Dear all We are very excited to announce our plenary and keynote events for IR15 in Daegu. More information on our speakers and other events can be found online at http://ir15.aoir.org/?page_id=86 . We look forward to seeing you in Daegu. Erika Pearson Program Chair Keynote Speaker: Jack Linchuan Qiu “Social Media on the Picket Line” Date: October 23, 2014 – 2-3.30pm Location: 7F (main hall) How do Chinese workers use social media during strikes? This talk provides a genealogy of working-class resistance via online tools (e.g., Weblog, QQ, Weibo) in China, “the world’s factory”. Through Raymond Williams’s framework of the dominant, the residual, and the emergent, it argues that social media on the picket is better understood as an enlarged ecology of new and old communication practices, among workers, NGOs, and activists. Most remarkable is the making of “worker-generated content (WGC)” during industrial strikes, where labor politics find their latest expression, online and off. The patterns of picket-line social media practices, their content and genres, and their consequences, will be examined and reflected upon. Jack Linchuan Qiu is associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He researches on information and communication technologies (ICTs), class, globalization, and social change. He is the author of World Factory in An Information Era 信息时代的世界工厂 (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013) and Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009). Some of his publications have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean. He serves on the editorial boards of 10 international academic journals, including six indexed in the SSCI. He has also worked with several grassroots labor NGOs and provided consultancy services for various international organizations. http://ihome.cuhk.edu.hk/~b200167/ Plenary Panel Panelists: Jean Burgess (Queensland University of Technology) Jakob Linaa Jensen (Aarhus University) Daren C Brabham (University of Southern California) Sun Sun Lim (National University of Singapore) Date: October 22, 2014, 9-10.30am Location: 7F (main hall) This year, IR15 is going to open with a conversation, between researchers working in different areas and from different perspectives. The plenary panel will discuss what they feel are the interesting trajectories, the under-explored avenues, and the current boundaries we are facing as ‘internet’ researchers. The plenary is designed to spark new ideas and open up new directions as we explore the boundaries and intersections of internet research in our 15th year of IR conferences.