[ecrea] CFP: Social Media, Discourse and Culture

The /Journal of Multicultural Discourses/ is playing an important role 
in promoting the role of culture in discourse studies.  Different 
cultural communities interact differently, in terms of worldviews, 
concepts, values, rules, strategies, means, channels, purposes and 
consequences.  And in and between all these communities there are 
inequalities and power relations that discourse researchers can and 
should reveal.  Yet at the same time we live in a world dominated by 
some key kinds of power relations, specifically with the continued 
dominance and global spread of American-Western free-market capitalism 
and media formats and styles.  What may not be so important is how and 
if people are different, but the power relations they inhabit are.


For this special edition of /Journal of Multicultural Discourses 
/authors are invited to submit abstracts that offer new insights into 
how social media can reveal, foster, facilitate or suppress, culturally 
specific kinds of communication, identity expression, forms of social 
relations, intercultural understandings and discourses.  In social media 
such as Facebook or Twitter who speaks and how, what social position is 
taken, what is said and not said?  And importantly in the case of social 
media how does this evolve over interactions and what kinds of 
engagement between users take place?  What kinds of cultural norms, 
patterns, relations, rules and values are revealed and through what 
kinds of discourses, genres and modes?


Papers are welcome from across disciplines and methods that deal with 
discourse and communication, though it is preferred that there is close 
linguistic, multimodal or semiotic analysis.  At the same time, papers 
that use ethnography, or political economic approaches are welcome, too. 
 Topics can be as broad as those found on social media.  Studies can be 
of the smaller details of conversation but also those that point to 
broader changes and patterns in use and participation, issues of 
resistance, off-line/ on-line relations, community management, patterns 
in uses of platforms and language style itself.


Please send abstracts (300-450 words) directly to the guest editor Gwen 
Bouvier (gwen.bouvier /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(gwen.bouvier /at/ gmail.com)>.


Deadline: 5/08/2014.