Bloomsbury is pleased to announce the development of a very exciting new project: The Handbook of Online Research Ethics.
It is nearly 20 years since the launch of the first specialist ethics guidelines for Internet research and subsequent publication of specialist monographs and edited collections focused on the ethics of Internet and online research. During this time, the nature of our online lives and uses of digital media, as well as the technologies, infrastructures and business models that underpin them, has changed dramatically, presenting new and emerging questions, tensions, and challenges for researchers to confront.
This new collection aims to contribute to the online research ethics space in a few different ways. The editors want to examine and interrogate the current theories, practices, politics, and philosophies surrounding online research ethics. They want to question – and perhaps challenge – conventions in thinking that have perhaps become sedimented in writing on online research ethics. They seek to explore new research directions, considering innovative methods and researchers’ ethical responses to these. They are particularly keen to broaden the discourse with globalization as a systemic theme throughout the handbook, such that we push readers to think through the implications of localised ethics vis-à-vis global perspectives. Contributions from IE scholars across Latin America and the Caribbean, the African continent, Indian sub-continent, South-East Asia and the Pacific are particularly welcomed.
The editors are soliciting chapters (8-10,000 words) that explore new areas of online research ethics from a range of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical bases.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Historical development of ideas in study of online research ethics
- Ethical controversies and provocations
- Global and transnational perspectives on online research ethics (challenges, issues, regulation, institutional responses, comparative case-studies)
- Negotiating/surviving/responding to the commercialisation and platformisation of the web
- Intimacy and managing research relationships (friending, unfriending, ending projects)
- Big data research, AI, algorithmic culture
- Ethical regulation and the law
- Social Media – research ethics beyond Facebook and Twitter
- Ethics of participatory, activist online research
- Ecological considerations of AI methods
- Social and communal perspectives on online ethics
- Ethical considerations of data trusts
- Ethics of augmented/mixed reality research (towards a research ethics for the study of the metaverse?).
Editors:
- Elizabeth Buchanan, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute.
- Natasha Whiteman, University of Westminster.
Submission information:
- Abstracts (approx. 300 words) + brief author(s) bio(s) should be sent to n.whiteman@westminster.ac.uk.
- Abstract submission date: 28th February 2022.
- Final deadline for accepted chapters: December 2022.
Whilst the cost of handbooks can sometimes be prohibitive for a wide readership, Bloomsbury are committed to making their handbooks accessible through pricing. A paperback version of the handbook will be published 12-18 months after the hardback.
