Category: Technology

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Migration, mobility and aircraft, sea serpents, deep time, Covid, poetry and Notre Dame de Paris ‘entangled’ – Anthropocenes Journal 2021 contents

Seven new research articles/contributions have been published in UWP’s journal Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. Journal authors continue to rethink in the words of the editors (about the journal) ‘abstraction, art, architecture, design, governance, ecology, law, politics and discourses of science in the context of human, inhuman and posthuman frameworks’. And this is showcased in an eclectic and uniquely interdisciplinary mix of material published in Vol 2 issue 1 which covers January 2021 to the end of July so far.

See here for the new issue contents for this year and here for 2020.

Readers have enthusiastically responded to the journal’s mix of material that mirrors and interprets the Anthropocene; that have reflected on the significance of eels, ‘sea serpents’, polar bears, invasive insects and human bodies; considered urban, mixed-use, dune, river and post-industrial landscapes; presented material as poetry, audio essays, visual essays, book reviews and creative writing on science. And of course reflected broadly on the key issues of climate change disasters, deep time, culture and the uses of architecture, data aesthetics, frontier technology, hyperobjects, Covid-19 and how to move beyond anthropocentricism.

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University of Westminster Press to partner with Michigan Publishing Services and Janeway Systems for Open Access Journals

London, UK and Ann Arbor, MI, USA – 10 December 2020

The University of Westminster Press and Michigan Publishing Services working with Janeway Systems digital journals publishing platform have reached an agreement whereby they will partner to publish UWP’s six scholarly journals from January 2021.

Andrew Lockett, Press Manager (University of Westminster Press) warmly welcomed the new arrangement: ‘Michigan are at the forefront globally of the innovation and development of academic library publishing services and together with Janeway represent an exciting opportunity for UWP’s activities to be part of the development of sustainable public open source scholarly communication infrastructure. We are excited at the prospect at learning from and working with two innovative teams that share our values and to further enhancing the impact, reach and quality of our new and established journals’.

Jason Colman, Director of Publishing Services (Michigan Publishing) said: “We’re delighted to form this new partnership with the University of Westminster Press and Janeway, who share our commitment to an open and community-owned future for scholarly publishing. We look forward to seeing UWP journals made available to readers on Janeway very soon.”

“We’re very excited to be working with the University of Westminster Press” added Andy Byers, Senior Publishing Technology Developer at Birkbeck, University of London, “and look forward to expanding our existing relationship with Michigan Publishing.”

Additional Information
As one of the UK’s first fully open access university presses, the University of Westminster Press has been publishing open access journals since 2015 and open access books since 2016 achieving 850,000 views and downloads thus far for its publications in the process across its books and journals. It has published 170 new journal articles with an archive of 719 articles publishing 33 new books and 6 policy briefs launching the new journals Silk Road – A Journal of Eurasian Development, Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman and (forthcoming in 2021), Active Travel Studies. Its 2020 catalogue recently released was its third and its book publishing and general website continues in its current form with Ubiquity Press.

Michigan Publishing Services is a team of librarians and publishing professionals offering a suite of publishing services to the University of Michigan community and several other partners in the UK, US and worldwide. Its Fulcrum platform offers infrastructure and services that enables the full richness of author’s research output to be published in discoverable, durable, accessible and flexible form. From 2021 Michigan Publishing Services will migrate its own, more than 40 mostly open access journals, to the Janeway Digital Platform.

Janeway is a digital platform designed for publishing scholarly research material. Launched in 2017, the platform provides a workflow for the submission, processing and presentation of scholarly materials. It was developed by Professor Martin Eve, Mauro Sanchez and Andy Byers at the Centre for Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London, and the Open Library of Humanities, UK. Janeway is currently used by many publishers and libraries including Michigan Publishing Services, UCL Press, the Open Library of Humanities, Huddersfield University Press, Iowa State Digital Press, the University of Essex, the University of West London and California Digital Library to host its recently launched Preprint service Eartharxiv.

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New theory of Communciation and Capitalism from Christian Fuchs

UWP‘s latest open access book title in the CDSMS series, Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory by Christian Fuchs has just been released. Below a short extract from the introduction where the author explains’s his approach in the book.

‘I have become convinced that an update of Marx’s theory and Hegelian philosophy in the 21st century is a viable approach for critical theory and that this approach does not need to borrow from complexity theory in order to be consistent and offer convincing explanations. Hegelian Marxism has a rich and diverse tradition and history that is today often forgotten, but possesses an immense intellectual and political wealth that 21st century critical theory can build on. There is a rich tradition of Marxist theory that can inform the critical study of society, communication, and culture. Because of the neoliberal turn and the postmodern turn, many Marxist approaches to the study of society, communication, and culture have been forgotten. I build on Marx and theories inspired by Marx in order to ground a Marxist theory of communication. […]

By working through a multitude of analyses of concrete societal and communication phenomena I have over the years developed a range of theoretical insights. These insights, concepts, and analyses have never been static, but have developed. Critical theory is itself dialectical. By working through various critical and bourgeois theories and working out analyses of a range of social phenomena (including privacy, surveillance, digital labour, social media, the Internet, authoritarianism, nationalism, protest, advertising, globalisation, imperialism, nature, sustainability, participation, democracy, the public sphere, culture, communities, etc.), I have established in different places and my mind some elements of a critical, dialectical theory of capitalism and communication.’

Public Sector Broadcasting – facing up to new challenges!

Achieving Viability for Public Service Media in Challenging Settings, the fifth in the CAMRI Policy Brief series was published recently. Authors James Deane, Pierre François Docquir, Winston Mano, Tarik Sabry and Naomi Sakr outline the paths and flexibility of thinking required to promote the cause of public service broadcasting in challenging settings that is arguably needed now more than ever before. As with all titles in the CAMRI series the booklet outlines key messages, the issue, surveys the research evidence and policy options. Each concludes with policy recommendations as how to take this vital media policy areas forward.

The series so far has recommended policy options for an online advertising tax (short and extended versions); AI and the Internet of Things in the UK; the gig economy and mental health; and portraying disfigurement fairly in the media.

The title is a collaboration between University of Westminster academics and leading PSB practitioners working for BBC Media Action and ARTICLE 19 and is more fully described below.

In the face of challenges posed by a shifting digital media landscape, an array of international bodies continue to endorse public service media (PSM) as an essential component of democratisation. Yet how can PSM achieve viability in settings where models of media independence and credibility are unfamiliar or rejected by political leaders? The answer lies in a holistic approach that is neither media-centric nor defeatist about PSM’s place in a landscape marked by younger generations’ widespread preference for social media platforms. There are more ways of working towards PSM than are often recognised. Wide-ranging research from media NGOs and academics demonstrates the potential of diverse, incremental approaches to embedding the values and mechanisms of PSM. These are as likely to involve regulatory and licensing institutions, unions of media practitioners, audiences, advocacy groups or social media platforms as content producers themselves. This Policy Brief considers the issues, research and policy options around achieving viability for PSM. It concludes with six recommendations that are relevant to policymakers, practitioners and media studies specialists.

Digital … transcends the human scale: The Condition of Digitality published

Robert Hassan’s new book The Condition of Digitality is the latest title to be released in the ‘Critical Digital and Social Media Studies‘ series. In this extract from the introduction in which he reflects on changes of outlook since David Harvey first wrote and published The Condition of Postmodernity, Hassan suggests – to use the words of the book’s subtitle – how the digital requires a new perspective from ‘analogue’ humans,that is – ‘A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life’.

‘Digital machines and their logic are (in the operation of their logic) like nothing we have ever seen before. Everything previously, going back to the dawn of our species and our drift toward technology invention and use, was some kind of analogue technology. From the wheel to the radio signal, and from writing to television, analogue technology fashioned our world and fashioned us, making possible such human-scaled processes as knowledge and communication, cities and institutions, Enlightenment and modernity, conceptions of time and space. Digitality changes all these and more, starting with the total transcending of the human scale. Time and space are now different categories of perception, condensed into immediacy and acceleration at the general level through, for example, the now-ubiquitous smartphone. Such drastic changes in scale and perception rebound back upon the analogue legacies in the realms of knowledge, reason, modernity and so on—and we struggle with the contradictions inherent within their unavoidable interactions across economy, society, culture and politics.

Seen in this way, digital technology and digitality compel us to think hard not just about the digital, but also about that which it supplants—the analogue logic and the relationship with analogue technology that made possible our pre-digital world. We are driven also to think about where the human stands in relation to analogue and digital. Some scattered work was done in this regard in the 1980s and 1990s, but all of it tentative, and none of it from a Marxist perspective that, like Harvey, makes salient social change and the socialist project. The hypothesis I construct here concludes that we are, ontologically speaking, analogue beings from an analogue universe that evolved from out of our species’ drift toward tool-use to become homo sapiens. Some scattered work was done here too, but only suggestive, not systematic, and not with a view to conclusions that had ramifications for the present conjuncture in terms of political economy or techno-capitalism. Meanwhile, digitality spread from a nascent but obvious technological ‘revolution’ around the time of Harvey’s research for Postmodernity, to become a whole way of life—infiltrating the practice of daily life and colonising the consciousness that governs the meanings that constitute practice. It became a central element of culture, in other words; culture that is now networked and global. What this means is that the elements of Postmodernity that Harvey takes as empty ideologies—a globalising neoliberalism and the cultural postmodernity that expresses its superficiality—have become embedded, through digitality, into the practice that constitutes how everyday life is now increasingly lived and understood (or not understood).’

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Critical Digital and Social Media Studies: New Call for Book Submissions

Critical Digital and Social Media Studies is an established book series edited by Professor Christian Fuchs on behalf of the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies and published by the University of Westminster Press (UWP). We invite submissions of book proposals that fall within the scope of the series.

CALL DETAILS After the publication of twelve titles in the series (and several others commissioned for 2020) we invite submission of book proposals (adhering to the guidelines set out below) as one document with one full chapter for book titles in the range of 35,000-80,000 words. The books in the series are published online in an open access format available online without payment using a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-NC-ND) and simultaneously as affordable paperbacks. We are able to publish a number of books in the call without any book processing charges for authors. Potential authors are welcome to contact the series editor outside of the initial time frame of this call for book proposals but should note that priority for funding support for suitable projects will be given to those proposals meeting the deadline. There is a preference for the submission of proposals for books whose writing can be finished and that can be submitted to UWP within the next 6-15 months. In the event of a surplus of strong proposals preference will be given to single-authored book proposals over edited volumes.

Outside these time frames authors are welcome to submit to the publisher a.lockett[at]westminster.ac.uk but will be notified if funding has already been allocated and the prospective date for the next call for publication. Authors who have access to open access fee-funding (e.g. covered by research project funding, universities or other institutions) that can cover the fees for layout and production are welcome to contact the publisher outside of the submission dates, but should note selection is based only on grounds of quality and suitability for the series notwithstanding that the series wishes to welcome as many suitable titles as possible. We welcome submissions to our submissions system with one (exactly one) uploaded sample chapter. We can only accept suggestions for books written in English. For further details see the Proposal Guidance below or if you have questions about the publishing process email a.lockett[at]westminster.ac.uk.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE Monday 20 January 2020 23:59 BST. Submissions should be made via UWP’s book proposal submission system at https://uwp.rua.re

Any prior queries may be sent by e-mail to Andrew Lockett (University of Westminster Press Manager), A.Lockett[at]westminster.ac.uk. Submissions will no longer be accepted by email. Regardless of other contact, all proposals for consideration have to be presented via https://uwp.rua.re.

CRITICAL DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA STUDIES: AIMS AND SCOPE
The book series “Critical Digital and Social Media Studies” publishes books that critically study the role of the Internet, digital and social media in society and make critical interventions. Its publications analyse how power structures, digital capitalism, ideology, domination, social struggles shape and are shaped by digital and social media. They use and develop critical theories, are profoundly theoretical, and discuss the political relevance and implications of the studied topics. The book series understands itself as a critical theory forum for Internet and social media research that makes critical interventions into contemporary political topics in the context of digital and social media. It is also interested in publishing works that based on critical theory foundations develop and apply critical social media research methods that challenge digital positivism. It furthermore is interested in digital media ethics that are grounded in critical social theories and critical philosophy. The book series’ understanding of critical theory and critique is grounded in approaches such as critical political economy and Frankfurt School critical theory.

TOPICS
Example topics that the book series is interested in include: the political economy of digital and social media; digital and informational capitalism; digital labour; ideology critique in the age of social media; new developments of critical theory in the age of digital and social media; critical studies of advertising and consumer culture online; critical social media research methods; critical digital and social media ethics; working class struggles in the age of social media; the relationship of class, gender and race in the context of digital and social media; the critical analysis of the implications of big data, cloud computing, digital positivism, the Internet of things, predictive online analytics, the sharing economy, location- based data and mobile media, etc.; the role of classical critical theories for studying digital and social media; alternative social media and Internet platforms; the public sphere in the age of digital media; the critical study of the Internet economy; critical perspectives on digital democracy; critical case studies of online prosumption; public service digital and social media; commons-based digital and social media; subjectivity, consciousness, affects, worldviews and moral values in the age of digital and social media; digital art and culture in the context of critical theory; environmental and ecological aspects of digital capitalism and digital consumer culture. Of particular interest is new work in the area of critical media/communication studies in the context of digital media and authoritarianism/populism, feminist political economy, critical perspectives on digital industries and digital labour, Marxism and AI, digital commons/digital public services/public service Internet.

PROPOSAL GUIDANCE
If you would like to know if UWP is interested in a proposal you will receive the swiftest answer if you submit via the RUA system (https://uwp.rua.re). Authors/editors need to register and complete a questionnaire. Authors submitting to this call for the CDSMS series must upload one sample chapter to their submission. The following indicates in general terms what will be requested:

UWP proposals are to be presented in response to a questionnaire

Preview of UWP Book Proposal Questionnaire

Book Title

Subtitle

Submitting Author/Editor

Title and subtitle of book

Contact email

Email of submitting author or editor only

Institution/affiliation of submitting author or editor only

Full author and editor details and short biography (120 words maximum)

Anticipated Completion Date

Total wordlength

Sample chapter

Sample material is always useful to receive. Please attach to/upload with contents and chapter plan

Case for the book
Relation to wider academic fields and disciplines; this may also include author/editor’s detailing relevant previous publications and history of research underlying the book.

Longer summary
Overview of the book’s aims, maximum 500 words.

Contents and chapter plan
For each chapter please include the title, and a paragraph of description (at least half of the full the length of a journal abstract) about its content and coverage. If an edited volume please provide contributor affiliations and up to three sentences biography including their most significant and relevant publications. The chapter plan should include a proposed length for each chapter as well as total length inclusive of notes and apparatus and details of any appendices.

Readership and how to reach it
Please detail core readership and subject areas the book would appeal to and cover, and details of any tertiary audiences either in terms of general interest or other academic fields. Please indicate how readers in your field are best reached. What factors do you think are most relevant in terms of ensuring the book makes an impact? Where in particular in terms might specialist reviews or coverage be sought? Lastly identify any other important aspects relating to marketing coverage including conferences, proposed events that might be organised or email or social media channels that could be utilised.

Competing and related books
Offer an account of competing titles and books closest resembling that in your proposal. Where competition is not relevant indicate any books serving as role models (or anti role models) or what in the absence of a competing title is available to read in the field.

Additional requirements
If relevant please indicate any presentation preferences for typesetting or any production requirements for the book including use of illustration, data, specialist typography or colour printing. Any thoughts on presentation/book format that are important and specific to the project including use of copyright material of any kind including imagery or supplementary files.

Series proposals are peer-reviewed in accordance with standard university press practice via the series editor, editorial board members and additional external referees where appropriate.

PUBLISHED and FORTHCOMING IN THE SERIES (to early 2020)
Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet Christian Fuchs

Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism: An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism Mariano Zukerfeld

Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, the Internet, and Renewing Democracy Trevor Garrison Smith

Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare Scott Timcke

The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism Edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano

The Big Data Agenda: Data Ethics and Critical Data Studies Annika Richterich

Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation Kane X. Faucher

The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness Edited by Joan Pedro-Carañana, Daniel Broudy and Jeffery Klaehn

Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism Edited by Jeremiah Morelock

Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis

Bubbles and Machines: Gender, Information and Financial Crises Micky Lee

Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization Edited by Vincent Rouzé

Forthcoming

The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life ( Robert Hassan

Incorporating the Digital Commons: Corporate Involvement in Free and Open Source Software Benjamin J. Birkinbine

Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory Christian Fuchs

EDITORIAL BOARD:
Dr Thomas Allmer, University of Innsbruck, Austria.
Prof Mark Andrejevic, Pomona College, USA
Dr Miriyam Aouragh, University of Westminster, UK
Charles Brown, University of Westminster, UK
Dr Eran Fisher, Open University of Israel
Dr Peter Goodwin, University of Westminster, UK
Prof Jonathan Hardy, University of East London, UK
Dr Kylie Jarrett, Maynooth University, Ireland
Dr Anastasia Kavada, University of Westminster, UK
Dr Maria Michalis, University of Westminster, UK
Dr Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Dr Vincent Mosco, Queens University, Canada
Prof Jack L Qiu, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Dr Jernej Amon Prodnik, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Dr Marisol Sandoval, City University London, UK
Dr Sebastian Sevignani, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany
Dr Pieter Verdegem, University of Westminster

Critical Digital and Social Media Studies
www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk

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