Call for Papers

Special issue of the Journal of Digital War:
My War: Participation In Warfare
https://www.digital-war.org/blog/2020/11/23/special-issue-my-war-call-for-papers

Edited by Olga Boichak, University of Sydney and Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow

Deadline for receipt of abstract/proposals: 15 January, 2021

In a time when we study, work, shop, and socialise remotely, digital media also afford unprecedented opportunities for remote participation in armed conflicts. Blurring the boundaries between military and civilian actors, physical and mediated battlefronts, weapons and witnesses, citizens and diasporas, digital technologies do not simply offer new capabilities in conducting military operations – extending the battlefronts into the realms of communication and perception, they reconstitute the social conditions shaping people’s relationship to wars.

This special issue foregrounds the emerging participatory patterns in military conflicts, attending to the higher-order social transformations that challenge and transform our understanding of wars. The submissions present a collection of insights and perspectives on participatory futures of armed conflicts.

For example, the concept of ‘participative war’ (Merrin 2018) highlights how new ‘architectures of participation’ (O’Reilly 2004) offered by web 2.0 platforms as well as connected and mobile media devices enable a wide range of actors to have their say and participate in warfare in an immediate and ongoing fashion. Media have made war seem increasingly granular, enabling (albeit unevenly) an array of actors (militaries, states, soldiers, citizens, photo/journalists, NGOs) to continually upload, post, edit, forward, delete, show and hide a multitude of perceptions around the unfolding of the mundane and the spectacular.

Others argue that we are living in a time of ‘radical war’ (Ford & Hoskins, forthcoming) namely that the interaction between media spectacle, connected technologies and the politics of violence obscures the relationship between military cause and political effect.

This special issue seeks interdisciplinary contributions to shape a new agenda for the study and understanding of the relationship between war and participation in digital media ecologies. Contributions may include, but not necessarily be confined to, the following themes:

• Witnessing and knowing
• New forms of knowledge
• Perception, attention and data
• Blurring of boundaries
• Compassion, morality and action
• Infrastructures and architecture
• Visual participation
• Distance and proximity
• Mundane and the spectacular
• New and old concepts of war and media
• Remembering and forgetting
• Crowds and open source intelligence
• Overcrowded and hyperconnected battlefield

CONTRIBUTIONS MAY INCLUDE:

Full research articles (6-12,000 words)
Image/art works
Commentaries
Reviews
Interviews

TIMETABLE:

15 January, 2021:
Deadline for receipt of abstract/proposals of no more than 300 words, including author(s) names and affiliations.

31 January, 2021:
Authors informed of decisions.

16 August, 2021:
Deadline for submission of full contributions.

August-December 2021:
Review process and revisions

Spring 2022:
Full special issue publication (accepted articles will be published earlier in online first)

CONTACT:

Olga Boichak: olga.boichak@sydney.edu.au