[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Internationalizing Internet Studies (1/31/06; collection)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Mark McLelland <m.mclelland@uq.edu.au>

'Internationalizing Internet Studies'

Call for papers for a edited collection by

Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney) & Mark McLelland (University of 
Wollongong)

 From the mid-1990s onwards, the Internet has shifted fundamentally from its
co-ordinates in English-speaking countries, especially North America, to 
become
an essential medium in a wide range of countries, cultures, and languages.
According to October 2005 statistics, Chinese language now represents 
14% of all
Internet communication and media use, Spanish 9% and Japanese 9%. At 35% and
falling, English use is now a minority in terms of overall online 
language use.
However, communications and media scholarship, especially in the Anglophone
world, has not registered the deep ramifications of this shift - and the
challenges it poses to the concepts, methods, assumptions, and 
frameworks used
to study the Internet.

The vast body of Anglophone scholarship into 'the Internet' is predicated on
research on and about English-language websites by academics and other
researchers working and publishing in English. Despite the fact that 
there is
also a large body of work being produced by scholars in non-English-speaking
cultures and locales, hardly any of this work is being translated and it 
has had
little impact on theorization of the developing fields of Internet and web
studies.

The purpose of this anthology, 'Internationalizing Internet Studies', is to
acknowledge that Internet use and Internet studies take place 'elsewhere' in
various national and international contexts. We seek to uncover how
non-Anglophone uses of the Internet might challenge certain preconceived 
notions
about the technology and its social impacts as well as the manner in which
Internet studies is taken up, valued and taught outside the circuits of
understanding prevalent in Anglophone academia. Through bringing together
researchers whose daily experience of the Internet is mediated through
non-Anglophone languages and cultures as well as researchers situated 
within the
Anglophone academy whose work focuses on cultures outside North America and
Europe, we hope to promote the visibility of work already being done 
outside the
Anglophone world. We also aim to encourage new work that critically 
engages with
Anglophone Internet scholarship that is based on research into diverse 
locales
and draws upon a range of intellectual traditions.

Accordingly, we wish to gather together a distinctive collection of 
contributors
who can illuminate the key features of the Internet's internationalization,
surveying exemplary Internet language groups and cultures. We hope to 
encourage
explorations of the distinctive features of the consumption and use of the
Internet by various language groups, and how this expands and questions
taken-for-granted notions of Internet studies.

We are also interested in contributions that reflect upon this 
cosmopolitan turn
in the Internet, and what it signifies for our methods, tools, and 
concepts of
Internet studies - and for media, communication, and cultural theory 
themselves.
Here we are concerned with the debate - yet to emerge - on the
internationalization of 'Internet studies'.

Contributions would be welcomed, but are not restricted to, the following
topics:

* non-anglophone language communities use of the Internet

* Asian countries and communities use of the Internet (especially Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean)

* mobility and the Internet: how the Internet is deployed by people on 
the move
across borders
* use of the Internet by diasporic communities
* Internet use by minority language speakers in majority Anglophone and 
other
language contexts
* Indigenous use of the Internet
* how particular Internet technologies (websites, peer-to-peer technologies,
blogs, social software, mobile Internet) have been shaped and are used by
different language and cultural groups
* cell phone, mobile and wireless technologies and the 
internationalizing of the
Internet
* how does this change our understanding of Internet cultures and cultural
histories?
* what the implications of internationalizing of the Internet for debates
concerning cultural citizenship and media diversity? (not least Internet
governance, open source and commons debates)
* what are the implications of increasing 'global governance' of the 
Internet
for local and countercultural communities?
* how is Internet studies responding to the internationalizing of the 
Internet -
what new concepts, methods, locations and relationships does
it need?

Timeframe:

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to both editors 
outlining your
proposed contribution to the edited collection by 31 January 2006. We will
advise acceptance by 1 April 2006.

We will be holding a workshop on 'Internationalizing Internet Studies' in
Brisbane on 27 September 2006 immediately before the Association of Internet
Researchers (AoIR) Annual Conference 7.0, and hope that we will be able to
invite some contributors to attend and present drafts of their full 
papers. (We
expect limited travel bursaries will be available for those attending from
outside Australia).

About the Editors:

 From January 2006, Dr Gerard Goggin (g.goggin@uq.edu.au) will be an ARC
Australian Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication,
the University of Sydney. He has published widely on Internet and new media,
including Digital Disability (2003), Virtual Nation: The Internet in 
Australia
(2004) and Cell Phone Culture (forthcoming 2006).


Dr Mark McLelland (m.mclelland@uq.edu.au) is a Lecturer in the School of 
Social
Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong. Recent
Internet-related publications include Japanese Cybercultures (2003) and 
Queer
Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (2005).



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