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Webinar: Deliberative Democracy - 24 March 2021
by Matthew Moore 02 Mar '21

02 Mar '21

More info & RSVP: https://meetu.ps/e/JQBXp/1327F/a Many Australians are disengaged from the democratic process and untrusting of those who are supposed to represent them. In response to this disenchantment, a range of deliberative processes have developed that allow citizens from diverse backgrounds to discuss issues in depth. Such processes mirror the shift of information and communications models in other domains from “broadcast” to “conversation” and offer practitioners both opportunities to learn and to deploy their skills in new ways. This session explores: - What deliberative democracy means in its different forms? - How it can work with existing institutions? - What might grassroots initiatives look like? Chris Riedy is Professor of Sustainability Transformations and Director of Graduate Research at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney. Chris is Lead Steward of the Transforming Narratives network under the SDG Transformation Forum, a Senior Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance project, a member of the Sustainability Transitions Research Network and the New Economy Network Australia, and is on the Editorial Board of Futures. Nivek Thompson is undertaking a PhD at the Institute for Sustainable Futures focusing on answering the question: what impact do democratic innovations have on political elites’ understanding and practice of democracy? Nivek is the founder and director of Deliberately Engaging where she recruits mini-publics for deliberative processes around Australia and supports online engagement through the European crowdsourcing platform Synthetron. Willow Berzin is the Founder and Chief Assember of The Coalition of Everyone where she designs, curates and facilitates assemblies, bringing people together to hold real conversations that renew trust, disrupt the politics of fear, and build a politics of hope. Before this, she has many years of experience as a creative and brand director. UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing this email.

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CfP 4S 2021 Open Panel: Scaling Software Studies (Inside) Out: Parallelization, Scalabilities, Distributed Computing Machineries, and Their Materialities
by Yoehan Oh 02 Mar '21

02 Mar '21

*** Apologies for cross-postings *** Hello everyone, CALL FOR PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS: I'm writing this to invite you to the 4S 2021 (The Society for Social Studies of Science) open panel *#152 *"Scaling Software Studies (Inside) Out: Parallelization, Scalabilities, Distributed Computing Machineries, and Their Materialities." The 4S conference this year <https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/> will be an online/offline (Toronto, Canada) hybrid conference, from October 6th (Wed.) to 9th (Sat.). The deadline for submitting presentation abstracts (up to 250 words) is Monday, March 8th 2021, using the conference submission portal: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss21/. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions on this panel: ohy(a)rpi.edu; yoehan.oh(a)gmail.com. Looking forward to hearing from you! Kind regards, Yoehan *PANEL ABSTRACT* (also at https://www.4sonline.org/152-scaling-software-studies-inside-out-paralleliz… ) Studies of information representation practices have shown that knowledge productions are conditioned by the affordances of those representing practices/systems like information architectures, classification schemas, and database management systems (Bowker & Star 2000; Bowker 2005; Poirier 2017) and that those systems’ affordances are materialized, carrying their own weight despite information’s supposed immateriality/virtuality (Edwards, 2010; Chun 2011; Dourish 2017; Jones 2017; Ribes 2017). Nevertheless, data processing practices having been parallelized and scaled out for last decades, from Google’s MapReduce, Spanner, BigTable (enabling to replace oligopolistic vendors’ proprietary software/hardware solutions with open-sourced/commodified software/hardware combinations), through Apache Hadoop (modeling Google’s distributed software), to Transformer (a more parallelizable deep-learning model, on which OpenAI’s GPT-3 was built) to name a few, have been less scrutinized, though these distributed practices contributed much to solving scalability issues (c.f. Ribes 2014) in ever-increasing resource-heavy computing systems, being epistemically infrastructured (Malazita & Resetar 2019). This panel seeks to collectively problematize those distributed systems for storing, indexing, retrieving, and pattern-recognizing data, and explore the themes/methods including, but not limited to, – How have distributed/parallel computing architectures (either software-or-hardware, or both) and algorithmic/programming models appeared in relation to others (Stevens 2013; Dourish 2016)? How are materialities and scalabilities related there? – Which hegemonic cultural/societal norms have those parallel systems and then-contemporary societies had in common (McPherson 2012)? – Are there any homogenizing, mono-cultural/geographical, or proprietary conditions these distributed computing machineries demand? By which methods would those conditions be noticed? What consequences follow? If those conditions should be cancelled/loosened, which alternatives (e.g. computing “of” the South) be needed (Amrute & Murillo 2020; Takhteyev 2012; Ochigame 2020)? *KEYWORDS* computing, distributed data processing, software studies, critical data studies, information infrastructure studies *REFERENCES* – Amrute, Sareeta, and Luis Felipe R. Murillo. “Introduction: Computing in/from the South.” *Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience *6, no. 2 (2020): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.34594 – Bowker, Geoffrey C. *Memory Practices in the Sciences. *Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. – Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. *Sorting Things Out: Classification and its consequences*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. – Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Always already there, or software as memory,” in *Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, *137-173. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015424.003.0008 – Dourish, Paul. “Algorithms and their others: Algorithmic culture in context.” *Big Data & Society *3, no. 2 (2016): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716665128 – Dourish, Paul. *The Stuff of Bits: An essay on the materialities of information. *Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10999.001.0001 – Edwards, Paul N. *A Vast Machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. *Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. – Jones, Matthew L. “Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to PageRank.” In *Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures, *edited by Lorraine Daston, 311-328. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226432533.003.0012 – Malazita, James W., and Korryn Resetar. “Infrastructures of abstraction: how computer science education produces anti-political subjects.” *Digital Creativity *30, no. 4 (2019): 300-312. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2019.1682616 – McPherson, Tara. “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In *Race after the Internet, *edited by Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White, 21-37. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. – Ochigame, Rodrigo. “Informatics of the oppressed.” *LOGIC *11 (2020): 53-74. https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/ – Poirier, Lindsay. “A Turn for the Scruffy: An Ethnographic Study of Semantic Web Architecture.” In *Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference, *pp. 359-367. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091505 – Ribes, David. “Ethnography of scaling, or, how to fit a national research infrastructure in the room.” In *Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, *pp. 158-170. 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531624 – Stevens, Hallam. *Life out of sequence: a data-driven history of bioinformatics. *University of Chicago Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226080345.001.0001 *CONVENOR(S): * Yoehan Oh. Ph.D. Candidate at Department of Science and Technology Studies, at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute; ohy(a)rpi.edu; yoehan.oh(a)gmail.com. -- Yoehan Oh Ph.D. Candidate Department of Science and Technology Studies The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Rensselaer Polytechnic institute 110 Eighth Street Troy, NY 12180 United States https://info.rpi.edu/people/yoehan-oh e-mail: ohy(a)rpi.edu ; yoehan.oh(a)gmail.com phone: (518) 368-1257 pronouns: he/him

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Informal Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers
by Danielle Blunt 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

Hi all, [Hacking//Hustling](https://HackingHustling.org) is so excited to announce a forthcoming event series in April on Informal Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers! This webinar series will bring sex workers into conversation with designers, academics, policy-makers, regulators, media, and tech companies to draw attention to issues plaguing sex workers online, including: content moderation, deplatforming, algorithmic profiling, surveillance, discrimination, data security, access barriers, and design justice. Learn more at: https://hackinghustling.org/informal-criminalized-precarious-sex-workers-or… Register:http://bit.ly/sextechinternet RT this tweet to share: https://twitter.com/hackinghustling/status/1366450379899219979?s=20[htt](ht… Event Schedule (in EST): Saturday, April 3, 4 – 5:30 pm: Sex Work as Work and Sex Work as Anti-Work Tuesday, April 6, 12 – 1 pm : Sexual Gentrification: An Internet Sex Workers Built Wednesday, April 7, 12 – 1 pm: Sex Worker Activism: Barriers, Exclusion, and Organising Thursday, April 8, 12 – 1 pm: Decoding Stigma: Designing for Sex Worker Liberatory Futures Thursday, April 8, 6 – 7:30 pm: Sex Work and Migration Monday, April 12, TBA: Sex Work in a Transnational Context Thursday, April 17, 6 – 7:30pm: Decriminalization Campaigns in the U.S. The conference is facilitated by The Disabled Sex Workers’ Coalition, Hacking//Hustling, Cornell Law School Gender Justice Clinic, Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society, and the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; we are co-sponsored by The Berger International Legal Studies Program, The Cornell Labor Law Clinic, The Dorothea S. Clarke Program in Feminist Jurisprudence, Justice Catalyst, and the Cornell student chapters of Outlaw. Please register and help us share! In solidarity, Danielle Blunt (she/her) Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.

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cfp @ 4s :Academic Automation, Machine Un/Learning and Artificial Non/Intelligence
by Jeremy Hunsinger 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

7. Academic Automation, Machine Un/Learning and Artificial Non/Intelligence Over the last 70 years, computational and networked media have become deeply integrated with higher education and have slowly adopted and integrated various technologies. The newest generation of technologies engaging higher education centers around what is popularly called artificial intelligence, otherwise known as machine learning. Machine learning creates models that, in part self-design solutions that may include interaction, prediction, and other simulatable aspects. This panel invites papers that engage with questions of academic automation, machine un/learning, and artificial non/intelligence in the academic context. It seeks critical papers that examine questions around automatic grading, artificial teaching assistants, robotic instructors, other academic technologies, and the transformation of the student and professor roles concerning these technologies. This panel also seeks papers that engage these technologies in other academic roles, such as research or service as work. How are these technologies mediating different academic functions? Who benefits from these technologies? And who is privileged by them? We have to consider the roles of craft, artistry, and humanity in those roles. Is there an argument to be made for automation in the academy? Is there an argument to be made for AI/Machine learning in the academy? What kind of relations do these establish? Following Ivan Illich, should we be rethinking our relations to develop tools and systems that treat us as human, perhaps even more human than our current system? Following Virilio, what will be their accident? What are the good relations between our academic institutions, their people, and these new technologies? Keywords: academic automation, AI in the academy, new academic technologies call-for-submissions Directions and rules https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss21/index.php direct link to submissions -- Jeremy Hunsinger Associate Professor Communication Studies Wilfrid Laurier University

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Funding for international students: MA in IR and Global Communications, Manchester Metropolitan University
by Adi Kuntsman 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

Deareveryone, please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in applyingfor this programme Weare proud to announce that our successful MA in International Relations andGlobal Communications (https://www.mmu.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/course/ma-international-relations-… offering scholarships of up to £3,000 to international students applying forfull time study for September 2021. Details of the scholarship are here: https://www.mmu.ac.uk/study/international/before-you-apply/fees-and-funding… Furtherinformation about the MA: The relationship between politics and communications hasnever been more dynamic or more important than it is today. Digital media,particularly social media, is fundamentally changing the terrain of politics.This course allows you to study those interactions within an interdisciplinaryenvironment, drawing on research and expertise from the fields of politics,international relations, information and communications, journalism andlinguistics. You will study media and communications theory, plus thehistorical development of international relations and key issues incontemporary global politics, becoming an expert in how new communicationtechnologies shape societies, politics and individual lives. Furtherinformation about funding: ·Applicants must hold an offer for a full, taught Masters course (180 credits)at Manchester Metropolitan University. ·This offer is only available for programmes commencing in September 2021 orJanuary 2022. ·Eligible applicants who achieve a UK First Class degree, or the internationalequivalent, in their undergraduate studies will be awarded a £3,000Scholarship. ·Eligible applicants with a degree classification which is lower than a UK FirstClass degree, or the international equivalent, in their undergraduate degreewill be awarded a £2,000 Scholarship. Dr Adi Kuntsman, Reader in Digital Politics Programme Leader, MA in International Relations and Global Communications Coordinator, PhD pathway in Digital Politics Department of Politics | Manchester Metropolitan University Geoffrey Manton Building| Manchester | M15 6LL| Web| Online office hours (term time only): Thursday 1-2pm and Friday 4-5pm on Teams (chat or call). Latest publications: --“Reverberation, Affect and Digital Politics ofResponsibility”, in Boler and Davis, AffectivePolitics of Digital Media: Propaganda by Other Means, Routledge. --“Environmentalmedia amidst the COVID-19 pandemic”, rapid response special issue of Journal of Environmental Media (co-edited with Becky Alexis-Martin and Liu Xin)

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MGRL Lecture Series: David Parisi & Justin Grandinetti
by Adriana de Souza e Silva 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

*** Apologies for cross-postings*** Department of Communication Mobile Gaming Research Lab Spring ‘21 Lecture Series Please join us for the Mobile Gaming Research Lab’s Spring ‘21 Lecture Series webinar. To celebrate the release of the Retro Mobile Gaming Database (http://database.mglab.chass.ncsu.edu <http://database.mglab.chass.ncsu.edu/>/), this webinar will feature scholars whose research is at the intersection of mobile games, archives and history. The talks will explore the history of touch-based mobile game interfaces and how Pokémon Go contributes to the creation of digital memory. WHEN: April 7, 2021 | 1:30-2:30 p.m. EST Featured Presentations Instrumentalities of Touch in Mobile Game Interfaces Dr. David Parisi, Associate Professor of Communication, College of Charleston (USA) Touch-based mobile game interfaces, by opening up new sites of contact between players and games, participate in a fantastical re-imagination of touch that originated in 1950s theories of information transmission. According to this model, touch could be deployed as the standing reserve of audiovisual interfaces, an alternative pathway for transmitting messages that compensates for the overloading and overcrowding of seeing and hearing in the modern media environment. By mapping the gap between these imagined transformative uses for digital touch and touch’s comparatively mundane deployment in contemporary mobile games, this talk provides a framework for further explorations of the relationship between mobile gaming and tactility. Speaker Bio (https://communication.cofc.edu/about/faculty-staff-listing/parisi-david.php <https://communication.cofc.edu/about/faculty-staff-listing/parisi-david.php>) » Pokémon GO and Digital Memory Dr. Justin Grandinetti, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of North Carolina Charlotte (USA) Critical to the functionality of the location-aware augmented reality mobile gameplay of Pokémon GO are elements of pervasive data collection, storage, and processing. For the player, this manifests in location-aware log and journal features, but also through the new Pokéstop scanning process that allows developer Niantic to “crowdsource” AR maps. In this presentation, Dr. Grandinetti will examine the digital memory of Pokémon GO as posthuman cognitive assemblage (Hayles, 2016; Lee, 2018) and part of a lineage of a personalized relation to space. Speaker Bio (http://www.justingrandinetti.com/ <http://www.justingrandinetti.com/>)» REGISTER HERE: https://ncsu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Mxndqj3NQbCTlMS9aqoFmw <https://ncsu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Mxndqj3NQbCTlMS9aqoFmw> _________________________ Adriana de Souza e Silva University Faculty Scholar Professor Department of Communication NC State University http://www.souzaesilva.com _________________________ Adriana de Souza e Silva University Faculty Scholar Professor Department of Communication NC State University http://www.souzaesilva.com

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Culturally Responsive Research Webinars presented by NVivo & SAGE - FREE WEBINAR SERIES
by Silvana di Gregorio 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

We're proud to be partnering with SAGE Publishing on a webinar series focused on the importance of culturally responsive research in all the stages of the research process. The series starts in March 2021, below are the first two webinars: March 18, 2021 What More Can I Do?: An Exploration of Critical Advocacy Research and Decision Points toward Culturally Responsive Research Penny A. Pasque PhD, professor in Educational Studies and director of Qualitative Methods & QualLab for the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University March 19, 2021 Youth-Led Antiracism Research Adriana Aldana, MSW, PhD, assistant professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills Department of Social Work. Katie Richards-Schuster, AM, PhD, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. See the full schedule and register now - https://my.visme.co/view/y4mx14gx-culturally-responsive-webinar-series-sd Best wishes, Silvana Silvana di Gregorio, PhD Academic Research Director QSR International (UK) Limited Eastside, King's Cross Station, London N1C 4AX United Kingdom T +44 (0)1925 358 095 E s.digregorio(a)qsrinternational.com qsrinternational.com Disclaimer This transmission may contain information which is confidential and privileged and intended only for the addressee. If you are not the addressee you may not use, disseminate or copy this information. If you have received this information in error please notify the sender immediately. Thank you. QSR Privacy Policy

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CfP: 4th International Workshop on Geospatial Linked Data at ESWC2021 (SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED to March 15th)
by Beyza Yaman 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

Apologies for cross-posting! The 4th International Workshop on Geospatial Linked Data will be co-located with the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) on 7th June 2021 ( dice-group.github.io/GeoLD2021/). Abstract: ======================================= Geospatial data is vital for both traditional applications like navigation, logistics, and tourism and emerging areas like autonomous vehicles, smart buildings, and GIS on demand. Spatial linked data has recently transitioned from experimental prototypes to national infrastructure. However, the next generation of spatial knowledge graphs will integrate multiple spatial datasets with the large number of general datasets that contain some geospatial references (e.g., DBpedia, Wikidata). This integration, either on the public Web or within organizations has immense socio-economic as well as academic benefits. The upsurge in Linked data related presentations in the recent Eurogeographics data quality workshop shows the deep interest in Geospatial Linked Data (GLD) in national mapping agencies. GLD enables a web-based, interoperable geospatial infrastructure. This is especially relevant for delivering the INSPIRE directive in Europe. Moreover, geospatial information systems benefit from Linked Data principles in building the next generation of spatial data applications e.g., federated smart buildings, self-piloted vehicles, delivery drones or automated local authority services. This workshop invites papers covering the challenges and solutions for handling with GLD, especially for building high quality, adaptable, geospatial infrastructures and next-generation spatial applications. We aim to demonstrate the latest approaches and implementations and to discuss the solutions to challenges and issues arising from research and industrial organizations. The best papers will be invited to submit their extended version to the special issue in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information Semantic Spatial Web. Topics of interest ======================================= • GLD vocabularies and standards (GeoSPARQL, INSPIRE, W3C, OGC) • Extraction/transformation of GLD from native geospatial data sources • Integration (schema mapping, interlinking, fusion) techniques for Geospatial RDF Data • Enrichment, quality and evolution of Linked Data with Geospatial information • Machine Learning improving GLD processing • Distributed solutions for GLD management (storing, querying, mapping) • Algorithms and tools for large scale, scalable GLD management • Efficient Indexing and Querying of GLD • Geospatial-specific Reasoning on RDF Data • Ranking techniques on querying Geospatial RDF Data • Advanced querying capabilities on Geospatial RDF Data • Benchmarking of GLD applications • GLD in social web platforms and applications • Visualization models/interfaces for browsing/authoring/querying GLD • Real world applications/use cases/paradigms using GLD • Evaluation/comparison of tools/libraries/frameworks for GLD • Data governance models for GLD Important Dates ======================================= Paper submission: 1st March 2021 15 March 2021 (Extended) Camera-ready paper submission: 9th April 2021 Workshop Date: 7th June 2021 *Organizing Committee: * ======================================= Dr. Beyza Yaman (ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland) Dr. Mohamed Ahmed Sherif (University of Paderborn, Germany) Assoc. Prof. Dr. Armin Haller (Australian National University, Australia) Prof. Dr. Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo (University of Paderborn, Germany) We are looking forward to your submissions! Best Regards, Beyza Yaman.

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Global Media and China Webinar: Creative Labour in East Asia
by Xiao Han 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

Dear All, Global Media and China is is co-organised with the Global Digital Cultures from the University of Amsterdam to hold this webinar to explores the nuanced situations of governance, digitisation, and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia. Time: Tuesday March 2 at 12.00pm (Amsterdam) / 19.00pm (Beijing) Title: Global Media and China and Global Digital Cultures Present: Creative Labour in East Asia Join Zoom Meeting https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/87846515546 <https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/87846515546> Meeting ID: 878 4651 5546 Join by SIP 87846515546(a)zoomcrc.com Join by H.323 162.255.37.11 (US West) 162.255.36.11 (US East) 213.19.144.110 (Amsterdam Netherlands) 213.244.140.110 (Germany) Meeting ID: 878 4651 5546 Speakers: Jeroen de Kloet, Professor of Globalisation Studies and Head of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. CHOW Yiu Fai, Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University. Jian Lin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. Changwook Kim, Assistant Professor of sociology at Handong Global University, South Korea. Michael Keane, Adjunct Professor of Chinese Media and Communications at Queensland University of Technology. Anthony Y.H. Fung, Co-Director of Hong Kong Institue of Asia-Pacific Studies, Director of Global Studies Program; Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Sun Meicheng, PhD student in Communication at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Yvette Lok Yee Wong, PhD student at the University of Amsterdam. Qing Wang, PhD Candidate in the Center for Culture and Technology, Curtin University and the Institute for Cultural Industries, Shenzhen University (joint award).

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CFP-Beyond Zoom: Promise and Reality of XR
by John P. Bell 28 Feb '21

28 Feb '21

Beyond Zoom: Promise and Reality of XR CFP Submission Deadline: March 15, 2021 (250 word abstract) Conference Date: April 15-16, 2021 Submit Proposals at http://dartgo.org/beyond-zoom-cfp Register to Attend at http://dartgo.org/beyond-zoom-reg Send Questions to beyond.zoom.conference(a)gmail.com This conference is a sequel to last year's "Beyond Zoom: XR For Teaching and Research in the COVID-19 Era," which highlighted the role of XR in remote teaching, learning and research contexts. In this follow-up conference we are seeking speakers to present their work in the context of the future promise and current reality of XR, particularly in response to changing world events like COVID, social polarization, and erosion of trust in scientific research and communication. Like many new technologies, XR is often spoken about as either a panacea for or contributor to any number of challenges in higher education. We would like to hear about your expectations when you began a project, your experiences using building and using XR thus far, and where you think we can go next based on what you've learned. We welcome proposals for brief (5-minute) lightning talks showing off existing or developing XR projects in any discipline as well as institutional initiatives built around XR. These brief presentations will be organized into sessions that seed generative discussions as part of a two-day event. - Retrospectives of recent teaching and research projects along with prospective looks at next steps - How XR can-and can't-explore issues of institutional racism, social justice, and agency - How virtual worldbuilding can demonstrate differences in perception among those with varying physical, cognitive, or sensory conditions - When XR can be used to effectively disseminate ideas and concepts (to the public or to students) that are not easily conveyed in other media - Data privacy issues for students, research subjects, and the general public - XR in the academy vs. XR in the consumer space, particularly with commodified hardware and software ecosystems - Research into XR's role in promoting empathy for the 'other' - Explorations of XR's digital divide and how to bridge it in higher ed - Discussions of tools that can democratize access to XR for creators and distributors - Use of XR spaces for collaboration among researchers, students, or others HOSTS Dartmouth College: Information, Technology, and Consulting The Neukom Institute Film and Media Studies University of Pennsylvania: Online Learning Initiative Cinema and Media Studies This conference is sponsored by Dartmouth ITC and the University of Pennsylvania Online Learning Initiative. Thank you, Beyond Zoom Conference Committee John P. Bell, Dartmouth College Peter Decherney, University of Pennsylvania Barbara Knauff, Dartmouth College Rebecca Stein, University of Pennsylvania Mark Williams, Dartmouth College

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