Call for papers: Journal of Applied Social Theory (JAST)

Special edition: Digital Scholarship and the Public Intellectual

Editors: Cristina Costa, University of Strathclyde & Mark Murphy, University of Glasgow

Almost three decades after its invention, what’s the contribution of the World Wide Web to academia? What has changed? More important even, how has it transformed the academic profession, the academy itself and the audiences it aims to serve and inform?

Even though popular and informal media are ripe with descriptions of how the web is either a potential space of intellectual participation and production or a tool of disruption, the contribution of social theory to the debate of digital scholarship practices is still minimal. This is no less curious given that the study of technology has occupied theorists across the social sciences for centuries, and areas of inquiry such as ‘careers’, ‘professional identities’ and ‘Higher Education leadership and policy’ to name a few are well established. Yet, links with the digital are far less frequent.

Hence, there is a need to enhance our empirical and critical understanding of the digital and its relation to academia and intellectual practices by exploring how and which social theories can provide analytical and methodological instruments to explain this emergent phenomenon.

This special edition aims to explore the contribution social theory can make to the understanding of the paradigm shifts brought about by and developed on the digital.

We seek contributions that might help theorise such paradigm shifts in areas such as:

  • The digital public sphere
  • Digital scholarship and the democratization of knowledge
  • The future of scholarship
  • Means of production and dissemination of knowledge
  • Professional identities and recognition
  • The rise/decline of the public intellectual
  • The contribution of digital scholarship to the civil society
  • Tensions between open and closed academic systems
  • Learning cultures
  • Communication, argumentation and debate
  • Management and governance
  • Impact agendas
  • Systems of accountability and regulation
  • The politics of access
  • Pedagogy and curriculum design
  • etc.

 

Submissions

Abstracts and full manuscripts will be reviewed by the Journal of Applied Social Theory’s editorial board.

Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full manuscripts by 30 October 2015 (review of manuscripts will take place in November 2015).

The special edition will be published online in December 2015. (This special edition might also result in a published book).

All contributions should be original and should not be under consideration elsewhere.

Please send us a 400 word abstract by July 31, 2015.

Papers should not exceed 8000 words.

For further information and authors’ guidelines please see JAST’s website

 

Submission of abstracts is done by registering with JAST and using the submission link (please choose relevant Section: Special edition: Digital Scholarship and Public intellectualism)

The Journal of Applied Social Theory (JAST) is published in Open Access. For further information please see The JAST’s Copyright Notice

Questions regarding this Call for Papers may be sent to the co-editors of this special edition:

Dr Cristina Costa [cristina.costa@strath.ac.uk] & Dr Mark Murphy [Mark.Murphy.2@glasgow.ac.uk]

 

Summary of Deadlines:

Submission of abstract:                31 July 2015

Notification of acceptance:         August 2015

Submission of full paper:             30 October 2015

Peer review of papers:                 November 2015

Publication of special issue:       December 2015