[Air-L] CfP - Panel on Producing, Sharing and Transforming Knowledge on Social Media

[Neil Sadler]

Dear all,

As part of the 'Genealogies of Knowledge II' conference to be held at Hong Kong Baptist University 7-9 April 2020, I would like to invite abstracts for a panel on 'Producing, Sharing and Transforming Knowledge on Social Media' - http://genealogiesofknowledge.net/events/gokconf2020/panels/social-media/. Both empirical papers and theoretical contributions addressing the epistemology of social media are welcome and the deadline for the submission of abstracts is 30 September.

In recent years a multitude of disciplines have explored how knowledge is produced, shared and transformed on social media. A growing body of scholarship examines how knowledge is shared within large institutions (Razmerita, Kirchner, and Nielsen 2016; Roblek et al. 2013; Ravenscroft et al. 2012); in disaster response situations (Sutherlin 2013; Houston et al. 2015); among activists in social movements (Murthy 2018; Carney 2016); and participatory practices such as crowdsourcing (Sui, Elwood, and Goodchild 2013; Aitamurto 2016) and citizen journalism (Ali and Fahmy 2013; Bruns 2018). Methodologically focused research has also focused on social media as a source of data for the production of scholarly knowledge and a site of epistemological change - as illustrated by the growing use of visualisation techniques to make sense of the huge volumes of data generated by social media (Drucker 2014; Halpern 2015).

This wide range of theoretical perspectives highlights the complexity of the relationship between social media and knowledge. The very visibility of knowledge exchange between social media users is valuable for avoiding the construction of 'knowledge silos' that are confined to specific institutional contexts (Leonardi 2014); however, that same visibility has proven a boon to repressive regimes that are keen to monitor their political opponents (Trottier and Fuchs 2015). The connective affordances of social media allow vast numbers of people to make individually small but collectively significant contributions in disaster response situations (Potts 2013), but they can also be used in economically exploitative ways to blur the boundaries between leisure and productive labour (Scholz 2013; Fuchs 2014). The potentially transformational impact of the huge volume of information generated by social media is tempered by ongoing debates about the filter bubbles derived from the ubiquity of opaque recommendation algorithms and the growing tendency towards homophily among social media users (Pariser 2011; Bruns 2019).

This panel invites proposals focusing on the production, distribution and transformation of knowledge on social media understood broadly. Both empirical case studies and theoretical reflections on the epistemology of social media, and the extent to which they either require or encourage new forms of knowing, are encouraged.
Potential topics to be explored in this panel include, but are not limited to:


  *   The co-production and sharing of knowledge across linguistic and cultural boundaries via social media
  *   The way in which knowledge is transformed as it moves through space and time on social media
  *   Knowledge production on social media and power
  *   Social media and performative knowledge
  *   The production of knowledge through individual and connective social media storytelling
  *   The interplay between online and offline practices of knowledge production
  *   Social media and ways of knowing: ambient, dialogic, fragmented and affective knowledge
  *   The changing practices of knowledge creation on social media since their rise to prominence in the mid-2000s
  *   The interplay between culturally specific (and especially non-Western) ways of knowing and social media affordances and design
  *   Algorithmic recommendation and knowledge production and distribution

Submissions should be sent to me (Neil Sadler, n.sadler at qub.ac.uk) by 30 September 2019.

Submissions should consist of:

(1) Abstract (300-400 words, including up to 5 bibliographic references).

(2) Contributor's 150-word (maximum) biodata written in the third person. See examples from a previous event here: http://genealogiesofknowledge.net/events/gok2017conference/presenters/.

(3) Full affiliation(s)

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 30 October 2019.

Best wishes,
Neil


Dr Neil Sadler
Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting
Centre for Translation and Interpreting
School of Arts, English and Languages, Room 104, 9 University Square, Queen's University Belfast
+44 (0) 289097 5138
@Neil_Sadler<https://twitter.com/Neil_Sadler>