My colleague Dr. Pamina Firchow and I are organizing a panel for next year’s ISA meeting in New Orleans (Feb. 15-21, 2015) on crowdsourcing and the study of violence and violence prevention. Below you’ll find our panel description, and instructions for submitting an abstract to us. We’ll need them by May 23 so we can make decisions on the five papers we will include in the panel proposal that we’ll be submitting before the June 1 deadline. We’d love to see what you all are working on, and look forward to your proposals!

Crowdsourcing Peace and Violence: Methods and Technologies in the Field

Over the last five years the field of crowdsourcing has been increasingly used by researchers and practitioners who study peace and violence. The primary goals of this panel are to discuss examples of successful projects, highlight ongoing challenges of using crowdsourcing and seeding, and frame crowd-based research methodologies based within the framework of established social science methods. The technologies that are used in crowdsourcing are readily available and inexpensive; these include mobile phones, social media, and open source software systems like Ushahidi maps. With all this expansion, however, there have been persistent challenges to using crowdsourcing and crowdseeding for peace and conflict research. Some of these are methodological, including problems with sampling bias, validity, and data integrity. Others are techno-social, such as how people use crowdsourcing technologies in their daily life, privacy concerns, and information security. This panel will feature papers from researchers who are actively using crowdsourcing and crowdseeding methods in their research, continuing the theme of ISA 2014’s panel “Crowdsourcing in the Study of Violence (WD26).” 

Panelists will also be invited to submit their papers to be included in a special journal issue on crowdsourcing in violence prevention and peacebuilding. Abstracts for the ISA panel should be submitted to Pamina Firchow (pfirchow[at]nd.edu) and Charles Martin-Shields (cmarti17[at]gmu.edu) by May 23, 2014 via email in Word format. Titles need to be less than 50 words and abstracts need to be less than 200 words. Please include affiliation and contact information in your abstract!