DEADLINE EXTENDED to Oct. 12 for abstracts of papers responding to initiative on journalism, citizenship and democracy

Abstracts are due Oct. 12Sept. 19 in response to AEJMC's call for papers exploring "relationships between journalism education and practice with citizenship, communities and democracy in the digital age." The headline of the call is "Revitalizing the Bonds of Journalism, Citizenship and Democracy."

The call says the reviewers, led by COMJIG member Jack Rosenberry, will be "particularly interested in papers that develop and test a new curriculum, or experiment with a practice innovation in the newsroom or in other media."

The call is a result of an initiative by the Kettering Foundation that convened a select group of journalism educators to discuss how service to democracy can play a larger role in journalism education.

As Jack said in a Sept. 9 message to COMJIG members, the call is "focused on journalism that helps communities to recognize their shared problems and act on them. Our goal is to develop innovative ideas for meaningful changes in journalism education."

Interested scholars are invited to submit, by Sept. 19, abstracts of no more than 1,500 words that clearly state: (1) The objective of the work and its relevance to the topic of how journalism can address problems of democracy by helping foster the process of citizens working together to solve shared public problems; (2) The methods that will be used to examine the question or topic; (3) What the project is expected to discover; and (4) What will be the expected significance of the work.

Abstracts will undergo peer review and up to 20 proposals will be selected for researchers to turn into full papers by April 2016. Top papers as selected by further peer review will be presented at the 2016 AEJMC conference in Minneapolis and also appear in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. The very top papers will earn cash awards.

Full details of the research call, including the process for submitting the abstracts, can be found at http://www.aejmc.org/home/2015/07/citizenship-democracy/.