The Emmy Noether research group on “Mediating (Semi-)Authoritarianism: The Power of the Internet in the Post-Soviet World”, will hold a preconference at the 67th annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) due to take place from May 25 to 29, 2017 in San Diego, United State.
Titled “the Consequences of the Internet for Authoritarian Politics: Comparative Perspectives” the preconference is scheduled to hold on 25 May 2017 from 9am to¬ 5pm at the San Diego Hilton Bay front (onsite, conference hotel of the ICA annual conference 2017).
The research group whose preconference proposal has been accepted by the ICA Organizing Committee has therefore called for three types of papers to supplement the scholarly presentations of Muzammil Hussain (University of Michigan, USA), Paolo Mancini (University of Perugia, Italy), Sarah Oates (University of Maryland, USA), and Katrin Voltmer (University of Leeds) among others who will be speaking at the preconference.
The group welcomes submissions that compare empirical data across different authoritarian contexts.
Secondly, the group is interested in papers that present empirical findings from only one country, but that, at the theoretical level, explicitly aim at embedding them into a wider regional or global context. Such theoretically informed comparisons according to the group can be achieved, for instance, by referring to the lively recent debates around new types of responsive and competitive authoritarianism, or to the literature on authoritarian institutions. As a third type of submission, the group also invites purely theoretical contributions.
While rationalising the preconference, the group, in its call, noted that over the past decade, a vibrant body of academic literature has emerged on the political consequences of the Internet for non-democratic politics.
However, the majority of extant studies focused on phenomena of political communication in one authoritarian regime only. By contrast, very few studies the group noted, have aimed at comparing empirical findings from across different authoritarian contexts.
It is against this backdrop that the preconference explicitly aims at providing a forum for scholars from across the globe to discuss, and develop comparative perspectives on the consequences of the Internet for authoritarian politics.
At a more abstract level, a key goal of the preconference is thus also to bring together scholars from the relevant communities, encouraging intellectual exchange across manifold disciplinary and methodological borders.
Participants who would not like to contribute but would still like to attend the event are welcome to sign up on the ICA registration website as audience members.
The participation fee, which is being charged to cover the two coffee breaks, is 50 USD.
All news regarding the conference are available on the research group’s website (http://www.mediating-authoritarianism.net/ica-2017-pre-conference).
Enquiries about the programme can also be directed to Anna Litvinenko (anna.litvinenko@fu-berlin.de) or Florian Toepfl (f.toepfl@fu-berlin.de).
The deadline for submission is December 11 2016 and notifications of acceptance will be sent out before January 1, 2017.
