Special Issue on Apps and Infrastructures
edited by Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, David Nieborg, and Fernando van der Vlist
We invite submissions for a special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies, on “Apps and Infrastructures”.
Excerpt
This special issue of Computational Culture welcomes proposals and projects from scholars and practitioners from across different disciplines interested in the advancement of app studies at the intersection of apps and infrastructures. Studies of mobile apps, platform native apps, and web browser apps or extensions are particularly encouraged. We specifically seek articles that bring together conceptual work with a technically and empirically grounded perspective, addressing the methodological challenges associated with the critical study of apps and their intricate relations to other software, platforms, and infrastructures. Contributors are encouraged to move beyond studies of single apps and their users in favor of approaches that explore apps as material artefacts alongside the infrastructures, political economy, and environments in which they are embedded and situationally enacted. We thus encourage interdisciplinary contributions that traverse boundaries between the fields of software studies, platform studies, cultural and media studies, science and technology studies, as well as political economy and data critique.
More information is available at http://computationalculture.net/cfps-events/. Queries to the editors can be addressed at apps.infrastructures@gmail.com. 750 word abstracts are due by April 1, 2018.
Carolin Gerlitz (University of Siegen)
Anne Helmond (University of Amsterdam)
David Nieborg (University of Toronto)
Fernando van der Vlist (University of Siegen and University of Amsterdam)