The Journal of Communication is inviting submissions, in the form of extended abstracts, for a special issue, titled "Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. The call appears below, and here: https://academic.oup.com/joc/pages/cfp-si-social-media-gbu The team of guest editors - which has a strong AoIR representation - is very keen to encourage submissions from a wide range of conceptual and methodological approaches. (This is a lightly coded way of letting qualitative researchers know to have a go at this one.) *** Journal of Communication Special Issue Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly The study of social media is pervasive not only within the field of communication (and its many subfields), but across the humanities and social-behavioral sciences. The who, what, where, when, why and how of social media are being approached from a wide range of theoretical angles grounded in diverse epistemologies. The resulting knowledge indicates social media represent the best and the worst of our own humanity. Our still fledgling, but ever evolving social media environments can generate inspiration, enlightenment, and empowerment and – at the same time – be coarse, jagged, unproductive and/or counterproductive spaces that prove difficult to navigate and manage. The title for the 1966 film “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” helps establish the theme for this special issue in that social media can be viewed as a mixture of all three of these characteristics. This film is set in a tense time defined by its hyper-polarization (i.e., American Civil War). Unfortunately, the same can be said for today’s real-world and virtual environments and not only in the US. This special issue is not seeking to resolve whether the social media platforms we have created should be viewed as the good, the bad, or the ugly. Instead, it seeks to bring together a series of insights that will allow scholars, practitioners, and the general public to develop a more nuanced understanding of the mediated communication environments that are becoming further integrated into our day-to-day lives. The guest editors are not defining what is deemed to be the good, the bad or the ugly of social media. Instead, it will be up to the submitting authors to indicate whether their proposals speak to one or a combination of these characteristics as studied in a wide variety of contexts. The special issue is open to all communication subfields, as well as work generated by scholars nested across the humanities and social-behavioral sciences. Proposed works can offer empirical data (qualitative or quantitative; within the latter we invite research that makes causal claims or tests directional hypotheses as well as that representing descriptive social science). We also welcome submissions that are adopting a critical studies, cultural studies, historical, rhetorical, or policy perspective. Submissions can utilize a wide variety of methods, from big data mining to meta- analysis to critical discourse analysis (to name but a few), as applied to a wide variety of datasets (e.g., large scale online behavioral data from social media platforms, existing macro-level data combined with aggregate statistics on social media use, small sample qualitative data from specific users or online communities, among others). Extended abstracts are due by December 1, 2021 (AoE). Submitters should cover the following in a main text maximum of two pages (double spaced, 1”/2.54cm margins, 12-point Times New Roman Font): (1) what communication phenomena will be the focus of the proposed work and how do these phenomena speak to social media being representative of the good, the bad and/or the ugly; (2) what work will be undertaken by the full manuscript deadline (along with any details concerning the feasibility of the endeavor); and, (3) an argument for why this work is important in terms of its theoretical, methodological, and social significance. Tables, figures, appendices and references do not count against the two-page main text limit. The timeline for the special issue is as follows: Extended Abstracts - 12-01-21 (AoE) Full Draft Invitations and Rejection Notifications - 01-15-22 Full Paper Submissions - 06-15-22 (AoE) Full Paper Decisions - 08-15-22 Full Paper Revisions - 10-01-22 (AoE) Final Accept-Reject Decisions - 11-30-22 Special Issue Publication - 02-01-23 (Volume 73, Issue 1) [image: page2image17281216] The guest editors for the special issue are as follows: Drs. Magdalena Wojcieszak (University of California-Davis), Jennifer Stromer-Galley (Syracuse University), Nicholas John (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Adrienne Massanari (American University) and R. Lance Holbert (Temple University). Please contact the editorial team at jcomsigoodbadugly@gmail.com with any immediate questions concerning this call for papers. ____________ Nicholas John Department of Communication, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tel: +972-54-7906073 @nicholasajohn http://nicholasjohn.huji.ac.il