Social media (from mainstream platforms such as Twitter to organization-specific tools) have become increasingly pervasive. This is exemplified by the diversity of uses ranging from Twitter and Facebook use during the Arab spring to the use of Snapchat by highly surveilled activist groups. Many social movements have increasingly seen social media as a means to collaboratively crowdsource, to network and communicate with diverse stakeholders. In large organizations, social media is often supported because the technology can help foster the sense of a “digital village”, where individuals are able to “see” the lives of others within their organization and feel closer to them. However, the literature on social movements and social media has not fully grasped just how much social media has fundamentally changed the landscape of organizational communication, ranging from stakeholders being able to directly mobilize resources to making grassroots transnational social movements more organizationally feasible. Social Media, Activism, and Organisations (#SMAO15) seeks to better our understandings of how social media has shaped social movement organizations and the organization of social movements.
The Social Media, Activism, and Organisations symposium will be held in London, England on November 6, 2015 at Goldsmiths, University of London. The symposium is sponsored by The Sociological Review, The Centre for Creative & Social Technologies at Goldsmiths, and the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy at Goldsmiths.
We invite you to submit short papers and extended abstracts that explore the social media-influenced intersections of social movements and organisations. Full papers are not required for this conference, only short papers (~2500 words, excluding references) and extended abstracts (250-750 words, including references) related to the broad theme of “Social Media, Activism, and Organisations” will be accepted. Please select the appropriate format during the submission process.
Papers should be submitted by September 7, 2015 via Easy Chair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=smao15 and there is no preset template for submission. If selected, the author(s) will be invited to give a 15-minute oral presentation followed by a 5 min Q&A period at the symposium.
Author(s) of accepted paper abstracts may also be invited to submit full papers to a special issue of The Sociological Review, published by Wiley.
#SMAO15 TOPICS OF INTEREST
• Organisational communication and social media
• Democratizing organisational structures via social media
• Gender, social media, activism, and organisations
• Activist knowledge aggregation techniques
• Enterprise applications and social activism
• Collaboration, social media, and activism
• Virtual teams, social media and activism
• Activist networks and organizational communication
• Social media and organizational leadership
• Communicating organizational messages via social media
• Social media and advocacy organizations
• Inter-movement organizational communication and social media
• Visual social media and organisations
• Implications of anonymous social media
We welcome both theoretical and empirical papers and the symposium seeks to showcase a variety of case studies to advance our understandings of how social media has shaped social movement organizations and the organization of social movements.
