The ICA Publications Committee has chosen Maria Bakardjieva to be the new editor of ICA's online publication, The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Her 3-year term as editor of JCMC will begin with the journal's Volume 16 (2011).
Bakardjieva is currently an Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. A native of Bulgaria, she received a Master's degree in Journalism in 1984 from that country's Sofia University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1995 from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She earned her second Ph.D., in communication, from Canada's Simon Fraser University in 2000. A member of ICA since 2005, Bakardjieva is a member of the Communication and Technology (CAT) Division.
Bakardjieva's research, naturally, focuses on the Internet. In particular, she studies the everyday uses of participatory media and everyday life of such users, with a critical eye towards the subject-as evinced in her 2005 book Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life. (In addition, she coedited the 2004 book How Canadians Communicate, and has authored 60 other book chapters, journal articles, and conference presentations.) She is the principal investigator on an ongoing study, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, of Internet in the home. She also, during a visiting fellowship at the UK's University of Oxford in 2002, conducted an ethnographic study of the Internet as a communication medium in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on intensive field work in Bulgaria.
Bakardjieva begins begins accepting manuscripts for the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in September. Her official editorship begins 1 January 2011 and ends 31 December 2013.
