The deadline to submit extended abstracts for a special issue of JCMC on Sensor-mediated Communication: Sensing, Mobilities, and Power is now *April 29*. More information can be found here <https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/pages/sensors-cfp> and below. Please forward to anyone who might be interested. I'm happy to answer any questions about the call or theme as well. Thank you! Germaine Sensor-mediated Communication: Sensing, Mobilities, and Power Guest editors: Didem Özkul, Bilkent University (Turkey) - didem.ozkul@bilkent.edu.tr Germaine R. Halegoua, University of Michigan (USA) - halegoua@umich.edu Lee Humphreys, Cornell University (USA) - lmh13@cornell.edu Rowan Wilken, RMIT (Australia) - rowan.wilken@rmit.edu.au Sensors are everywhere. They monitor environments and measure a multitude of environmental characteristics such as air quality, temperature, noise, humidity, and radiation (Gabrys, 2019; Starosielski, 2021). They attempt to detect, compute, and communicate context (Beigl, 2005). They are increasingly embedded in urban infrastructures, offices, objects, and homes. With our smartphones and watches, we also carry sensors with us or on us. Many smartphones are equipped with proximity sensors, ambient light sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, barometers, biometric sensors, face or fingerprint scanners, heart rate monitors, and sensor receivers like GPS and GNSS. These sensors ‘sense’ and process information and mediate many physical and virtual interactions in public and private spaces. As a result, sensor-mediated communication has become routinely integrated into our daily lives.
From self-tracking apps to self-driving cars, sensing technologies power automated decision-making systems and influence social practices around health and wellness, navigation and transportation, climate and energy use, commerce and consumption, sociality and engagement, and urban governance. Despite the growing prevalence of sensors and citizen-sensing projects (Gabrys, 2016), and the value placed on the data acquired through their use, academic interest in researching their societal, behavioral, and ethical implications is only recently gaining momentum. Even with key contributions that define contemporary societies as “sensor societies” (Andrejevic & Burdon, 2015), and as attributes of the “quantified self” (Lupton, 2016) become foundational to an increasing number of everyday interactions, sensor-mediated communication has remained a relatively under-researched topic. With current crises of mobilities such as climate change, mass migrations and deportations, and pandemics, mobile forms of sensing and sensor-mediated communication and interaction have gained salience as smartphones, Internet of Things devices, and technologies for ‘always-on’, passive data collection are increasingly utilized for controlling and governing communities, societies, and populations. Therefore, we believe that it is time to critically reflect on and empirically analyze sensor-mediated communication practices and their societal and ethical implications.
With our special issue on sensor-mediated communication, we open up a critical discussion at the intersections of computer-mediated communication (CMC), critical data studies, surveillance studies, infrastructure studies, and media and communication studies. We invite empirical papers that address emerging debates regarding sensors and sensor-mediated communication, sensor data practices, and their societal implications for measuring, seeing, and knowing bodies, mobilities, environments, and the data they produce. Although the Covid-19 pandemic with its increased uncertainty and anxiety around public health and contagion has created new urgency around sensors and the ways in which they mediate communication and interaction practices, this special issue focuses on issues of ethics, surveillance, technology design and use that may precede the pandemic yet contextualize current discourses and decisions around sensing technologies and sensor data. Our focus includes not only the commonplace use of smart(phone) sensors, such as apps for parents to track their children, or apps for care for the elderly and disabled, but also (and most importantly) the broader uses of sensors and scanners in cities, by platforms and governments, in robotics, drones and satellites, and through other forms of mobile and remote sensing. What does it mean to think about sensing technologies and practices as computer-mediated communication? How can mediated communication foreground investigations of sensing technologies that reveal organizational, cultural and structural mechanisms at work? This might include questions around power, mobilities, and capitalism as sensing and scanning technologies are increasingly embedded in mediated-communication practices of everyday life including personal, wearable, and “smart” devices. In response to these questions, we invite empirical papers that examine practices, processes, power, and ethics as they relate to sensors and sensor-mediated communication and interaction. Multidisciplinary papers and papers from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives are encouraged but must focus on sensors and their societal implications from a computer-mediated communication perspective. Articles for this special issue are expected to contribute to and extend existing CMC debates through a focus on critical questions related to CMC and how our field can examine the impacts and roles of communication technologies and mediated-communication through various aspects of sensors and scanners, i.e. sensor-mediated communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication only publishes original research articles and meta-analyses of prior research. Therefore, all submissions are required to have a section that describes and discusses the research process and/or methods. Important dates: - Extended abstracts submission (1,500 words): 15 April 2022 - Notification: 15 May 2022 - Full papers submission (maximum 9,000 words): 31 September 2022 - Final acceptance: January 2023 - Provisional publication: March 2023 Guidelines: Please submit an extended abstract of no more than 1,500 words (including references) that states the paper’s main argument, methods, and scholarly contribution. The abstract should clearly explain how the full submission will contribute to the aims of this special issue. Please email extended abstracts to didem.ozkul@bilkent.edu.tr with cc to all other editors: halegoua@umich.edu, lmh13@cornell.edu, rowan.wilken@rmit.edu.au by 29 April 2022. Abstracts should be accompanied by a short biography for each author (approx. 200 words). Positively reviewed abstracts (notification by 15 May 2022) will be invited to submit full papers by 31 September 2022. All manuscripts must be submitted online through MANUSCRIPT CENTRAL <https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jcmc> ( https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jcmc). Invited submissions will undergo a blind peer-review process following the usual procedures of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The special issue will be published March 2023. Please note that manuscripts must conform to the guidelines for Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Please see Author Instructions for more information: https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/pages/General_Instructions. In case of further questions, please contact the guest editors. References: Andrejevic, M. & Burdon, M. (2015). Defining the Sensor Society. Television & New Media. 16(1), 19-36. Beigl, M. (2005). Ubiquitous computing: Computation embedded in the world. In G. Flachbart & P. Weibel (Eds.), Disappearing Architecture: From Real to Virtual to Quantum (pp. 52-59). Basel: Birkhauser. Gabrys, J. (2016). Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gabrys, J. (2019). How to Do Things with Sensors. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lupton, D. (2016). The Quantified Self. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Starosielski, N. (2021). Media Hot & Cold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. -- Germaine R. Halegoua (she/her) Associate Professor University of Michigan