spaces in
which infants are present; the forms of online participation enabled for
and curated on behalf of infants, and the range of political implications
raised by infants’ digital data and its traces, for both their present and
future lives. Ideally papers will focus on the impact of digital
technologies and networked culture on pre-birth, birth and the early years
of life, along with related changes and challenges to parenthood and
similar domains.


Possible areas of focus include, but are by no means limited to:

• Social media and infant presence and profiles

• Cultural and national specificities of infant media use and presence

• Digital media in the everyday lives of young children

• The app economy, and capture of infant attention

• “Mommy blogs,” and online curation

• Identity and impression management

• Ethics, persistence and the right to be forgotten

• Geographies of infant media use

• Infant interfaces and hardware

• Cultural responses to parenting, “oversharing”, privacy and surveillance

• Erasure of maternal bodies in digitising infancy

• Apps and services targeting infants as a consumer market


Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to both Tama Leaver
t.leaver at curtin.edu.au and Bjorn Nansen nansenb at unimelb.edu.au by Friday, 1
April. Where appropriate, please nominate an author for correspondence. On
the basis of these short abstracts, invitations to submit full papers (of
no more than 8000 words) will then be sent out by 15 April 2016. Full
papers will be due by 1 July 2016, and will undergo the usual Social Media
+ Society review procedure. Please note that an invitation to submit a full
paper for review does not guarantee paper acceptance.



-- 
Dr Tama Leaver
Senior Lecturer in Internet Studies
Faculty of Humanities, MCCA, Curtin University
GPO Box U1987 Perth WA Australia 6845
Ph: (+61 8) 9266 1258
Fax: (+61 8) 9266 3166
Email: t.leaver at curtin.edu.au
Web: www.tamaleaver.net
Twitter: @tamaleaver

CRICOS Provider Code: 00301J (WA) 02637B (NSW)