Thank you all for the incredible flood of suggestions and for not being openly irritated about the short notice. Special thanks to Aneesh for reading proposals between encounters with a job candidate today. See below for the email message I just sent to ASA with 4 proposals attached. Although Aneesh and I were charged to submit only two proposals, given the amazing collaborative discussion that took place today, I thought that we might as well give the Program Committee several admittedly overlapping options. Most of the proposals I received were not complete, so I did my best to combine suggestions from multiple people into each proposal while listing as organizers the CITASA members who contributed the most. Note that these are just ideas for the Program Committee to consider: if they like a submission, they will invite organizers (not necessarily the ones recommended here) to submit a final description. Note also that the Committee does not assume the people listed as potential participants have been contacted or that they will eventually participate. So don't worry if your proposal has been altered, your name listed as a potential participant even if you have no intention of attending the 2012 meetings, etc. Let's just hope that one or more of these session proposals capture the imagination of someone on the Program Committee and at least one member of CITASA is asked to organize a session. I absolutely love the way this section works together!!!!! Rebecca G. Adams Associate Provost for Planning & Assessment University of North Carolina at Greensboro P.O. Box 26170 Greensboro, NC 27402-6170 Email: Rebecca_Adams@uncg.edu Voice: 336-334-3578 FAX: 336-334-4342 ----- Forwarded by Rebecca Adams R_ADAMS/facultystaff/uncg on 11/12/2010 08:43 PM ----- Rebecca Adams R_ADAMS/facultystaff/uncg 11/12/2010 08:41 PM To meetings@asanet.org cc Subject 2012 Annual Meeting: Member Suggestion I am submitting the four attached proposals on behalf of the CIT section of ASA for consideration for inclusion as thematic sessions on the program for the 2012 meeting. Please confirm that these proposals have been received passed on to the Program Committee for their review. Please contact the recommended organizers and/or discussants if you have questions about a specific proposal. Thank you, Rebecca G. Adams Associate Provost for Planning & Assessment University of North Carolina at Greensboro P.O. Box 26170 Greensboro, NC 27402-6170 Email: Rebecca_Adams@uncg.edu Voice: 336-334-3578 FAX: 336-334-4342

Dear all, I just wanted give you an update about our proposal for a thematic panel for the 2012 meetings. As you remember, we got wonderful suggestions for possible sessions from many of you. Rebecca submitted four of them on our behalf. Unfortunately, the ASA program committee could accept only one but none that we submitted. They asked us to create a new proposal that consolidates some of the overlapping themes from our four proposals. I was tasked with creating a new proposal, which I did, and am happy to report that Erik Olin Wright, President-Elect, has given us an informal approval via email but we will have to wait for an official approval from the ASA program committee about the proposal and panelists before we could definitively announce its acceptance. I'm pasting the proposal below for you all. Thanks to everyone who participated in this process. Best, Aneesh www.uwm.edu/~aneesh Type of Session: Thematic Working Title: Virtual Utopias and Dystopias Modes of collective existence have multiplied over the years. In addition to physical togetherness, social life increasingly consists of virtual interactions. This session focuses on three specific modes of virtual interaction: community (e.g., Facebook), fantasy (e.g., digital games, MMORPGs), and exposé (e.g., Wikileaks), all mediated by distributed networks of information and communication technologies. These virtual networks are both real and utopian. On the one hand, they are populated with real people and their concrete concerns. But they also remain utopian, even dystopian in some cases, on the other. They are utopian in their imaginative constructions of what a good society -- full of solidarity with immediate connections to one’s entire social network, yet critical of state and corporate corruption -- would be. In some instances, virtual networks are also constructed as dystopian, for they are argued to produce a society that has forgotten the importance of the physical ground of interaction, where its members spend an inordinate number of hours glued to the machine, with dystopian depictions in popular films like The Matrix. This session will be devoted to parsing out the manifestations of such utopias and dystopias. Possible presentations might consider, for example, how virtual gaming affects the quality of socialization among the young; how technology facilitates or discourages close ties across generations, races/ethnicities, or genders; or how technological applications can reinforce or dismantle broad processes, like social stratification; how activist networks facilitate new forms of politics; or how tensions between a global social formation comes into friction with state-centric national formations. On Nov 12, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Rebecca Adams R_ADAMS wrote: > > Thank you all for the incredible flood of suggestions and for not being openly irritated about the short notice. Special thanks to Aneesh for reading proposals between encounters with a job candidate today. > > See below for the email message I just sent to ASA with 4 proposals attached. Although Aneesh and I were charged to submit only two proposals, given the amazing collaborative discussion that took place today, I thought that we might as well give the Program Committee several admittedly overlapping options. Most of the proposals I received were not complete, so I did my best to combine suggestions from multiple people into each proposal while listing as organizers the CITASA members who contributed the most. Note that these are just ideas for the Program Committee to consider: if they like a submission, they will invite organizers (not necessarily the ones recommended here) to submit a final description. Note also that the Committee does not assume the people listed as potential participants have been contacted or that they will eventually participate. So don't worry if your proposal has been altered, your name listed as a potential participant even if you have no intention of attending the 2012 meetings, etc. Let's just hope that one or more of these session proposals capture the imagination of someone on the Program Committee and at least one member of CITASA is asked to organize a session. > > I absolutely love the way this section works together!!!!! > > Rebecca G. Adams > Associate Provost for Planning & Assessment > University of North Carolina at Greensboro > P.O. Box 26170 > Greensboro, NC 27402-6170 > > Email: Rebecca_Adams@uncg.edu > Voice: 336-334-3578 > FAX: 336-334-4342 > > ----- Forwarded by Rebecca Adams R_ADAMS/facultystaff/uncg on 11/12/2010 08:43 PM ----- > Rebecca Adams R_ADAMS/facultystaff/uncg > 11/12/2010 08:41 PM > > To > meetings@asanet.org > cc > Subject > 2012 Annual Meeting: Member Suggestion > > > > > I am submitting the four attached proposals on behalf of the CIT section of ASA for consideration for inclusion as thematic sessions on the program for the 2012 meeting. Please confirm that these proposals have been received passed on to the Program Committee for their review. Please contact the recommended organizers and/or discussants if you have questions about a specific proposal. > > > > > Thank you, > > Rebecca G. Adams > Associate Provost for Planning & Assessment > University of North Carolina at Greensboro > P.O. Box 26170 > Greensboro, NC 27402-6170 > > Email: Rebecca_Adams@uncg.edu > Voice: 336-334-3578 > FAX: 336-334-4342 > <Gaming in a Real Utopia is SRS BIZNS.docx><Technologically-Facilitated Utopias.docx><Utopian and Dystopian Features of Online Communities.docx><Virtual Communities.doc>_______________________________________________ > CITASA mailing list > CITASA@list.citasa.org > http://list.citasa.org/mailman/listinfo/citasa_list.citasa.org