New materialist approaches are emerging across the social sciences and other disciplines, and express a renewed concern with matter and material processes. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Karen Barad, Manuel DeLanda and others have contributed to this emergence through the development of various new ways of thinking about materiality. This issue of WPCC is concerned with what insights new materialist approaches might provide into the Internet and its uses, where the Internet is understood to be a heterogeneous arrangement of situated people, machines and associated technologies rather than simply a placeless “cyberspace”.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- New materialist analyses of social networking
- Non-human agency and the Internet (eg bots)
- The Internet and the materiality of electronic waste
- New materialist perspectives on Internet software and hardware
- The Internet and the posthuman
- Limitations of new materialist approaches to the Internet
A 250-word abstract, full contact information for the corresponding author, and a biographical note (up to 75 words) on each of the authors should be submitted by no later than 15 January, 2014. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified on 31 January, and will then be invited to submit a full paper by 30 April.
Complete manuscripts should be prepared in English in MS Word and adhere to the Manuscript Submission Guidelines; they should be 6,000-8,000 words, including notes and references. Papers should be accompanied by an abstract of 100-150 words and up to six keywords. The manuscript must contain a separate title page that should include: the title of the manuscript; the name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s); full contact details of the author(s); the author’s brief biographical statement. An invitation to submit a full paper does not constitute a commitment for publication; all papers will be subject to anonymous peer review following submission.
Please send your abstract as an email attachment to the issue editor, John Hondros at: j.hondros@westminster.ac.uk.
Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2014
Deadline for completed manuscripts: 30 April 2014
