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From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Colin
Rhinesmith
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2014 1:18 AM
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Subject: [Air-L] CFP: Special Issue of The Journal of Community Informatics

Call for Papers: The Journal of Community Informatics
(http://ci-journal.net)

Special Issue - Research Methods for Community Informatics

The Journal of Community Informatics (JoCI) is seeking scholarly articles
and notes from the field for a special issue on Research Methods for
Community Informatics. Community Informatics is the study and the practice
of enabling communities with Information and Communications Technologies
(ICTs). JoCI is an international journal that focuses on how researchers and
practitioners work with communities towards the effective use of ICTs to
improve their processes, achieve their objectives, overcome the "digital
divides" that exist both within and between communities, and empower
communities and citizens. This is possible in areas such as health, cultural
production, civic management and e-governance, among others. JoCI is a focal
point for the communication of research of interest to a global network of
academics, community informatics practitioners, and national and
multi-lateral policy makers. JoCI is currently indexed in the IBSS and
Google Scholar as well as several indexes of Open Access journals. Efforts
are underway concerning additional scholarly indexing. More information
regarding JoCI is available at http://ci-journal.net.

The guest editors for the special issue are: Dr. Colin Rhinesmith
(University of Oklahoma, USA), Dr. Mark Wolfe (University of Alberta,
Canada), and Andy Bytheway (Retired Professor of Information Management at
the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa).

Objective

This special issue will focus on the methods used to investigate how ICTs
can support local economic development, social justice, and political
empowerment. Community Informatics (CI) is a point of convergence concerning
the use of ICTs for diverse stakeholders, including community leaders and
activists, nonprofit groups, policymakers, users/citizens, and the range of
academics working across (and integrating) disciplines as diverse as
Information Studies, Management, Computer Science, Social Work, Planning and
Development Studies. This diversity brings with it a range of methodological
approaches - and tensions - to the field of CI. The special issue seeks to
both disentangle and organize the use of existing methods in CI research and
to explore innovative new approaches used by researchers and practitioners
in their work with communities.

Topics

This special issue seeks articles focused on methodological topics and
issues related to community informatics research. We encourage contributions
that come from a wide range of perspectives, including (but not limited to):

Conceptual foundations. What are the pros and cons of positivist,
interpretivist, and critical methods in the CI context?
Data elicitation. What techniques are needed for reliable data to be
collected in local communities, and what is the role of the cloud, "big
data," and data analytics in this context?
Measures of success. What is the extent to which key variables and measures
of CI investment success are actually understood?
Ethics. How are research ethics understood in the context of CI work?
Comparative analysis. How can shared local and global research resources be
developed for comparative studies in different regions of the world?
Cross-cultural studies. How are data elicitation techniques and methods used
in a cross-cultural context?
Extant theory. What is the applicability of other extant theories from
related research areas (e.g., MIS, anthropology, science and technology
studies, etc.) to the field of CI methodology?

We also invite authors to submit "Notes from the Field" from CI
practitioners and policy makers that describe relevant methodological topics
and issues.

Submission procedure and deadlines

Full original and unpublished articles for this special issue should be
submitted via the JoCI website. Authors are invited to submit full-length
papers between 5000-7000 words and notes from the field between 3000-5000
words. All full-length research articles will be double blind peer-reviewed.
Notes from the field containing insights and analytical perspectives from
practitioners and policy makers are also encouraged - these will not be
peer-reviewed. All authors should provide a note to the editors via the
website indicating their interest in having their submissions considered for
the special issue on "Research Methods for Community Informatics."
Interested authors should consult the journal's editorial policies and
author guidelines for submissions at
http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/information/authors.

Full article draft submissions due: November 15, 2014.
Notes from the field due: December 15, 2014.

All inquiries should be directed to:

Colin Rhinesmith,
Guest Editor
Email: crhines@illinois.edu (before August 1, 2014) / crhinesmith@ou.edu
(after August 1, 2014)

Colin Rhinesmith, Ph.D.
Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~crhines

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Journal of Peer Production (JoPP)
CFP for Special Issue on Feminism and (Un)Hacking

Editors: Shaowen Bardzell (Indiana University), Lilly Nguyen (University of California - Irvine), Sophie Toupin (McGill University)

There has been a recent growth in interest in feminist approaches to practices like hacking, tinkering, geeking and making. What started off as an interest in furthering representations of women in the technical fields of computer science and engineering, often along the lines of liberal feminism, has now grown into social, cultural, and political analyses of gendered modes of social reproduction, expertise, and work, among others. Practices of hacking, tinkering, geeking, and making have been criticized for their overtly masculinist approaches, often anchored in the Euro-American techno-centers of Silicon Valley and Cambridge that have created a culture of entrepreneurial heroism and a certain understanding of technopolitical liberation, or around the German Chaos Computer Club (CCC).

With this special issue of the Journal of Peer Production, we hope to delve more deeply into these critiques to imagine new forms of feminist technical praxis that redefine these practices and/or open up new ones. How can we problematize hacking, tinkering, geeking and making through feminist theories and epistemologies? How do these practices, in fact, change when we begin to consider them through a feminist prism? Can we envision new horizons of practice and possibility through a feminist critique?

In this call, we understand feminist perspectives to be pluralistic, including intersectional, trans, genderqueer, and race-sensitive viewpoints that are committed to the central principles of feminism--agency, fulfillment, empowerment, diversity, and social justice. We refer to the term hacking with a full understanding of its histories and limitations. That said, we use it provisionally to provoke, stimulate, and reimagine new possibilities for technical feminist practice. Hacking, as a form of subjectivity and a mode of techno-political engagement, has recently emerged as a site of intense debate, being equally lauded as a political ethos of freedom and slandered as an elitist form of expertise. These fervid economic and political ideals have been challenged and at times come under attack because they not only displace women and genderqueer within these technological communities but, more importantly, because they displace gendered forms of reflection and engagement.

Drawing on a growing community of feminist scholarship and practices, we hope to build on this momentum to invite submissions that reconceptualize the relationship between feminism and hacking. We aim to highlight feminist hackers, makers and geeks not only as new communities of experts, but as new modes of engagement and novel theoretical developments. In turn, with this special issue, we hope to challenge both concepts of feminism and hacking to ask several questions. How can feminist approaches to hacking open up new possibilities for technopolitics? Historically, hacking discourses center on political and labor aesthetics of creation, disruption, and transgression. How can feminist theories of political economy push technopolitical imaginaries towards alternate ideals of reproduction, care, and maintenance? Conversely, we also ask how notions of hacking can open up new possibilities for feminist epistemologies and modes of engagement?

We seek scholarly articles and commentaries that address any of the following themes and beyond. We are also interested in portraits, understood broadly, of feminist hackers, makers and geeks that help us better understand feminist hacker, maker and geek culture. We also solicit experimental formats such as photo essays or other media that address the special issue themes.

· What is distinctive about feminist hacking or hackers? How do feminist hacking practices help create a distinct feminist hacking culture?
· Why are feminist hacking practices emerging? Which constellation of factors help the emergence of such practices?
· What do we know about the feminist hacker spectrum? i.e. what are the differences among feminist hacking practices and how can we make sense of these distinctions?
· What tensions in hacking and/or in hacker practices and culture(s) come to the fore when feminist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and/or anti-oppression perspectives are taken?
· What does feminist hacker ethic(s) entail?
· What kind of social imaginaries are emerging with feminist hacking and hackers?
· What kinds of hacking are taking place beyond the Euro-American tradition?

Submission abstracts of 300-500 words due by September 8, 2014, and should be sent to femhack@peerproduction.net.
All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines; see http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/​
Full papers and materials (peer reviewed​ papers around 8,000 words; testimonies, self-portraits and experimental formats up to 4,000 words) are due by January 31st, 2015 for review.