Call For Papers:
Special Issue of New Media & Society on the Democratization of Hacking & Making

Research on hacker culture has historically focused on a relatively narrow set of activities and practices related to open-source software, political protest, and criminality. Scholarship on making has generally been defined as hands-on work with a connection to craft. By contrast, “hacking” and “making” in the current day are increasingly inroads to a more diverse range of activities, industries, and groups. They may show a strong cultural allegiance or map new interpretations and trajectories.

These developments prompt us to revisit central questions: does the use of hacking/making terminologies carry with them particular valences? Are they deeply rooted in technologies, ideologies or cultures? Are they best examined through certain intellectual traditions? Can they be empowering to participants, or are they merely buzzwords that have been diluted and co-opted by governmental and business entities? What barriers to entry and participation exist?

The current issue explores and questions the growing diversity of uses stemming from this turn of hacking towards more popular uses and democratic contexts. Submissions that employ novel methodological and theoretical perspectives to understand this turn in hacking are encouraged. They should explore new opportunities for conversations and consider hacking as rooted in a specific phenomena, culture, environment, practice or movement. Criteria for admission in this special issue include rigor of analysis, caliber of interpretation, and relevance of conclusions.

Topics may include:

• Disparities of access and representation, such as gender, race and ethnicity
• Open-access environments for learning and production, such as hacker and maker spaces
• “Civic hacking” and open data movements on city, state and national levels
• Integration of hacking and making within industries
• Historical analyses of making/hacking such as phreaking and amateur computing
• Popularization of terms like “hacker” in newspapers, magazines and other publications
• Open-source hardware and software movements
• Appropriation of technology
• Hacking in non-western contexts, such as the global south and China
• Political implications of a popular shift in hacker/maker culture

Please email 400 word abstract proposals, along with a short author biography, by May 1, 2014 toaschrock@usc.edu and jhunsinger@wlu.ca. Final selected articles will be due during September 2014 and will undergo peer review.

Jeremy Hunsinger
Communication Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech

Call for Papers / Proposals

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1. Special Series
Call for Manuscripts
Critical Education

The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education
Series editors: Derek R. Ford (Syracuse University), Brad Porfilio
(Lewis University), Rebecca A.Goldstein (Montclair State University)

Abstracts due: Dec. 31, 2013
Manuscripts due: May 1, 2014

As the neoliberal agenda for public education in North America intensifies, educational literature has increasingly turned its attention toward understanding the logics and processes of neoliberal privatization. Additionally, attention has been paid as to how educators resist these processes and practices, both in the classroom and beyond. This special issue seeks to deepen our understanding of the neoliberal privatization of education by extending critical examinations to an underrepresented field of cultural production: that
of mainstream media reporting on education and the neoliberal privatization of education, which many believe represents a new round of primitive accumulation. By examining and analyzing the mainstream media’s relationship to the processes in which neoliberal education ideologies are constructed, reflected, and reified, articles in this issue will explicate the various ways in which the mainstream media has helped facilitate and legitimate neoliberalism as a universal logic in reforming education, both locally and globally. Articles will also speak to how critical educations have guided students in K-20 schools to understand the mainstream media’s relationship to supporting the neoliberal takeover of schools.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, theoretical, pedagogical and narrative articles that approach this topic from a variety of perspectives and frameworks. Articles included in the special issue may ask and examine questions such as, but not limited to: How has media coverage of teachers’ unions and teachers’ strikes reinforced and/or advanced privatization? What shift has taken place in terms of who is positioned in the media as educational “experts”? What are the differences between the way that various major news networks, newspapers, and news magazines talk about educational privatization? How are Teach For America and Teach For All being propelled by media coverage? What are the variations in media coverage of the neoliberal agenda for education? What are the alternatives and prospects for challenges to the mainstream media? How has ALEC impacted school reform policies and practices on the state level and to what extent has the media covered it? How have critical educators positioned their students to understand the  mainstream media’s role in supporting the corporate agenda for schooling?

Critical Education is an international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is interested in theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education.

An early expression of interest and a 250-500 word abstract is preferred by December 31, 2013. Please address correspondence to drford@syr.edu, and include “Critical Education” in the subject line.

For details on manuscript submission see: http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/information/authors

The influence of Roger Simon’s calling as a teacher extends in incalculable directions. For decades, his teaching at the University of Toronto questioned status quo practices found in activism, schools, museums, media, and other sites of public memory. Simon’s influence is as subtle in these multiple directions as it is profound in specific sites where his colleagues and former students now work.

In a special Canadian Social Studies issue we seek to honour Roger and his work with the focused attention, theoretical risk and radical possibility he practiced and encouraged. We do so by inviting contributions from those whose work takes up, extends, or is imbued with Roger’s influence as a teacher and as a scholar.

Submission deadline is January 5, 2014.

Click here for more details:

http://thenhier.ca/en/content/r-i-simon-pedagogy-public-possibility

For more information, please contact the editor Kent den Heyer at kdenheye@ualberta.ca.

Historical Encounters is a new interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the empirical and theoretical study of historical consciousness, historical cultures, & history education. Submissions from across the fields of public history, history didactics, curriculum & pedagogy studies, cultural studies, narrative theory, and historical theory fields are all welcome.

For more details, please visit http://hej.hermes-history.net/index.php/hej

Call for papers / Appel de textes

Special Issue Focus: Multimedia in/as scholarship

Anila Asghar and Teresa Strong-Wilson (McGill University) invite submissions for a special issue of the McGill Journal of Education on Multimedia in/as Scholarship. This issue invites scholars from a wide variety of disciplines in education to explore the use of multimedia in/as research. It comes in the wake of the increasing proliferation of multimedia tools within scholarship generally yet the relative paucity of multimedia within scholarly articles, even those that claim to push boundaries. We believe that this is because, despite the move to e-books and e-journals, the imprint of paper (i.e., the static, print-bound PDF) remains dominant, profoundly influencing the ways in which scholarship is presented, shared and becomes re-legitimized. This special issue invites scholars using multimedia in their research to submit pieces that creatively engage with multimedia, or with the embedding of multimedia, within their scholarship (e.g., artful visual and/or audio artifacts or productions, blogging, digital storytelling, imovies, podcasts, photoessays, photographs, social media, wikis, etc.). We invite those working in various disciplines within education (e.g., arts, curriculum, digital media, literacy, science & math, scholarship of practice, social justice education & peace studies, social studies, teacher education, etc.) and drawing on various methodologies (e.g., arts-based, ethnographic, memory work, participatory forms of research, self-study, etc.) to consider submitting to this issue. We also encourage submissions from new scholars and doctoral students.

Submissions may be for blind peer-reviewed articles or non-peer-reviewed Notes from the Field (see descriptions under Author Guidelines here: http://mje.mcgill.ca/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions). We also welcome 1-page proposals for a MJE Discussion Forum that would take up issues arising from the use of multimedia in/as scholarship; possible issues could be: how to better connect cutting-edge teaching with research; ethical issues in multimedia scholarship; the implications of multimedia for doctoral formation, academic careers, and tenure; the impact of multimedia on disciplines, research methodologies and/or research methods courses.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: September 30th, 2013

• Please submit papers online following the procedures found here: http://mje.mcgill.ca/about/submissions

• Please indicate that the submission is for the special issue on “Multimedia in/as Scholarship”