Timeline:

30 March 2021| Submission of short abstracts (max. 250 words) to panel chairs

10 April 2021 | Submission of extended abstracts to panel chairs
based on AoIR guidelines (1000-1200 words)

15 April 2021 | Deadline for preconstituted panel contributions
to AoIR conference (submitted by panel chairs)

13-16 October 2021 | AoIR conference (virtual event)

Download the CfP as PDF

CfP: The in(ter)dependencies of mobile online and offline spaces: Reflections on methods, practices, ethics

Organizers: 
Katja Kaufmann (University of Innsbruck, Austria) &
Monika Palmberger (University of Vienna, Austria)

Background:
Mobile media technologies such as smartphones, now commonplace companions in numerous pockets, place users in digital (online) as well as physical (offline) spaces in novel ways, thus opening up new environments of affordances. In everyday life these mobile online and offline spaces are increasingly interdependent and interwoven in manifold ways. Practices, experiences, meanings and expectations are being negotiated across these spaces, while simultaneously bound by the spaces’ respective logics and limitations, leading to new interrelations and contradictions. The mobile, interrelating, yet not converging, nature of online and offline spaces, however, poses significant method(odolog)ical challenges. Researchers are confronted with questions such as: What are appropriate designs to study mobile online and offline spaces and their intersections? Do interdependent spaces call for likewise interdependent methodological approaches? How can researchers overcome a potential additivity in their methodical approaches to acknowledge that intersecting online and offline spaces are more than the sum of their separate parts? In what ways can elaborated mixed and multi-method designs capture complexity adequately without the researchers losing sight of the specifics? And what are the ethical and practical implications for the parties involved?

With the AoIR panel and the associated special issue of Media and Communication, we seek to advance the methodological scholarship and cross-disciplinary exchange on ICTs and their embeddedness in everyday practices across mobile online and offline spaces. Submissions of contributions that develop or advance methodological approaches are encouraged, as are papers that explore epistemological, ethical or practical issues related to doing research on/at the intersections of mobile online and offline spaces.

The contributions may include, but are by no means limited to, the following issues:

• Creative, innovative and unexpected methods and approaches
• New applications of established methods
• Mobile methods
• Mixed methods, multi-method and multimodal designs
• Longitudinal and/or comparative approaches
• Ethnographic approaches
• Feminist and/or postcolonial approaches
• Reflections on positionality and/or research ethics

Procedure:
In the first stage, interested authors are invited to submit a short abstract (max. 250 words, with a tentative title and one or two key references) to session chairs Katja Kaufmann and Monika Palmberger (click on button below) by 30 March 2021. Please be as clear as possible as to how your proposed contribution addresses the call for papers.

Positively reviewed proposals will be invited for a submission of extended abstracts following the AoIR submission guidelines by 10 April 2021 which will then be compiled for a panel to be proposed to the AoIR conference as part of the regular submission process (extended AoIR submission deadline for papers and panels: 15 April 2021; https://aoir.org/aoir2021cfp/). Please note that this year’s annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers taking place from 13-16 October 2021 will be a virtual event.

In the second stage, selected authors will be invited to submit a full paper for review for the planned special issue of the open access journal Media and Communication by 30 November 2021. Publication of the issue is planned for summer 2022: www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/pages/view/nextissues#MobileSpaces