*** Please spread the word to any postgraduate students in your network that might be interested. Thank you *** Post-Graduate Conference Digital Communities: interdisciplinary perspective Monday 3rd July 2017 Call for abstracts We look forward to welcoming you to our first Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Conference! “Digital Communities: interdisciplinary perspectives” postgraduate conference is organised by PhD students from the schools of Social Science, Computer Science, Law and Politics in Cardiff University and supported by the ESRC Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP). It will take place on Monday the 3rd of July 2017 at the Glamorgan Building, Cardiff and will bring together PhD students and academics from different disciplines interested in studying the implications of the digital on society. This interdisciplinary conference is aimed at attracting PhD students from Wales, the UK and overseas from across different disciplines. The principal aim of “Digital Communities” is to encourage doctoral researchers to consider how the concept of digital communities is applied inside and outside of their own subject areas. Overview How are digital technologies impacting upon, and affecting the lives and relationships of people and things? How are communities developed and maintained in these contexts? How are they, and how could they be, governed and threatened? How can they be researched? Through this conference we will provide a space for discussion around emerging and pertinent issues faced by people and communities in their interactions with the digital, as well as the opportunities and barriers that face researchers studying the digital. Students at all levels of postgraduate study, as well as early career researchers, are invited to give presentations on their own research (ongoing or completed) as well as various aspects of their study and experience, including but not limited to: complete and preliminary findings, insights and observations, theoretical/methodological/ethical issues and approaches, problems and challenges, personal/professional interests and experiences related to the digital, and so on. Given this open and inclusive scope, we especially welcome contributions that have relevance across different academic and professional disciplines. Keynote Speakers Presentation groups will be bookended by two academic keynote speakers: Dr Athina Karatzogianni, Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester: “The Problem of Trading Discursive for Affective Power in Digital Political Communities”. Dr Suzy Moat, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, co-director of Data Science Lab: “Sensing human behaviour with online data”. Call for Abstracts Presentations will be 15-20 minutes, organised into three topical blocks, with Q&A sessions at the end of each block, and extensive networking and discussion opportunities later in the day. We encourage a wide range of submissions involving, but not limited to, the following thematic topics: Identity, subjectivity and digital communities: What kind of human subject is enabled by the digital? How does this affect people’s lives within and outside of their digital communities? How are interactions and expressions mediated by the digital? How are forms of activity and organisation privileged and stifled? Topics appropriate for submission include but are not limited to: “old and new” communities, community development and digital technologies, urban and rural communities, migrants, refugees, LGBTQ, activism and social movements on social media, influence on media and policies). Threats, antagonism and digital communities: How is problematic activity and speech (un)regulated? What old and new antagonisms propagate online? How are technologies used to disrupt, manipulate and antagonise digital communities and individuals? Topics appropriate for submission include but are not limited to: developing and supporting digital communities, cyber conflict and digital communities, technological threats, such as phishing/scam/privacy related issues, problems of governance and regulation of online spaces and communities. Study of digital communities: What is the ontological and epistemological status of the digital? To what extent are digital communities “new” or novel? What are the opportunities and affordances of different methods of research into the digital? What is digital data? How do the actions and structure of digital platforms and their operators constrain and influence methodological development? How can digital research draw from micro and macro approaches to research? What are the ethical challenges involved in the study of the digital? Topics appropriate for submission include but are not limited to: methodological and ethical considerations in the study of digital communities, different types of research: participatory approaches, community-centred design, case studies of communities, computational social science (e.g. digital communication dynamics, text analysis and natural language processing of social phenomena, network analysis of social systems, large-scale social experiments and/or phenomena, causal inference and computational methods for social science, novel digital data and/or computational analyses for addressing societal challenges, methods and analyses of biased, selective, or incomplete observational social data, social news curation and collaborative filtering, methods and analyses for social information). Abstracts should be 300 words, indicating name, institutional affiliation and title of presentation. The deadline for submission has been extended to 23/05/2017. Abstracts should be submitted to this link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dc2017 You will have to create an account in Easychair in order to submit. We will notify you of acceptance by June 7. We are currently working on the possibility of publishing a virtual special issue in an online Journal based on the works presented at the conference. Registration is free but places are limited! Registration will open on 23/05/2017. For further details please visit: website https://digitalstuffcardiff.com/ or write to CardiffDigitalStuff@gmail.com Chiara Poletti PhD student Cardiff University Phone: 0044-7477450608 Twitter:@ccpollon Skype:chiara.poletti15