[ecrea] Convergence cfp - Special Issue on Virtual Worlds as Sites for Social and Cultural Innovation

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media
Technologies
 
Call for Papers – Special Issue on Virtual Worlds as Sites for Social
and Cultural Innovation
Vol. 18 No 1, February 2012
 
Guest editors: Louise Phillips and Sisse Siggaard Jensen,
Communication Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark.
 
Convergence invites contributions for its forthcoming special
issue on ‘Virtual Worlds as Sites for Social and Cultural
Innovation’. There is a growing recognition of the importance of virtual
worlds as environments that carry the potential for social and cultural
innovation by making possible new forms of social relationships based on
communication among avatars. We seek papers from across the humanities
and social sciences that present distinctive theoretical and empirical
analyses of virtual worlds and deal systematically and critically with
their possibilities and limitations in relation to social and cultural
innovation. We particularly welcome papers that are themselves innovative
in their research practices and that reflect carefully on their use of
theories and methodologies including efforts to rework theories and
methodologies developed for the study of other media.
 
Papers may, in principle, apply any relevant conceptualisation of
processes of social and cultural innovation, they may focus on any space
that is widely categorised as a virtual world in the context of a
discussion of contested definitions of virtual worlds, and they may
report on attempts to produce innovation such as simulation or
experiments in virtual spaces. Possible topics include (but are not
restricted to)

• Meaning-making and sense-making processes in and/or about virtual worlds
• Co-design and user-generated content
• Entrepreneurship, market dynamics and management
• The construction and communication of knowledge in and/or about virtual worlds
• Conceptions of space, place and/or body and/or identity
• Social experimentation and the establishment and maintenance of social practices and rules of social conduct
• Learning and knowledge construction in higher education
• Emerging fields and new forms of _expression_ and/or dissemination

We are hoping with this issue both to develop the emergent
multidisciplinary field of study on virtual worlds and to feed into the
wider body of research about digital communication and culture.

 
Deadline for submission of research articles:  1 February 2011

Please send all submissions to Associate Professor Louise Phillips (at
(louisep /at/ ruc.dk)) – as attachments in
Microsoft Word.  Please include the author’s or authors’ surname(s)
in the subject line, and full contact details for the author(s), as well
as information on the current affiliation or position of the author(s),
in the attachment and also in the accompanying email.
 
Guidelines for the submission of papers can be found at:

http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/submissions

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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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