[Commlist] cfp: Methodological innovations and challenges of research on digitally connected homes

Methodological innovations and challenges of research on digitally 
connected homes

Special Issue in Digital Creativity

Deadline for abstracts: October 4, 2021

The past few years have seen a rapid increase in the number and variety 
of technologies embedded in and passing through home environments. 
Researchers increasingly recognize the distinct nature of the home as a 
site of research. The past four decades have seen a significant shift in 
the technology environment from the "media home" (Spigel, 2001) to the 
"smart home" (Woods, 2021). We have seen significant additions to the 
abundant digital ecology of the home, increasing the number of digital 
access-points and available services, and intensifying the 
data-circulation in connected homes. The home is a site of mundane, 
private, usually hidden but highly significant everyday practices (Pink 
et al. 2017). Yet it is also increasingly becoming a part of national 
healthcare infrastructures through the deployment of welfare 
technologies, and energy policy through smart meters. During the "global 
lockdown" caused by the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, 
technologies took a prominent role as the home transformed itself into a 
site in which activities such as learning, parenting, work, 
entertainment, and remote medical care intermingled.

The increasing complexity of the digital infrastructures and the 
experiences, spaces, visions of the home in a current era of connected 
homes and connected living poses particular challenges for conducting 
research in such an environment. This also calls for methodological 
innovations that shape how we see the home as a research site and how we 
engage with it.

For this special issue, we invite contributions that make a strong 
methodological contribution by highlighting the innovations and 
challenges of conducting research on technology in home environments. 
Papers could, for example:

·       Explore cross-disciplinary methodological approaches in a 
project related to the connected home.

·       Develop an innovative methodological framework or research 
design to address a specific research challenge concerning the 
technologically connected home.

·       Apply new and emergent forms and sources of digital data from 
the connected home.

·       Describe and evaluate research tools and techniques.

Submissions may cover issues such as:

·       Participatory and co-design approaches to research related to 
the home

·       Novel ways of capturing, visualizing and analyzing digital 
infrastructures and data connected to the home

·       Multisensory and multimodal approaches to studying technologies 
in the home

·       Narrative methods for researching and designing in the home

·       Negotiating relationships between researchers, research 
participants, and technologies in the home

·       Ethical dilemmas related to methods for studying technology in 
the home

·       Interventions as a research method to study technological 
practices in the home

·       Probing and elicitation techniques for uncovering practices with 
technology in the home

Submissions Requirements: Submission to this special issue is a 
two-stage process. Authors interested in contributing are invited to 
submit an extended abstract (500 words) for review. Please email 
abstracts directly to the editors listed below. Authors whose abstracts 
are accepted will then be invited to submit a full paper (up to 7000 
words). Full papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed for acceptance 
into the special issue.

Upon acceptance of the abstract, you will be sent further authors' 
guidelines based on the Digital Creativity guidelines (Instructions for 
Authors) at https://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/NDCR. Note that acceptance 
of abstract alone does not imply acceptance for publication in the 
journal. The extended abstract should include the following information: 
1) Name of author(s) with email addresses and affiliation, if applicable 
2) Title of the paper 3) Body of the abstract 4) Preliminary 
bibliography 5) Author(s)'s short bio(s)

Guest Editors: Henry Mainsah, Emma Slade, Dag Slettemeås, Dale 
Southerton, and Ardis Storm-Mathisen

Important Dates:

Abstracts due (via email): October 4, 2021

Submission method: Please send abstracts as PDFs (and any questions) to 
Henry Mainsah, (henryma /at/ oslomet.no), as well as to the editors of Digital 
Creativity, (dcsubmit /at/ gmail.com).

(No payments are required from authors of accepted articles.)

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions.

References

Pink, S. Leder-Mackley, K. Morosanu, R. Mitchell, V. & Bhamra, T. (2017) 
Making homes: ethnography and design. Oxford: Bloomsbury.

Spigel, L. (2001). Media homes: then and now. International Journal of 
Cultural Studies, 4(4): 385-411.

Woods, H. S. (2021): Smart homes: domestic futurity as Infrastructure. 
Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.1895254

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