Day 31, Year of #Mygration: Invite for paper contributions

Dr Belinda Wu , Research Fellow in Development Policy and Planning at the Open University and Dr Gareth Bentley, Senior Teaching Fellow in media at SOAS, are organising a paper panel at the Development Studies Association (DSA) conference 2018 on Global inequalities.

The panel, entitled: "New methods in research and communication of global inequalities”, invites paper contributions on innovative research methods and methods of communication in migration and development research.

New technologies, especially visual and digitally-enabled, help to translate global inequality realities into everyday intersubjective communicative ideas, thereby posing complex challenges.

Inequality and global injustice are the causes celebres of our times. Do new technologies, especially the internet, help media and social media make global inequality issues as apparent and meaningful as everyday social communication and interaction? Such changes constitute political economic and poststructural complex theoretical challenges to inequality research, providing unprecedented opportunities as well as dilemmas. Indeed, can the latest developmental discourses catalyse a bottom-up levelling of communicative power networks or reproduce top-down exploitation and inequality fatigue in the form of consumer capitalist rhetoric?

The interdisciplinary research of global inequality issues has taken developmental studies out of its comfort zone. Yet how far are academic researchers prepared to go to work with non-mainstream methods? More importantly, such phenomena are already here and they challenge the production and communication of development information and knowledge. The way that we engage with this world of unstructured data and diverse transnational audiences will shape the future global inequality agenda. Therefore, we invite researchers to discuss how inequality studies using different methods (e.g. usage of social media, big data and mobile technology) can complement and strengthen developmental perspectives in the context of the global new trends and challenges in global inequality research.

Paper proposals can be submitted before the deadline of 05/03/2018.

See the general DSA2018 call for papers