Dear AoIRists, I'm very pleased to call your attention to an upcoming PhD workshop on "Researching the relational / sociable self: Methods, Privacy, Ethics" - to be held at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, November 27-28, 2013. Please distribute this call to appropriate lists and potentially interested PhD students. We invite doctoral students from a range of disciplines – including media and communication studies, information science, sociology, philosophy, and political science – to participate in this interdisciplinary PhD course. Faculty presenters / mentors include: Charles Ess (Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo); Hallvard Fossheim (Director of the Norwegian National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (NESH) and Professor II, University of Trømso, Norway); Stine Lomborg (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark); Annette Markham (Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark); Espen Ytreberg (Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo) *Background: *Especially over the last decade or so, both social science and humanistic research have emphasized the emergence of “the relational self,” as fostered by Internet-facilitated modes and venues of communication – most especially social media. Understanding how far our conceptions of selfhood may be changing in Western societies – broadly, from more individual to more relational, and, perhaps, from more rational to more emotive – is critical, especially as these changes seem further tied to - changing circumstances of socialization and togetherness in everyday life, and interweaving of different networks of affiliation that is associated with networked media for personal communication (cf. Rainie & Wellman, 2012); - changing methodologies and approaches to research designed to better tease out and explore the multiple dimensions of relationality; - changing sensibilities and expectations regarding privacy and notions of *privatlivet* ["private life"] and the (proper) boundaries of our * intimsfære* (intimate sphere) (cf. Ess 2013), and thereby - possible coherencies and/or conflicts with current research ethics codes and law, e.g., expected changes in EU data privacy protection law that increases individual privacy protections, but may remain silent regarding privacy and other protections for close relationships such as are already encoded, for example in the NESH 2006 guidelines (Norway) as already more relationally oriented Please see the course website, < http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/forskning/aktuelt/arrangementer/phd/2013/methods-pr...

for further details, including guiding questions, provisional schedule, available ECTs and correlative requirements, and instructions for submitting expressions of interest (due no later than October 26, 2013). Many thanks in advance, - charles ess Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo