This issue of Postmodern Culture aims to gather ways of seeing the term “medium” beyond current disciplinary frames. Rather than take the routes of literary or film studies, art history or communication theory - and rather than see media as discrete, pre-constituted categories of aesthetics or mechanics - we seek to put the category of medium into question, and in doing so, to facilitate approaches to the various mutually dependent media whose boundaries and frames might now seem less conclusive.
Abstracts due June 1, 2012.
Read full call-for-papers: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v021/21.3.article.html
International conference aimed at simultaneously exploring and questioning the role played by urban planning, design, and policies in the continuous urbanisation processes affecting the so-called ‘global South’.
Abstracts due June 15, 2012. The conference will be held at Politecnico di Milano, November 15-17, 2012.
Read full call-for-papers: http://www.contestedspaces.info/

Mobile user experience has gained momentum as a significant area of research in recent years. This book will aim to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area.
Chapter proposals due May 30, 2012. To be published by IGI Global
Full call: http://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/720
INTRODUCTION - Mobile user experience (UX) has gained momentum as a significant area of research in recent years. The emergences of mobile human-computer interaction (HCI) as a separate, unique field in HCI discipline with diverse academic activities and body of literature supports this idea. Although mobile devices allow users to stay connected anytime anywhere, diverse user groups still suffer from usability issues caused by the design of mobile interfaces and the limitations of mobile devices (Kaikkonen, 2009). Although the mobile HCI community is trying to create and adapt research methods, tools, and infrastructure for mobile-specific challenges and opportunities (Kjeldskov and Stage, 2004), there is still a limited number of studies on mobile UX, which addresses both researchers and professionals that work in the field of mobile HCI. Secondly, it is not so difficult to observe that the product managers in the sector of mobile communication often ignore usability issues and UX processes because of time and budget limitations. However, when it comes to delivering innovation on mobile devices, new philosophies, researches, and approaches should be taken into consideration.
OBJECTIVE - This book will aim to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area. By including cutting-edge empirical studies and live cases from the professional sector, it intends to prepare a reference book for the mobile human-computer interaction community that will reveal key mobile user experience issues with solid data and guidelines and will support innovative mobile UX design processes.
The car is unique place to be. Gaming in cars, for safety reasons, cannot be like gaming at home, but also not should be. But gaming in cars has the potential, of making use of all the cool properties of the car itself, the practices of driving, and of driving as a socially shared experience.
Due May 25, 2012. The Car as an Arena for Gaming Workshop at MobileHCI 2012, San Francisco, CA, September 21, 2012.
Read full call here: http://workshops.icts.sbg.ac.at/mobilehci2012/index.html
MORE - In this workshop, we aim to gather both practitioners and academics to work out the possibilities and challenges of this design space that to our experience has been slightly forgotten about since Juhlin and colleagues’ excellent work on the Backseat Playground system.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:

This workshop aims to bring together a multidisciplinary set of researchers interested in the behaviour change through technology across three highly topical domains; non-communicable diseases, greenhouse gas emissions and ageing.
Workshop papers due June 17, 2012. HCI 2012, Sep 12-14, 2012, Birmingham, UK.
View full call here: https://sites.google.com/site/techbehavchangehci2012/
How do mobile devices affect the traditional forms of delivering news? Can the app economy be an alternative to selling content? Is there a new journalistic language and new journalistic genres for these devices? These are the three themes of this conference.
Abstracts due June 30, 2012. International Congress on Journalism and Mobile Devices, Universidade da Beira Interior (Portugal), 15-16 November 2012.
See full call for papers: http://www.jdm.ubi.pt/index-en.php#CallForPapers

This issue of Culture Machine will explore how digital platforms can be understood, leveraged and contested in an age when the ‘platform’ is coming to supplant the open Web as the default digital environment.
Full articles due Nov 1, 2012. Special issue of Culture Machine, vol. 14.
ABOUT - Platforms can be characterized as resting on already existing networked communication systems, but also as developing discreet spaces and affordances, often using ‘apps’ to circumvent any need to access them via the Internet or Web. For this issue of Culture Machine we are seeking papers that explore the nature and distinctive aspects of the ‘platform’: as something that can be positioned as more than just a neutral space of communication; and as a complex technology with distinct affordances that have powerful political, economic and social interests at stake. In this respect the platform constitutes a zone of contestation between, for example, different formations and configurations of capital; social movements; new kinds of activist networks; open source and proprietary software design. Platforms also constitute spaces of struggle between mass movements and governments, users and the extractors of value, visibility and invisibility: witness the various debates over the role of ‘social media’ in the Arab Spring, anti-austerity, student and occupy movements. Such struggles entail a compelling intersection between technology and design, capital, multitude, the democratization of technology and ‘subversive rationalization’.
The platform represents not just a question of software and control, then; it also connects to wider social struggles in the sense that ‘platform’ can refer to a ‘political platform’, and can thus take on the agenda setting or framing role of political discourse more generally. Accordingly, this special issue will look to understand ‘platform politics’ as a broad social assemblage, complex or form of life. Linking particular platforms across the molecular and molar, it will think about platform politics as a distinct new context of power operating at the intersection of technological development, software design, cognitive/communicative capitalism, new forms of social movement and resistance, and the attempts to contain them by the exiting democracies. As such, platform politics requires a distinct mode of engagement, which this special issue of Culture Machine will endeavour to encourage and provide.
We invite contributions on topics such as:
Please submit your contributions including contact details by email to Joss Hands: joss.hands(at)networkpolitics.org
Culture Machine’s Guidelines for Authors: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuidelines
All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

Technology is now common in all walks of life and HCI practitioners and researchers have more areas of impact than ever before. The theme of the conference is People and Computers, this to encapsulate and highlight the growing diversity of our field of HCI in one event.
The dates for submission for Short Papers, Work in Progress, Alt HCI and the Doctoral Consortium is June, 15, 2012. HCI 2012, Sep 12-14, 2012, Birmingham, UK.
View full call here: http://hci2012.bcs.org/calls.html
Relevant topics areas include but are by no means limited to:

In the context of media transformation, this event brings together scholars and researchers in the fields of media, ICT, and political science, to reflect and discuss how we can conceptualize and develop empirically the public sphere of the new media-driven society.
Abstracts due July 1, 2012. Conference Nov 8-9, 2012, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Read full CFP here: http://cemes.ku.dk/newmedia/dokument/
Topics
In this PDC 2012 workshop, we will challenge the logic of innovation by exploring the potential of participatory design cases that demonstrate a repertoire of differently situated practices of ‘future-making’; futures made locally, in heterogeneous communities, and with marginalised publics. The workshop will focus on map-making and storytelling to form landscapes of multiple futures.
Submissions due June 1, 2012. Participatory Design Conference, Roskilde, Denmark, August 12-16, 2012. Workshop date is August 13.
Participants interested to contribute to the workshop should no later than June 1 announce their intent to the organizers, makingfutures@sand14.com, by sending a short description of your case (2-4 pages).
Full call is available here: http://medea.mah.se/2012/05/pdc2012-workshop-making-futures-challenging-innovation/