RMeS Winter School & Graduate Symposium 2017-18

When? 23 & 24 January  2018
Time? 10.00 – 18.00 hrs (23/1, followed by dinner at a restaurant)
Where? University of Amsterdam
ECTS? 2 (two full days plus preparation 3 days)
Organized by? 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) Extended deadline, 5 December 2017

This Winter School will feature different types of sessions: 1) parallel sessions for presenting your work to peers 2) lectures by RMeS staff members and 3) a workshop on Career Perspectives outside Academia.

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 Winter School starts, you will be asked to send in your full chapter or article, which will be peer-reviewed and responded to during the Winter School.
2. Lectures: TBA
3. Finally, this Winter School & Graduate Seminar will also offer a workshop on Career Perspectives outside Academia

Data ethics
The RMeS Winter School is dedicated to critical data studies, with a practical component on data ethics. There has been a recent ethics turn in media studies, in particular new media & digital culture, ushered in by a series of data ethics scandals beginning in the mid-‘00s with the release of search engine user search histories (AOL), and followed more recently by the infamous Facebook contagion study. Among the critiques developed as an answer to ‘but the data is already public’ (Zimmer) concern maintaining the contextual integrity of the user’s privacy (Nissenbaum). When using social media he or she does not anticipate posts and tweets being mined and analysed by academics. There likely is an expectation that the user’s databody — to use a classic term — or glass body — a newer coinage — would be the subject of marketing, however. The Winter School keynotes concern the limits to research as the (social media and other) data are made public, and the workshop provides practical pointers on the ethical treatment of data, both for academic researchers as well as those to be working outside of the academy.

Keynote speaker
Dr Stefania Milan is Associate Professor in New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

Workshop
Data ethics workshop given by the Utrecht Data School for researchers inside and outside academia.

Sign up for Winter School

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

• Register for the Winter School before December 5, 2017 (Extended deadline) via our website. You will receive a confirmation email from our RMeS office.
• Please submit abstracts for individual presentations before December 7, 2017. 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 8, 2018. 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 Winter School, 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.