Theorizing the Web 2012

#TtW12

Saturday, April 14th
University of Maryland

Keynote Session: “Social Media & Social Movements”
Andy Carvin (NPR; @acarvin) with Zeynep Tufekci (UNC; @techsoc)

Deadline for Abstracts: February 5th
Registration Opens: February 1st

Call for Papers:

Building off the success of last year’s conference, the goal of the second annual Theorizing the Web conference is to expand the range and depth of theory used to help us make sense of how the Internet, digitality, and technology have changed the ways humans live. We hope to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines, including sociology, communications, philosophy, economics, English, history, political science, information science, the performing arts and many more. We especially encourage international perspectives. In addition, we invite session and other proposals by tech-industry professionals, journalists, and other figures outside of academia. Intersections of gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability will not be isolated in seperate panels; instead, we fully expect these issues to be woven throughout the conference.

Submit abstracts online at http://tinyurl.com/TtW12.

Topics include:

Citizen/participant journalism and media curation

Identity, self-documentation and self-presentation

Privacy and publicity on the Web

Cyborgism and the technologically-mediated body (e.g., body modification)

Political mobilization, uprisings, revolutions and riots on social media (including the Arab Spring/Fall, Occupy)

Repression and the Web: Surveillance, wire-tapping, anonymity, pseudonymity

Code, values and design

Epistemology of the Web: Wikipedia, Global Voices, “filter bubbles” and the prosumption of information

Theorizing whose Web? How power and inequality (e.g., the Digital Divide) manifest on the Web

Mobile computing, online/offline space

Digital dualism & augmented reality; should the online/offline be conceptualized as seperate or enmeshed

Education, pedagogy and technology in the classroom

What art/literature can offer research and theory of the Web

We plan to curate 7 open submission panels, 4 presenters each as well as a couple invited panels and a keynote session on social media and social movements with Andy Carvin (NPR) and Zeynep Tufekci (UNC). Other events may be added before April.

The first Theorizing the Web conference happened last year. We decided to do this because there often is not a place for scholars who are theorizing about the Internet and society to gather and share their work. The 2011 program consisted of 14 panels, two workshops, two symposia (one on social media’s role in the Arab revolutions, the other, on social media and street art), two plenaries (by Saskia Sassen on "Digital Formations of the Powerful and the Powerless" and George Ritzer on "Why the Web Needs Post-Modern Theory"), and a keynote by danah boyd from Microsoft Research and NYU on "Privacy, Publicity Intertwined." Presenters traveled from around the world (including Hong Kong and New Zealand). The archive is available here.

There will be a new website with much more information coming January 2012. For further inquiries, email theorizingtheweb@gmail.com.

Call for Artists:

In addition to traditional presentations, the conference will feature a variety of artistic and multimedia events. As such, we invite proposals from artists for relevant works or performances in any medium as well as for discussion of such pieces. We seek to display art of all forms during the conference and after at a reception. This could include, but is not limited to, paintings, sculpture, poetry, fiction writing, digital art, and performance art.