Emerging Media and Communication at UT Dallas is hiring

 

The EMAC program at UT Dallas is growing again. They’ve just posted a position for one or more tenure track or tenured hires in the program in Emerging Media and Communication at UT Dallas.

This expanding program emphasizes the interdisciplinary study of digital media, networks, and technologies and their social, political, cultural, and ethical implications. EMAC prepares students for innovative thinking, practice, and leadership in changing media environments. The program offers B.A. and M.A. degrees, and EMAC faculty advise doctoral students in the Arts and Technology and Arts and Humanities Ph.D. programs. EMAC is housed in the new Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building.

EMAC is founded on a multi-dimensional approach to problem solving and critical thought. Faculty conduct research in a variety of disciplines, broadly clustered into three methodologies: humanistic, creative practice, and social scientific. In addition to interdisciplinarity within the program, EMAC faculty collaborate in working groups and sponsored projects with colleagues from Arts and Humanities; Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences; Brain and Behavioral Sciences; and Engineering and Computer Sciences. These collaborations stem from the university’s commitment to fostering innovative responses to evolving media ecologies.

Last year EMAC added four new tenure track faculty members to the program in Emerging Media and Communication: one humanistic scholar and three social scientists. This year they seek to hire another humanities scholar and two creative scholar-practitioners.

 

To check out all the current job opportunities at UTD, click the link below for more details:
http://provost.utdallas.edu/facultyjobs/pad150213

Call For Abstracts: Women and Technology Conference at Carleton University

 

The Women and Technology Conference is a meeting of Ontario scholars
working in applied and technical fields, the natural sciences, humanities,
and social sciences. This year’s meeting will take place in Ottawa, on *June
19, 2015*, with all events being hosted at Carleton University. The goal of
this year’s conference is to highlight scholarship on women in the STEM
fields (i.e., sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

To encourage fruitful discussion across disciplines and between researchers
and professionals, submissions are encouraged from two broad areas:

1.     The reality of women’s STEM-related work and studies.

a.     Examples of potential presentations within this subject area
include, but are not limited to: challenges of entering STEM fields;
misconceptions about women’s work in STEM fields; historical presentations
of the role of women in STEM fields; and the lived experiences of women
pursuing education and work in STEM fields.

2.     Research on issues in STEM-related work and studies that primarily
affect women.

a.     Examples of potential presentations within this subject area
include, but are not limited to: increasing the representation of women in
STEM-related education; encouraging greater success for women studying or
working in STEM fields; structural barriers to women in STEM fields; the
impact of social media on women’s interest/participation in STEM fields;
and media (mis)representations of women in STEM fields.

One of the major goals of this conference is to help advance the work of
Ontario scholars by creating an interdisciplinary space for dialogue on
women doing STEM-related studies, research, and work. To help ensure that
these goals are achieved, you are encouraged to tailor your abstract and
presentation to a well-educated audience without expertise in your field.

Submissions reporting on original scholarship and research are preferred.
Presentations not meeting this requirement will be considered on a
case-by-case basis, with preference given to those who have first-hand
experience working at the nexus of women and technology.

*To apply:* please submit a 250-word abstract with 3 keywords/phrases for a
15 minute oral paper presentation to: womenandtechconf@gmail.com

*Deadline: March 15, 2015 at 4:00pm EST*

In your submission, please indicate if you require assistance with
childcare. The conference organizers may be able to provide subsidies for
child care and associated costs (e.g., parking and transportation).

For more information, please visit https://womenandtechcu.wordpress.com/

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Public Humanities, Brown University

 

The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and the Department of American Studies, Brown University, seek a postdoctoral fellow in the Digital Public Humanities. Digital humanities often results in projects open to the public, and public humanities work increasingly takes advantage of digital tools to reach and interact with broad audiences.  Brown University seeks a postdoctoral fellow to help explore the connections between the two fields.

The candidate should have experience in publicly-engaged humanities work (in a gallery, library, archive or museum; community arts organization; school; social justice project, for a few examples) and demonstrated digital skills relevant to humanities research, teaching, community engagement, and/or publishing.  S/he should be both a practitioner and a thoughtful critic and theoretician with an active research agenda and a public practice.  Brown seeks a generalist who might specialize in any of a range of digital humanities methods or technical practices, but be able to teach and consult across the whole range of the digital humanities.

The fellow will teach in the Master’s of Public Humanities program; help connect the American Studies Department and the Center for Public Humanities with digital humanities on campus and nationally; and provide consultations for faculty, students, and community partners on research and public projects.  It is expected that such activities will constitute half of the fellow’s time, with half available for their own research and projects.

Brown’s American Studies department maintains flourishing programs at the undergraduate, MA, and PhD levels; has a faculty involved in national and international digital projects; and has taught digital courses for several years.  The Center for Public Humanities has built a strong reputation for programs that connect university humanities expertise with broader audiences, community-based arts and humanities, and in training students for work in a broad range of cultural organizations.  The public humanities program has been moving aggressively to incorporate digital work into its courses and projects.

This postdoctoral fellowship is a full-time salaried appointment ($50,000) with excellent benefits and research/project support funds each year. It is open only to recent Ph.D. recipients; the fellow must have completed all requirements for the Ph.D. by September 2015 and no earlier than June 2011.  The appointment will be for two years.

TO APPLY:
Please submit a C.V., three letters of recommendation, a sample of public work, and a dissertation chapter before March 13.  To apply, go to http://apply.interfolio.com/28477

Mellon Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Digital Humanities and Community Engagement

 

 

Lehigh University seeks applications for a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Research Scholar in digital humanities and community engagement beginning August 2015. The annual salary is $50,000 with full benefits.

Lehigh University seeks a postdoctoral scholar well-versed in digital media, methods and technologies, with scholarly interest in one or more of the following areas: documentary studies (film or other), community engagement, urban studies and social justice. The scholar will pursue digital humanities scholarship, teach one undergraduate course each semester, contribute to workshops in partnership with the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, and work one-on-one to help faculty integrate digital media into their courses.

The goal is to drive expansion of an undergraduate humanities curriculum that engages the local community, equips more faculty with enhanced skill sets in digital humanities forms, amplifies undergraduate humanities research, and leads to the development of an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in documentary studies.

The position is open to candidates with a Ph.D. received between August 2012 and August 2015. Lehigh U. seeks scholars from a wide range of humanities disciplines as well as the humanistic social sciences.

To apply, please submit a cover letter, vita, dissertation abstract, project description, and contact information for three academic references who will be prompted via email to submit letters electronically.

The deadline for receipt of all materials is March 15, 2015. Please apply at https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/5320.
Inquiries should be directed to Professor Ed Whitley: edw204@lehigh.edu.

Power/Freedom on the Dark Web: A Digital Ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network

A talk by Robert W. Gehl, Assistant Professor of New Media, Department of Communications, University of Utah

Robert W. Gehl

Friday, February 27, 4:00 p.m. – Knight Library, Room 41

Free and open to the public

The Dark Web Social Network (DWSN) is a social networking site only accessible to Web browsers equipped with The Onion Router. This talk will explore the DWSN as an experiment in power/freedom, an attempt to simultaneously trace, deploy, and overcome the historical conditions in which it finds itself: the generic constraints and affordances of social networking as they have been developed over the past decade by Facebook and Twitter, and the ideological constraints and affordances of public perceptions of the dark web, which hold that the dark web is useful for both taboo activities as well as freedom from state oppression.

Robert W. Gehl is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. His research draws on science and technology studies, software studies, and critical/cultural studies, focusing on the intersections between technology, subjectivity, and practice. He has published research that critiques the architecture, code, culture, and design of social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and blogs. His book, Reverse Engineering Social Media (Temple University Press, 2014), explores the architecture and political economy of social media. At Utah, he teaches courses in communication technology, composition in new media, and political economy of communication.

Reverse Engineering Social Media

Sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, the UO Libraries Digital Scholarship Center, and the Center for Cyber Security, University of Oregon (CCSUO), this event is free and open to the public. Accommodations for people with disabilities will be provided if requested in advance by calling 541-346-3056.

8-day Summer Institute: Beyond the Digitized Slide Library

July 5–15, 2015
University of California, Los Angeles

 

Beyond the Digitized Slide Library is an eight-day summer institute to be held at the University of California, Los Angeles, July 5-15, 2015. Participants will learn about debates and key concepts in the digital humanities and gain hands-on experience with tools and techniques for art historical research (including data visualization, network graphs, and digital mapping). More fundamentally, the Institute will be an opportunity for participants to imagine what digital art history can be: What constitutes art historical “data”? How shall we name and classify this data? Which aspects of art historical knowledge are amenable to digitization, and which aspects resist it?

With major support for the program provided by the Getty Foundation, participants will receive travel and lodging in Los Angeles for the duration of the Institute. UCLA’s team of leading digital humanities technologists will be joined by faculty members Johanna Drucker (Bernard and Martin Breslauer Professor of Bibliography, Information Studies), Todd Presner (Chair, Digital Humanities Program, and Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature), and Miriam Posner (Digital Humanities Program Coordinator and Institute Director).

Participants will be selected on the basis of their ability to formulate compelling research questions about the conjunction of digital humanities and art history, as well as their potential to disperse the material they glean to colleagues at their home institutions and to the field at large.

Applicants must possess an advanced degree in art history or a related field. The application is open to faculty members, curators, independent scholars, and other professionals who conduct art historical research.  “Art history” is defined broadly to include the study of art objects and monuments of all times and places. Current graduate students are not eligible to apply. If you have questions about eligibility, please contact Institute Director Miriam Posner at mposner@humnet.ucla.edu.

Please apply online at http://www.humanities.ucla.edu/getty. Applications are due by 11:59 p.m. PST on March 1, 2015.

CFP: Mediating Audiences: MIT to host Media in Transition Conference 9

 

Media in Transition 9: Mediating Audiences
May 1-3, 2015
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Call for papers

Audiences now include readers, viewers (of exhibits and websites, as well as film and television), players, users (of software and as well as libraries), and people who are as busy conversing, writing, and photographing as they are “listening”. Expanding media forms might be changing what we think of as audience, but newmedia technologies still strive to develop, constitute and assess a wide variety of audiences.

Indeed, “the people formerly known as the audience” (as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it) remain at the center of the media equation. From imagining the reader of a text to statistically-based Nielsen audience profiles and algorithmically generated targets of Google’s AdSense, audiences have been constructed in myriad ways.  This variety of approaches reflects the multi-disciplinary stance of media studies and mass communications.  It also bears the traces of shifting media regimes, from centralized mass media to the particularities of today’s social media, or from lone readers to the networked group.  Audiences have been produced, regulated, contested, surveilled, disaggregated and, of course, studied.  Duped or empowered, they remain at the center of the media equation as sources of anxiety, even as we struggle to find new ways to describe ‘them’ and their activities.

Recently, foundations have encouraged researchers to investigate viewer engagement, for example, in documentaries.  At the same moment, the US Advertising Research Foundation has embarked on a parallel mission to understand audience engagement with advertising in the age of Twitter and Facebook.  As media forms and use patterns continually shift, these explorations of audience suggest that now is an opportune moment to stand back and consider the larger dynamics of audience construction and behavior, as well as a spectrum of tropes from victimization to empowerment.  Are there discourses from before the 20th century that might have new relevance in today’s individualized but networked media?  Are we replaying the dystopian/utopian opposition that has informed much of the 20th century’s assessment of publics, audiences and their enactments? How have technologies shaped the debate as well as the construction of audiences? How might we reassess the awkward history of social science / humanities approaches to these topics?

While these questions might be addressed broadly, they would also benefit from media- and case-specific exploration.  Game players, readers, film audiences in public cinemas and in home theaters, producers of tweets, and even the audiences represented on television (as well as audiences of television) all have rich histories.  Imagined, represented, statistically profiled, monetized, enacted … these groupings and many more unmentioned can best be understood through case studies, industry and regulatory discourse, and the technologies used to give them form.

Topics could include:

  • Activist audiences: when publics & audiences converge
  • The fate of the public sphere (and public media)
  • The audience as a site of perpetual anxiety
  • Fragmentation: unity in diversity?
  • The invisible audience:  underrepresented/ignored populations
  • Policy
  • The challenge to TV metrics with IPTV and Google analytics
  • Showrunners and the ideal audience
  • Fandoms and productive audiences
  • Piracy and the uncounted – or overcounted — audience
  • The aftermarket public
  • Representations of the audience in media
  • Privacy in a data-rich world
  • Challenges and opportunities/reception research
  • Big data and merging of data sets (TV use and credit card use)
  • New trends in audience tracking and assessment
  • Learning from historical audiences
  • Transnational formats and their audiences
  • Overseas audiences
  • MOOCS/online education and audience in higher ed
  • The labor of audiences

For more information visit the MIT conference page here.

The deadline for submitting proposals is February 15th, 2015.

Submit an Abstract and Short Bio:

Short abstracts for papers should be about 250 words in a PDF or Word format and should be sent as email attachments to mit9@mit.edu no later than February 15th, 2015. Please include a short (75 words or fewer) biographical statement.

NOTE: If you submitted an abstract and bio before December 22, 2014, please RESUBMIT to mit9@mit.edu.

Evaluation of submissions will be done on a rolling basis beginning in [month] and each proposal will receive a response.

Include a Short Bibliography: For this year’s conference, please include a brief bibliography of no more than one page in length with your abstract and bio.

Proposals for Full Panels: Proposals for full panels of three or four speakers should include a panel title and separate abstracts and bios for each speaker. Anyone proposing a full panel should recruit a moderator.

Submit a Full Paper: In order to be considered for inclusion in a conference anthology, you must submit a full version of your paper prior to the beginning of the conference.

Virtual Games Try To Generate Real Empathy For Faraway Conflict

The following is an excerpt from an article by James Delahoussaye for NPR’s All tech considered. Originally published January 25, 2015. Read the full article here.

Allison Begalman, a student at the University of Southern California, wears goggles and headphones to experience a virtual mortar strike on civilians in Aleppo, Syria. James Delahoussaye/NPR

Video games are great for passing time or battling monsters with friends online. But the medium is also being used to explore complex stories and themes. It’s even being used as form of journalistic storytelling, immersing people in places and events that can be hard to imagine.

In a moment, University of Southern California student Allison Begalman is transported to a sunny street corner in Aleppo, Syria.

Wearing bulky virtual reality goggles and headphones, she can see a cart selling food, cars and trucks passing by, and a group of people circled around a singing little girl.

But then “all of a sudden there’s like a bomb that goes off,” Begalman says as she navigates her way around the virtual street. “It’s completely full of dust and dirt and … I’m sort of walking back and forth.”

In this virtual world, Begalman has experienced a mortar shelling from Bashar Assad’s regime. This is Project Syria, a virtual reality experience built by a team of students at USC. The bomb blast and the destruction are created with the same kind of tools used for video games, except that this is not a regular video game.

“In America, we’re deeply involved in Syria, but we’re very disconnected about — what is that place?” says Nonny de la Peña, head of Project Syria and a longtime journalist in print and film. “Who are the people? Why do I care? Why are we there?”

Peña says the game helps people feel a little closer to Syrians in the middle of the civil war.

“I sometimes call virtual reality an empathy generator,” she says. “It’s astonishing to me. People all of a sudden connect to the characters in a way that they don’t when they’ve read about it in the newspaper or watched it on TV.”

Peña sent her team to the Middle East to film refugee camps and interview survivors. From the singing girl to the bomb blast, the audio heard in Project Syria comes from YouTube videos of an actual mortar strike in Aleppo.

What Peña’s doing — using virtual reality in combination with reporting — is part of a wider landscape of video games being created to explore the news. And they’re called, appropriately enough, “newsgames.”

Learn more about Project Syria in the video below, then read the rest of the article over on All tech considered.

UO Public Impact Graduate Fellowship

The University of Oregon Graduate School is pleased to announce the 2015-16 Public Impact Fellowship. This purpose of this award is to recognize and support the work of up to two doctoral students and one master’s student whose research has the potential to have a significant impact on society. Examples of relevant research include that which makes a contribution to improving economic opportunity and well-being, social justice, political participation, cultural engagement, and scientific and technical solutions to pressing social issues.

This fellowship will provide up to two doctoral-level recipients and one master’s-level recipient with a stipend of $6,000 for the 2015-16 academic year and the opportunity to participate in research advocacy opportunities. The award will be made in June 2015 with funding to commence in fall term, 2015.

Doctoral Student Eligibility

Recipients of this award will be doctoral students enrolled full-time in 2015-16 who will have advanced to candidacy by fall 2015 and who are in the process of conducting research that has substantial public value and will benefit local, national and/or global communities. To be eligible for this award, applicants must possess a strong academic record and be willing to participate and/or have their research featured in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Innovation and Graduate Education and/or Graduate School public and donor relations efforts.

Master’s Student Eligibility

The recipient of this award will be a master’s student enrolled full-time in 2015-16 who plans to graduate in spring or summer 2016 and who is in the process of conducting research that has substantial public value and will benefit local, national and/or global communities. To be eligible for this award, applicants must possess a strong academic record and be willing to participate and/or have their research featured in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Innovation and Graduate Education and/or Graduate School public and donor relations efforts.

Application Deadline and Process

All parts of the application/nomination must be submitted no later than 5:00 p.m. on Friday, February 20, 2015.

NOMINATION. Applicants must be nominated by their departments. A department may nominate no more than one master’s student and one doctoral student. Click here to view the online nomination/approval form to be completed by the graduate program director or the department head (depending on the department’s practice or preference).

(Note: Only authenticated UO faculty and staff can access the nomination form. If you cannot access the nomination form please contact Graduate School atgradsch@uoregon.edu)

LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION. This award requires one letter of recommendation from the student’s faculty advisor addressing the public impact of the research and describing the student’s academic progress (with attention to the student’s intent to be advanced to candidacy by fall term in the case of the doctoral nominees and anticipated completion date in the case of master’s nominees). The letter of recommendation must be provided to the nominating department by the recommender and then submitted by the nominating department through the nomination form above.

APPLICATION & SUPPORTING MATERIALS. Applicants must complete an Applicant Informaton Form. The following application materials must be merged into a single PDF and attached to the form under “Additional Documents”:

  • A current curriculum vita (CV) or résumé.
  • A statement by the applicant (not to exceed 1,000 words) describing his/her research project, written for an audience of non-specialists in the field. The statement should summarize the project’s current status and plans for its completion, and should also describe the impact the research will have on local, national, and/or global communities.
  • A brief student profile (not to exceed 150 words) that includes previous institutions and degrees, research interests, current projects, awards and honors, work experience and career objectives, and any other noteworthy outside interests or activities.

 

Selection Process

Initial review of applications will take into account each student’s ability to convey his/her research to an audience of non-specialists; the clarity of the direct impact of the research on a specific community as well as the potential regional, national, and global impact; and the strength of the student’s academics. Attention will be paid to discipline to ensure broad representation of UO graduate programs each year.

Top candidates will be interviewed for 30 minutes by members of the selection committee during spring term.

Contact

Questions about this award or the application process can be addressed to the Graduate School at 541-346-2489 or bota@uoregon.edu).

Note for Graduate Students with Financial Aid or Loans
Receiving this award may reduce your financial aid award. Please contact the Financial Aid Office prior to applying for this (and any other type of) support.

CFP: A Manifesto for Cyborgs thirty-years on: Gender, Technology and Feminist-Technoscience in the twenty-first century

*Abstracts due: 27th of February, 2015

Donna Haraway

*Volume Editor: Thao Phan

In her iconic essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s, Donna Haraway introduced the metaphor of the cyborg as an “ironic political myth” to critique the so far troubling narratives of the West. Published in the Socialist Review in 1985, it brings together a broad spectrum of literacies—from socialist-feminism, to cybernetics and biopolitics—to proffer a cutting criticism of Enlightenment humanism, gender essentialism, and military technoscience. Her provocations created a useful framework to destabilise rigid boundaries and make fluid the borderlines between human and animal, organism and machine, natural and artificial, semiotic and material. Today the Manifesto sits comfortably as part of the canon of feminist-technoscience and postmodern theory. Although as an oppositional figure the cyborg is bounded by a historical specificity, it has certainly found new significance and politics in the contemporary age of ubiquitous media.

To mark the 30th anniversary since its publication, Platform invites authors whose work resonates or responds to themes expounded in this seminal essay. With the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, what new observations or critical assessments can be made in regards to the cyborg as a feminist, tropic figure? Did the cyborg fulfill its promise of an “historical transformation”? Is the figure of the cyborg still as useful today, given contemporary technological developments? Or, conversely, do we need myths like Haraway’s now more than ever? The submission of theoretical or empirical work engaging with applications of, or criticisms of, frameworks used by Haraway are encouraged. Of especial interest are critical papers that provide novel insights into the relation between gender and technoscience.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Cyborg subjectivities in the 21st century
  • Gendered tropes in technology
  • Novel readings of gender and technoscience
  • Trans/queer studies of technology
  • Feminist science and/or feminist science and technology studies
  • Posthuman subjectivities
  • Postgender politics and subjectivities of ‘affinity’
  • Multiple or fractured readings of the cyborg
  • Technologies of sex and gender
  • Technologies of race and identity
  • Critical studies of the body/embodiment
  • Feminist histories/historiographies of media, technology or computation
  • The informatics of domination
  • Biotechnologies and Artificial Intelligence
  • Feminism and accelerationist politics
  • Feminism and new materialisms

In addition to this special section, the Journal of Media and Communication also welcomes submissions that more broadly deal with issues relating to the areas of media, technology, and communication in theoretical or critical terms.

Please send all enquiries and submissions to platformjmc@gmail.com. Abstracts must be accompanied by a brief curriculum vitae and biographical note, and should not exceed 350 words.

It is recommended that prospective authors submit abstracts well before the abstract deadline of 27th of February, 2015, in order to allow for feedback and suggestions from the editors. All submissions should be from early career researchers (defined as being within a few years of completing their PhD) or current graduate students undertaking their Masters, PhD, or international equivalent.

All eligible submissions will be sent for double-blind peer-review. Early submission is highly encouraged as the review process will commence on submission.

Note: Please read the submission guidelines before submitting work. Submissions received not in house style will not be accepted and authors will be asked resubmit their work with the correct formatting before it is sent for review.

– See more at: http://journals.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/call_papers.html#sthash.7ioWmIcU.dpuf