[ecrea] cfp merzWissenschaft 2018

call for papers

The issue of
merzWissenschaft 2018, the scientific journal of merz | media + education
(http://www.merz-zeitschrift.de/?MAIN_ID=3&NAV_ID=7), is the field of
connections between children, (their) rights and media. We’re looking
forward to your contributions and we’re happy if you hand it on to others
who might be interested.

CfP merzWissenschaft  Children|Media|Rights – Complex requirements for
access, protection and entitlement in the day-to-day media world of children
and young adults Supervising Editors: Stephan Dreyer (Hans-Bredow-Institut
for Media Research, Hamburg) and merzWissenschaft editorial team

Children have rights. This fact is notably anchored in the UN Convention on
the Rights of the Child. This revolutionary 1989 agreement is unfortunately
still not taken as a matter of course today. In the context of media in
particular it is worthwhile to examine how the rights of children are taken
into consideration in the formulation of media products and also in the
realization of media-educational concepts. This is more important than ever
in the course of comprehensive mediatization in all aspects of life ("deep
mediatization"). New digital technologies provide individuals with new
opportunities for societal participation; children and youth benefit for
example from the diverse range of available information and communication.

In the sense of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been
in effect for 25 years now, it is appropriate to examine on the one hand the
rights to access, information and expression, and on the other hand
guarantees of protection of minors in the media and in their private lives.
Analyses of the exact manifestation of this balancing act between active
participation and protective exclusion, between personality development and
developmental impairment and between playful discovery and family and legal
restrictions are still rare in German-language scientific debate. In
addition to the fundamental question of what form the children's rights to
be guaranteed will take on in everyday media practice in a digitally
networked world and how these rights will be implemented at a political and
practical level and accompanied at societal and legal levels, many
communication-related phenomena require respective specific considerations
with differentiated approaches, solutions and guarantees.

In this context merzWissenschaft invites all interested authors to submit
contributions on the topic of "Children|Media|Rights". The following are
examples of possible, although not exclusive, key questions to be handled in
the submitted contributions:

At the societal level:

• How do the media-related conceptual tasks faced by society and resulting
from children's rights change with the age of the child? What role do age
and developmental stage of the child play in the relationship between
parent, child and state? What is the underlying concept of "childhood"?

• Are state obligations to create adequately varied and child-appropriate
content derived from children's rights? What qualitative and
media-educational demands will this type of "positive content" have to meet?
How far can/should state regulations on content go?

• News comprises important information for both children and young adults.
What requirements on form and content emerge from children's rights when it
comes to the journalistic range offered? What specific possibilities and
limitations result for personalized news-feeds for minors?

At the state level:

• Participation means codetermination. What are the actually existing ways
of integrating children and youth in societal and political discourse on
media-related children's rights and their specific formulation, and which
currently appear to be Best Practices?

• Information-related and media-related children's rights are classically
oriented towards public communication media. How will it be possible in the
future to guarantee these rights without excessively restricting the use of
new forms of interactive, semi-public or private communication among
children and between children and adults? How far can and should the
conceptual task of protecting children from themselves go, for example with
regard to self-revelation in the network?

• Consent in data protection law is a classic example of the intersection of
child participation and state-granted parenting rights on the part of the
parents. What premises for electronic consent on the part of children emerge
from the developmental goals of children's rights? Will Art. 8 of the
European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fulfill these
requirements after taking effect in May 2018?

At the level of academic institutions:

• To what extent does the right to education also include a right to digital
learning or to the conveyance of digital competence in schools? What
requirements for digital teaching aids arise based on defined development
goals and objectives deriving from children's rights?

• In the age of algorithm-driven and bot-based communication, media literacy
also includes critical reflection on the processes of media production and
clarity regarding the communicator, which cannot (can no longer) be
guaranteed. How can the corresponding skills be conveyed as soon as during
early childhood?

• Digital technologies make it easy for minors to produce their own
communication and media content. The opportunity for self-expression in
media at an early stage brings positive chances for participation and
development. How can the active and critical encounter with the new
possibilities for expression succeed?

At the family level:

• What role should parents play in the realization of the children's rights
to be guaranteed? What is the relationship between these rights and parental
media education? What forms of educational efforts, campaigns and when
appropriate technical limitations are necessary in order to adequately
protect the rights of children (e. g. with regard to the phenomenon of
"sharenting", or the prolific sharing of images of the parents' own child in
social networks)?

• What is the role of the right to free time, recreation and play where
digital media are concerned?

• What can and should be the role of technical protective instruments and
"automated" access decisions in media education?

At the level of the media market:

The possibilities and practices of observing media use by children on the
part of private providers, their contractual partners (e. g. advertising
providers) and by state instances are ubiquitous.

• What is the significance of this form of "ubiquitous surveillance" from
the point of view of the development of the child's personality?

• What are the consequences of children's rights for the conceptualization
of products and services that collect data?

• What limits are required in the context of the unmanageable proliferation
of Internet-connected sensors (voice assistants, connected toys, GPS
tracking, home automation) with regard to the least possible restriction on
development?

• What risks to the developmental goals of children's rights are posed by
insertion of individualized advertisements in content? What role can, may
and should the perspective of children as (young) consumers play in the
conceptualization of products and services?

• What forms of media-related research on use and observation of
supply-driven markets are called for by children's rights? What kind of
knowledge basis is necessary in order to guarantee children's rights in
media practice?

merzWissenschaft provides a forum advancing scientific analysis in media
education and promoting progress in the theoretical foundation of the
discipline. For this purpose qualified articles are called for from various
relevant disciplines (including media-educational, communications sciences,
(developmental) psychological, legal and philosophical perspectives), also
with an interdisciplinary approach, for the continuing development of expert
media-educational dialog.

Of interest are original papers with an empirical or theoretical foundation,
presenting new findings, aspects or approaches to the topic and which are
explicitly related to one of the topic areas or questions outlined above or
which explore a separate topic within the scope of the overall context of
the Call.

Abstracts with a maximum length of 6,000 characters (including blank spaces)
can be submitted to the merz-editorial team ((merz /at/ jff.de)) until February 19,
2018. Submissions should follow the merzWissenschaft layout specifications,
available at www.merz-zeitschrift.de (follow "über merz -> für autoren und
autorinnen -> style guide merzWissenschaft"). Please feel free to contact
Susanne Eggert, tel. +49.89.68989.152, e-mail: (susanne.eggert /at/ jff.de)

Summary of Deadlines

- February 19, 2018: Submission of abstracts to (merz /at/ jff.de)

- March 2, 2018: Final decision on acceptance/rejection of the abstracts

- June 11, 2018: Submission of papers

- June 12 to July 23, 2018: Assessment phase

- August/September 2018: Revision phase (with multiple cycles, when 
appropriate)



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