07 Aug Social Construction: Re-Opening the Conversation, Re-Constituting the Possibilities
August 6, 2012
If you have an idea for an article to submit, let me know. I’m on the editorial board….
Call for Papers: Electronic Journal of Communication
Social Construction:
Re-Opening the Conversation, Re-Constituting the Possibilities
Issue Editor:
Mariaelena Bartesaghi
University of South Florida
Over the last five years, members of our field have intensified their discussion of social construction with renewed force and purpose. The 2006 National Communication Summer Institute on Social Construction, the creation of a “Communication as Social Construction” division at NCA, a new handbook, an edited collection, and a chapter in Communication Yearbook are all examples of re-engagement with the ideas of social construction since, almost 20 years ago in their Communication Yearbook contribution, Shotter and Gergen claimed it as the central paradigm for Communication.
The issue invites authors to reflect on and reformulate the options for social construction as a theoretical and practical approach to studying communication that is continuously emergent in relationships, constitutive of social reality, consequential to communicators, experienced through the bodily senses, and afforded by their material circumstances. Authors are encouraged to take stock of our predicted and actual accomplishments, consider the tensions between the promised and actualized changes brought about by social construction work in Communication, and project the impact of social construction on the discipline in the next five to ten years. The focus is not only critical, but reflexive: How do we wish to reconstruct social construction?
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- the anxieties of relativism provoked by notions of the constructed world
- the separation of discourse from materiality and embodiment
- issues with the social construction of race, gender, sexuality and difference
- social construction and the limits of the discursive
- pushing the envelope of social construction
- social construction by any other name in practical or theoretical applications
Papers may take pedagogical, philosophical, theoretical, interpretive, empirical, critical, or cross disciplinary perspectives. Papers should be approximately 7,000 words in length, excluding notes and references, in APA form, and submitted as a MS Word document, WordPerfect (wpd), or Rich Text (rtf) format, with MS Word preferred. Submit as an attachment to mbartesaghi@usf.edu by September 6, 2011. Authors who would like to discuss paper ideas are encouraged to contact the editor.
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