RMeS Winterschool & Graduate Symposium 2016-17

When? 19 & 20 January 2017
Time? 10.00 – 18.00 hrs (19th, followed by dinner at a restaurant)
Where? Erasmus University Rotterdam
ECTS? 2 (two full days plus preparation 3 days)
Organized by? Professor Jeroen Jansz (EUR), Yosha Wijngaarden, MA (EUR), Min Xu, MA (EUR), Roel Lutkenhaus, MSc (EUR), & Professor Richard Rogers (UvA/RMeS) on behalf of the RMeS Advisory Board
Open to? PhD candidates who are a member of RMeS
Fee (non-members): € 150
Registration (max number of participants: 20).
Registration for this event is closed. If you want to attend (any part of) the Winterschool, please send an email with you name and affiliation to rmes-fgw@uva.nl

This Winterschool will feature different types of sessions: 1) parallel sessions for presenting your work to peers 2) lectures by RMeS staff members and 3) a workshops on Photo voice and Visualisation.

1. PhD’s are kindly asked to submit an abstract of their paper presentation. This may regard a chapter of your dissertation, a draft for an article, or a write-up of research results, which you would like to discuss with your peers. We will group your abstracts into panels, selecting panels on the basis of your theme/subject, approach and your level of advancement in the PhD track. If you want to be in a session with one or two of your peers (people whose judgment you value, or people you haven’t worked with yet) please feel free to indicate this on your abstract. We will then try to organize panels on the basis of your proposals. You will be assigned to peer-review one paper and to chair or respond to one paper in another session. A month before the Winterschool starts, you will be asked to send in your full chapter or article, which will be peer-reviewed and responded to during the Winterschool.
2. Lectures: Daniel Trottier’s keynote is on “Digital Vigilantism as Policing of Everyday Life”
   Payal Arora’s keynote is on “Is there such a thing as an academic activist?”
3. Finally, this Winterschool graduate seminar will also offer workshops on Photo voice and Visualisation

Sign up for Winterschool

If you are interested in participating and earning credit (both in EC and social credit from your peers), please

• Register for the Winterschool before November 16, 2016 via our website. You will receive a confirmation email from our RMeS office.
• Please submit abstracts for individual presentations before November 23, 2016. Abstracts for individual presentations are max 300 words, including a clear research question or thesis statement. Please indicate on your abstract whether you would like to be in a panel with specified other participants and/or whom you consider a suitable reviewer for your paper (although we cannot promise that all your wishes will come true…).
• You can opt for two formats in terms of paper submission:

1. Those of you who are in the very early stages of your PhD, may also consider to hand in your PhD proposal, which will then be commented upon by your peers. (recommended to PhDs who have just started)
2. Most PhD candidates will opt to hand in a chapter/article format: a full paper of approx. 5,000 – 6,000 words.

• Full papers of (or one of the above formats) are due by January 6, 2017. On the basis of your submissions, we will group the panels, assign reviewers and organize responses. We will distribute the papers to all panel-members and assign the tasks of writing a full peer review (1-2 pages long). Each of you will have to write one peer review.
• Presentations: During the Winterschool, each participant will give a presentation of 5-10 minutes. Each presentation will receive a prepared peer review (in writing, handed in the same day, and a short oral summary of the review). Another panel member will be assigned as discussant/respondent. All session members engage in discussion and feedback.

Programme

PDF Preliminary Programme, including timetable

Thursday January 19, 2017

Keynotes:

Dr Daniel Trottier (ERMeCC)
Digital vigilantism as policing of everyday life

Digital media enable citizens to persecute fellow citizens as a parallel form of criminal justice. This presentation examines digital vigilantism (DV) as a practice that demands further conceptual and empirical scrutiny. DV refers to when citizens are collectively offended by other citizen activity, and respond through coordinated retaliation on digital media, including mobile devices and social media platforms. The offending acts range from mild breaches of social protocol to terrorist acts and participation in riots. The vigilantism includes a weaponised visibility where users publish the targeted individual’s personal and relational details, resulting in harassment, death threats, and other harms. Drawing on previous research on digital media culture and online forms of policing, this presentation considers the cultural factors surrounding DV, in contradistinction to offline vigilantism. This presentation also addresses methodological and ethical challenges associated with data collection of mediated and ephemeral social movements.

Dr Payal Arora (ERMeCC)
Is there such a thing as an academic activist?

Academics think. Activists do. Supposedly. Objectivity is sacrosanct in academia. It is what builds trust. However, we need to also build faith and inspiration. Society is losing faith in academics as change-makers. It is hard for academics to shake off the image of the armchair or ivory tower professor and for good reason. We strangle passion lest it comes across as bias. Many of us go into research driven by a desire to help. However, much of this research once executed, is circulated at conferences and shelved away for good. The public rarely encounters these results. Academics, particularly those in the social sciences and humanities, stay away from the private sector, lest they are accused of selling out. Inadvertently, we turn our backs against a major actor in society who will continue to shape the economy with or without us. Hence, we need to figure a way to engage all segments of society if we are to be the change makers we are meant to be. We need to communicate our findings in ways that entertain and enlighten to engage the public. This talk will share the journey of my experiment called Catalyst Lab that embarked on bridging academia with activism. Catalyst Lab: http://www.catalyst-lab.org/

Panel I: Perspectives on negotiation and participation

• Anouk Mols (EUR): Mobile privacy and surveillance, Evaluating users’ everyday negotiations and practices.
• Yu Sun (RUG): From everyday talk to civic engagement in bridging the sphere between family and state: talking childcare and parenting issues in Chinese online forums
• Arjen Nauta (UvA): The case of where are we going dad

Panel II: Storytelling in a changing media landscape

• Roel Lutkenhaus (EUR): The entertainment-education strategy in the new media landscape
• Tim Groot Kormelink (VU): The feeling of news: a video ethnography of everyday news experiences
• Natalia Sanchez Querubin (UvA): Connected healing and the wounded storytellers of instagram

 

Friday January 20, 2017

Panel III: Inside media representations

• Arnoud Arps (UvA): Remembering violence: Cultural memory, popular culture and the Indonesian war of independence
• Peter Veer (UvA): Audiovisual rhetorics

Panel IV: Reflections on journalism practices and beyond

• Sanne Rotmeijer (KITLV/LU): Small islands, big impact: constructive journalism practices in St. Marten and Curacao
• Sadrag Shihomeka (EUR): Engaging citizens: new media and political engagement in Namibia
• Sophie Willemsen (RUG): Pop-up journalism

Workshops:

Visualisation
by Maarten Lambrechts (freelance data- and multimedia journalist)
Visual journalist Lambrechts will help researchers to develop visual tools in order to reach out to audiences that are difficult to reach by traditional, textual tools.

Photo voice
by Dr Tonny Krijnen (ERMeCC)
This innovative qualitative research method enables to collaborate with audiences that are difficult to reach with methods like interviews that presuppose language competencies.

Practical matters

We invite you for drinks and dinner on Thursday night at a restaurant in Rotterdam; all participants and lecturers at this Winterschool are invited to join. As for accommodation, we will try to arrange a hotel deal in Rotterdam, for those who are interested, please let us know when registering for our Winterschool. For those of you who are not reimbursed for travel and accommodation from your own faculty, we have a small budget available to cover these costs. Please send an e-mail to Chantal Olijerhoek at: rmes-fgw@uva.nl. On both days, lunches, coffee and tea will be served at the university location.