Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC) 2009 is May 27-28 – Call for Papers

From @lokmant on Twitter (who is a PhD Student at Annenberg School for Communications, at Univesity of Pennsylvania and also a Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard), I learned that the Chinese Internet Research Conference for 2009 will be held Wed May 27 – Thur May 28 and hosted at the University of Pennsylvia Annenberg School.  Last year’s conference was hosted by Hong Kong University Journalism and Media Studies Centre and liveblogged extremely well by the organizers (see RConversation CIRC tag, www.CIRC.asia ) and also by CN Reviews (Day 1, Day 2,  Blogosphere coverage).

I had the chance to email Lokman with some questions about the conference and he got back to me:

Q:  Who are the primary organizers of the conference?

The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania is the host of the conference, with Professor Monroe Price and the Center for Global Communication Studies being very supportive and the main sponsor for the conference. Hongmei Li, currently Gerbner Fellow and Assistant Professor at Georgia State University is the driving force behind the conference, with me and Sylvie Beauvais trying to help her where we can.

Q:  What do you hope to accomplish with the conference?  Who is the audience?  Is it mostly focused on academic research?

We hope to gain a better understanding of the development of Chinese civil society and its implications in relation to the internet. Most of the attention so far has been on the political (e.g. issues of censorship) and commercial implications of the Chinese internet; for this conference we wish to understand the role of the internet in fostering civic participation, engagement, and culture. For example, what role has the Chinese internet played in facilitating what Yochai Benkler has called commons based peer production, that is at the heart of projects such as Wikipedia and YeeYan?

While the conference will have academic research as its focal point, we hope to invite a broader group of people to participate and to contribute given the civil society topic of the conference, including industry people, bloggers, journalists and, last but not least, civil society representatives. We are also committed to have translators present to facilitate discussions between Chinese and English speaking participants.

Call for Papers

The conference just announce its Call For Papers.  More information can be found on the Annenberg School CIRC website.  Go there to see if you might be interested in presenting at this event.