[Air-L] CfP:

[Charles M. Ess]

Dear AoIRists,

on behalf of my co-editors, Elisabetta Locatelli and aline shakti 
franzke, I am very pleased to call your attention to the following CfP 
(and with the usual apologies for the usual cross-postings) for a 
special issue of the journal Comunicazioni Sociali, to be published in 
September, 2023. (For more information on the Journal, please see below.)

Internet Research Ethics in the Platform Society: Theoretical 
Reflections, Research Experiences, and Open Questions

Edited by Charles M. Ess, aline franzke shakti, Elisabetta Locatelli

Since the late 1990s, Internet Research Ethics (IRE) has emerged as a 
burgeoning field, fueled by an ever-growing variety of ethical 
challenges and concerns (Zimmer and Buchanan, 2016). To name but a few, 
questions include how to minimize risks for researchers and research 
subjects, and issues surrounding informed consent and intersecting 
interests between corporations and academic approaches: both emphasize 
the importance of the integrity of researcher but also add challenges to 
Ethics Committees, who aim to confirm what research can or cannot be 
conducted (franzke et al., 2020). In recent years, the societal and 
technological landscape has changed and expanded still again: platforms 
such as social media and apps aggregate a significant number of users, 
generating new social, cultural, and media practices to study. Research 
into these realms is stimulating and challenging but further implies 
methodological and ethical issues surrounding both qualitative and 
quantitative approaches. Both ethnographies and big data approaches in 
particular have different but compelling ethical issues to consider 
(Zimmer, Kinder-Kurlanda, 2017; Zook et al, 2017). Actually, there is 
the need to study and comprehend users' behaviors and their 
socio-cultural implications but users need to be more aware of what may 
happen to the data they posted and also about the research they are 
involved into. Moreover, the complex nature of AI technology and 
platform logics has evoked thunderous academic debates surrounding 
buzzwords such as fake news, and the importance of taking up 
misinformation, hate speech and ethical reflection in social media 
research is more compelling than ever before. In addition to these 
changes, the role and importance of internet research ethics has grown 
for over a decade and the approach of having it incorporated by design 
into the research projects is increasingly more common (Ibiricu, Van Der 
Made, 2020). For example, when participating in public grants and 
fundings such as Horizon Europe, the evaluation of the ethics of 
research is an aspect required from the very beginning also for social 
sciences and humanities. This entails a specific attention to privacy 
and developing a new attitude and best practices also for these 
disciplines, with consequences for how research projects are developed 
and carried out, including ethics assessments from its very beginning 
through its dissemination. Among the new challenges there is also the 
need of making research data open, requiring a further level of 
reflection.
Considering this landscape, the present issue of Comunicazioni Sociali. 
Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies focuses on the 
new challenges of the ethics of social media and internet research 
through eliciting papers addressing theoretical reflections and research 
projects across the world especially related to social sciences, media 
studies, performing arts, and cultural studies. This topic is consistent 
with the tradition of the journal and its attention to the research on 
media and its context.
The aim is to make a collection of research experiences as well as 
theoretical reflections that can serve as useful examples and references 
for the academic community.
The call for papers invites submission of abstracts regarding the 
following topics of internet and social media research ethics; abstracts 
on other topics related to internet research ethics are also welcome:

●	Informed consent;
●	Possible harms to research subjects (especially when dealing with 
vulnerable subjects such as children, immigrants and people at the 
margins, and sensitive issues, such as gender and health);
●	Potential harms vis-a-vis the safety and integrity of the researcher;
●	Privacy and data protection with small data (e.g., ethnographies, 
interviews) and big data;
●	The role of the research participants in the research project (e.g., 
considering them as active subjects, as in research with children or in 
research-action projects);
●	Internet Research Ethics across countries (e.g., comparative studies, 
the role(s) of Ethics Review Boards, etc.);
●	Ethics by design and the design of the research process;
●	Dissemination of the research and open data.

Submission details

Please send your abstract and a 150 words biographical note by September 
16, 2022 to:

<redazione.cs at unicatt.it>

<elisabetta.locatelli at unicatt.it>

<aline.franzke at gmail.com>

<c.m.ess at media.uio.no>

Abstracts should be between 300 to 400 words of length (in English). All 
submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional 
affiliation, contact details and a short bio for each author. Authors 
will be notified of proposal acceptance/rejection by September 30, 2022.

If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the 
full article, in English, by February 17, 2023.

Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and 
is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

Articles must not exceed 5’000/6’000-words (including references)

For editorial guidelines, please refer to the section “Guide for the 
authors” on the Comunicazioni sociali website 
http://comunicazionisociali.vitaepensiero.com

Contributions will be submitted to a double-blind peer review process.

The issue number 2.2023 of Comunicazioni Sociali will be published in 
September, 2023.

“Comunicazioni Sociali” is indexed in Scopus and it is an A-class rated 
journal by ANVUR in: Cinema, photography and television (L-ART/06), 
Performing arts (L-ART/05), and Sociology of culture and communication 
(SPS/08).


References

Franzke, aline shakti et al. (2020) Internet Research : Ethical 
Guidelines 3.0 Association of Internet Researchers. Available at: 
https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf.

Ibiricu, B., & van der Made, M. L. (2020). Ethics by design: a code of 
ethics for the digital age. Records Management Journal, 30(3), 395–414. 
https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-08-2019-0044

Zimmer, M. and Buchanan, E. (2016) Internet Research Ethics, Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-internet-research/.

Zimmer, M., & Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (Eds.). (2017). Internet Research 
Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts. Internet 
Research Ethics for the Social Age. New York: Peter Lang (Digital 
Formation series). https://doi.org/10.3726/b11077

Zook, M., Barocas, S., Boyd, D., Crawford, K., Keller, E., Gangadharan, 
S. P., … Pasquale, F. (2017). Ten simple rules for responsible big data 
research. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(3), 1–10. 
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005399

==
We would be grateful for your distributing this CfP to potentially 
interested colleagues and lists.

Many thanks and all best,
- charles


-- 
Professor Emeritus
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

3rd edition of Digital Media Ethics now available:
<http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509533428>