Call for Papers: Canadian Journal of Communication Special Issu

Call for Papers: Canadian Journal of Communication

Special Issue: Democratizing Communication Policy in the Americas: Why It
Matters

Deadline for full papers December 15, 2009; publication date Fall 2010.

Communication policy is an often important but overlooked topic ­ a blind
spot - in much social policy research and public discourse. Media and
telecommunications systems have become so fundamental, ubiquitous and
pervasive that we often take them for granted as enablers, and nothing more,
of many other freedoms, rights, and capabilities. Many do not realize the
extent to which policies concerning communication resources are quite
vulnerable to fluctuating corporate and government interests.

This ³knowledge gap² is what this special issue of the CJC seeks to address:
how do communication policies affect economic, social justice and human
rights, and what are civil society organizations in the Americas doing about
this? For example, how do the supposed decline of traditional news media
such as newspapers, struggles over copyright, the emergence of new ways of
communicating online, questions about who owns or controls the internet, or
access to the information we need, relate to social policy concerns such as
sustainable development, immigration, environmental degradation, labor
rights, gender equity, and other concerns across the Americas? What do any
of these struggles have in common related to media, communication, and
internet policies?

With these ideas in mind, we seek two types of submissions from concerned
experts working either in academic or non-academic settings in the Americas:

€ Policy Contexts (i.e., Enabling/Disabling Legal and Regulatory
Environments): Short syntheses of the current state of play re communication
policy that includes attention to the full spectrum of convergent policy
issues such as broadcasting, telecommunications, information (i.e.,
intellectual property rights and access to information laws), and internet
governance policies in each of the following regions: North America (Canada
and the U.S.); Mexico and Central America; the Caribbean; Spanish-speaking
Latin America; and Brazil.

€ Civil Society Responses: Research illuminating either failed (and why)
or successful (and how) civil society engagement related any of the
previously listed communication and social policy areas in terms of making
policy making actors, processes or institutions more transparent,
representative, and accountable to public vs. corporate interests. Simply
put, we seek to know why and how communication policies matter to a variety
of social policy concerns and how civil society actors are working to effect
communication policy change in a variety of contexts.

For this special issue, and given our interest in linking media and
communications with social policy more generally, we are also interested
primarily in research that is informed by critical theory, social justice
and/or human rights frameworks and that features praxis-oriented research
capturing the various challenges and/or opportunities for public-interest
oriented interventions in policy making processes across the Americas.

Full-length papers (@7,000-9,000 words) in English or French should be
submitted electronically following the guidelines laid out on the CJC
submissions website (http://www.cjc-online.ca/submissions.php). Make sure to
write in all caps "COMM POLICY" in the Comments to the Editor field, and
also to include it on the cover page of your article as well. Please do not
include your name on the cover page.

Comments and queries can be sent to one or both of the special issue
editors:

Dr. Leslie Regan Shade, Concordia University, leslieshade@gmail.com
Dr. Becky Lentz, McGill University, becky.lentz@mcgill.ca