This might be relevant to many of you: Begin forwarded message:

From: Zeynep Tufekci <socnetres@gmail.com>

Dear Colleagues,

Global Voices is announcing an open call for participation in a co-located academic workshop called “Digital Media and Disruptive Publics”, to be held together with our 2012 Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. This workshop will be held from June 29 - 30 and is being organized by Zeynep Tufekci. The event, including travel and lodging, is fully subsidized by Global Voices for selected participants. There will also be a public event, July 2-3, which you can participate either as a speaker on a panel or through the open sessions.

Global Voices will support up to four individuals selected through this open call process.

The purpose of this event is to introduce people within the academic community who study citizen media with a very active community of practitioners, who perhaps a function as a microcosm of citizen media more broadly. On the Summit site you'll find background information on previous Summits and the goals of the meeting.

We are looking for academics with a variety of perspectives and approaches, who can move beyond the polarized and rather simplistic conversations on the question of citizen media that so often find in mainstream media. We're hoping to approach the subject with an awareness and focus on a variety of different media environments - different countries, languages, access concerns, regulatory environments, and censorship.

The workshop will not require formal presentations of papers, but will be focused on intensive discussion of the issues, together with engagement with citizen media activists and practitioners from around the world.

We are expecting around 20 participants overall from a variety of disciplines and regional expertise. The public meeting will have roughly 300 participants.

There will also be opportunities for people to observe or participate in some of our internal events.

If you would like to be part of this summit, please send us a short (1-2 paragraph) description of your work and why you’d like to attend along with a CV to “zeynep at unc dot edu” and “ivan.sigal at gmail dot com” by May 23nd. We will be finalizing the list of participants by the end of that week.

Please forward to mailing lists and colleagues as appropriate.

Best regards, Zeynep

-- Zeynep Tufekci, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society

zeynep at unc.edu or @techsoc http://www.technosociology.org

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