Call for Contributors: THE HANDBOOK OF ONLINE RESEARCH ETHICS

1 December 2021

Call for Papers, Ethics

Bloomsbury is pleased to announce the development of a very exciting new project: The Handbook of Online Research Ethics.

It is nearly 20 years since the launch of the first specialist ethics guidelines for Internet research and subsequent publication of specialist monographs and edited collections focused on the ethics of Internet and online research. During this time, the nature of our online lives and uses of digital media, as well as the technologies, infrastructures and business models that underpin them, has changed dramatically, presenting new and emerging questions, tensions, and challenges for researchers to confront.

This new collection aims to contribute to the online research ethics space in a few different ways. We want to examine and interrogate the current theories, practices, politics, and philosophies surrounding online research ethics. We want to question – and perhaps challenge – conventions in thinking that have perhaps become sedimented in writing on online research ethics. And we seek to explore new research directions, considering innovative methods and researchers’ ethical responses to these. We are particularly keen to broaden the discourse with globalization as a systemic theme throughout the handbook, such that we push readers to think through the implications of localized ethics vis-à-vis global perspectives.

We are therefore soliciting chapters (8-10,000 words) that explore new areas of online research ethics from a range of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical bases.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Historical development of ideas in study of online research ethics
Ethical controversies and provocations
Global and transnational perspectives on online research ethics (challenges, issues, regulation, institutional responses, comparative case-studies)
Negotiating/surviving/responding to the commercialisation and platformisation of the web
Intimacy and managing research relationships (friending, unfriending, ending projects)
Big data research, AI, algorithmic culture
Ethical regulation and the law
Social Media – research ethics beyond Facebook and Twitter
Ethics of participatory, activist online research
Ecological considerations of AI methods
Social and communal perspectives on online ethics
Ethical considerations of data trusts
Ethics of augmented/mixed reality research (towards a research ethics for the study of the metaverse?).

Editors:

Elizabeth Buchanan, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute.
Natasha Whiteman, University of Westminster.

Submission information:

Abstracts (approx. 300 words) + brief author(s) bio(s) should be sent to n.whiteman@westminster.ac.uk.
Abstract submission date: 28th February 2022.
Final deadline for accepted chapters: December 2022.

Whilst the cost of handbooks can sometimes be prohibitive for a wide readership, Bloomsbury are committed to making their handbooks accessible through pricing. A paperback version of the handbook will be published 12-18 months after the hardback.