[Air-L] CFP: Journal of Communication Special Issue: Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[Nicholas John]

The Journal of Communication is inviting submissions, in the form of
extended abstracts, for a special issue, titled "Social Media: The Good,
The Bad, and The Ugly”.
The call appears below, and here:
https://academic.oup.com/joc/pages/cfp-si-social-media-gbu
The team of guest editors - which has a strong AoIR representation - is
very keen to encourage submissions from a wide range of conceptual and
methodological approaches. (This is a lightly coded way of letting
qualitative researchers know to have a go at this one.)

***


Journal of Communication
Special Issue
Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The study of social media is pervasive not only within the field of
communication (and its many subfields), but across the humanities and
social-behavioral sciences. The who, what, where, when, why and how of
social media are being approached from a wide range of theoretical angles
grounded in diverse epistemologies. The resulting knowledge indicates
social media represent the best and the worst of our own humanity. Our
still fledgling, but ever evolving social media environments can generate
inspiration, enlightenment, and empowerment and – at the same time – be
coarse, jagged, unproductive and/or counterproductive spaces that prove
difficult to navigate and manage.

The title for the 1966 film “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” helps
establish the theme for this special issue in that social media can be
viewed as a mixture of all three of these characteristics. This film is set
in a tense time defined by its hyper-polarization (i.e., American Civil
War). Unfortunately, the same can be said for today’s real-world and
virtual environments and not only in the US. This special issue is not
seeking to resolve whether the social media platforms we have created
should be viewed as the good, the bad, or the ugly. Instead, it seeks to
bring together a series of insights that will allow scholars,
practitioners, and the general public to develop a more nuanced
understanding of the mediated communication environments that are becoming
further integrated into our day-to-day lives.

The guest editors are not defining what is deemed to be the good, the bad
or the ugly of social media. Instead, it will be up to the submitting
authors to indicate whether their proposals speak to one or a combination
of these characteristics as studied in a wide variety of contexts. The
special issue is open to all communication subfields, as well as work
generated by scholars nested across the humanities and social-behavioral
sciences. Proposed works can offer empirical data (qualitative or
quantitative; within the latter we invite research that makes causal claims
or tests directional hypotheses as well as that representing descriptive
social science). We also welcome submissions that are adopting a critical
studies, cultural studies, historical, rhetorical, or policy perspective.
Submissions can utilize a wide variety of methods, from big data mining to
meta- analysis to critical discourse analysis (to name but a few), as
applied to a wide variety of datasets (e.g., large scale online behavioral
data from social media platforms, existing macro-level data combined with
aggregate statistics on social media use, small sample qualitative data
from specific users or online communities, among others).

Extended abstracts are due by December 1, 2021 (AoE). Submitters should
cover the following in a main text maximum of two pages (double
spaced, 1”/2.54cm
margins, 12-point Times New Roman Font): (1) what communication phenomena
will be the focus of the proposed work and how do these phenomena speak to
social media being representative of the good, the bad and/or the ugly; (2)
what work will be undertaken by the full manuscript deadline (along with
any details concerning the feasibility of the endeavor); and, (3) an
argument for why this work is important in terms of its theoretical,
methodological, and social significance. Tables, figures, appendices and
references do not count against the two-page main text limit.

The timeline for the special issue is as follows:

Extended Abstracts - 12-01-21 (AoE)

Full Draft Invitations and Rejection Notifications - 01-15-22

Full Paper Submissions - 06-15-22 (AoE)

Full Paper Decisions - 08-15-22

Full Paper Revisions -  10-01-22 (AoE)

Final Accept-Reject Decisions - 11-30-22

Special Issue Publication - 02-01-23 (Volume 73, Issue 1)

[image: page2image17281216]

The guest editors for the special issue are as follows: Drs. Magdalena
Wojcieszak (University of California-Davis), Jennifer Stromer-Galley
(Syracuse University), Nicholas John (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem),
Adrienne Massanari (American University) and R. Lance Holbert (Temple
University). Please contact the editorial team at
jcomsigoodbadugly at gmail.com with any immediate questions concerning this
call for papers.

____________
Nicholas John
Department of Communication,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972-54-7906073
@nicholasajohn
http://nicholasjohn.huji.ac.il
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