[Air-L] CFP: Addressing Challenges and Opportunities in Online Extremism Research: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (CSCW 2021)

[kiran gvr]

Addressing Challenges and Opportunities in Online Extremism Research: An
Interdisciplinary Perspective
October 23-24, 2021
Co-organized along CSCW 2021 Conference
https://sites.google.com/view/cscw21extremismworkshop/home


Recent political and cultural upheavals around the globe highlight the
importance of studying extremism in online spaces. The CSCW community has
shown growing interest in exploring the information and influence
operations, use of language and multimedia and finance structures in online
extremism movements. The goal of this workshop is to broaden the current
research by considering multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural aspects of
online extremism research. This workshop brings together international
researchers to discuss challenges and new opportunities to help (1)
understand the representativeness and validity of the data used for
studying extremism (2) uncover nuances in extremism research across
countries and cultures (3) build norms for platform governance and policies
(4) develop critical perspectives on extremism studies addressing questions
such as research ethics and bias (5) promoting research efforts to
aid victims of the extremism (6) leverage extremism research for aiding the
recovery and social support for populations involved in online extremism.


Workshop Goals:

(1) Facilitate networking, connections, and community identity of
researchers from multiple disciplines such as social psychology, computer
science, criminology, epidemiology, social justice studying online
extremism.
(2) Discuss and propose ideas relevant to the five themes of the workshop.
(3) Encourage future interdisciplinary collaborations on the ideas
generated during the workshop


Topics of interest:

In this workshop, we aim to reach beyond the concepts of online incivility,
toxicity, hate speech, harassment, or online harm and also consider
ideologically driven extremism based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, religion, nationality, caste, and political affiliation. As
such, we invite ideas researching both, online harms, hate speech, and
harassment relevant to ideological extremism and the broader level online
ecosystem of ideological extremism. Keeping in mind the socio-political
complexity of ideological extremism, this workshop focuses on bringing
together researchers from diverse countries and disciplines such as
computational social science, HCI, criminology, social psychology,
epidemiology, and political science to facilitate further dialogue on six
main themes of the workshop:

— Extremism Studies and Data
— Extremism across Cultures
— Extremism and Governance
— Extremism Research Ethics
— Aiding Victims of Extremism
— Recovery from Online Extremism


Submission guidelines:

- Authors can submit a 2-6 pages position paper or a 300 word abstract
- The accepted papers/abstracts will be hosted on the website upon
acceptance
- Position papers will be invited for presentations or lightning talks
during the workshop
- Both position papers and abstracts should be able to identify at least
one or more themes outlined on the website.
*- Submissions are being accepted through this google
form: https://forms.gle/9cxLcoF5paCk1w9MA
<https://forms.gle/9cxLcoF5paCk1w9MA>*


Important dates:

- Paper submission deadline: 10th September 2021
- Acceptance notifications: 17th September, 2021

Organizing committee:

- Shruti Phadke, University of Washington
- Jessie Seiler, University of Washington
- Tanushree Mitra, University of Washington
- Kiran Garimella, MIT
- Matthew Costello, Clemson University
- James Hawdon, Virginia Tech


Contact:

phadke at uw.edu

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!

Sincerely,
Kiran Garimella