Following on the success of last year's inaugural Conference on Workplace Mobbing at Niagara University (YouTube playlist), the 2025 conference has posted a call for proposals and opened for registration.
The founding of the World Association for Research on Workplace Mobbing was a key accomplishment of last year's event.
The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) has posted a request for proposals (RFP) seeking "a consultant to produce a report on obtaining government records for use in agency proceedings."
The item might be especial interest to persons working in freedom of information, federal administrative law, or compliance.
Here is the RFP summary from ACUS:
Obtaining Government Records for Use in Agency ProceedingsAgency decision makers and private parties frequently require access to records maintained by federal agencies to decide cases and participate meaningfully in agency adjudications, investigations, and similar proceedings. In some contexts, a private party is responsible for obtaining a record from the government—sometimes by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request—and providing the record to an agency decision maker. In other contexts, the agency decision maker is able to access the record without action by a private party or with the private party's consent. This project will examine circumstances in which parties are responsible for obtaining federal records for use in agency proceedings, circumstances in which agencies bear primary responsibility for obtaining federal records, and the procedures by which private parties and agency decision makers obtain federal records for use in agency proceedings. It will identify agency best practices to improve the fairness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and efficiency of agency decision making.
Attorney Ben Birkhill is staff counsel and contact on the project. Before working for ACUS, Birkhill worked on rule and policy making for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau in the U.S. Treasury Department. ACUS is an independent, executive-branch agency charged with studying and identifying best practices to improve administrative procedure.
RFPs are due September 15, 2024. It is expected that the consultant's report will be complete in August 2025.
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| Niagara Falls, N.Y. Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, via Picryl |
Read more about the interdisciplinary conference at Niagara University, July 22-24, 2024, in the February announcement. The conference website now features information about presenters and their work. Presenters include:
As well, from the conference website:
Host of the conference is Niagara University, which dates from 1856, and which is meeting the challenges of the present century with extraordinary success. Its president, Rev. Dr. James Maher (theology), and its provost, Dr. Timothy Ireland (criminology), will welcome conference participants.
Among sponsors of this conference is the Edwin Mellen Press, which has published more books on mobbing than any other publisher. Professor Herbert Richardson (theology), Its founder and chief editor, now in his 93rd year, will address the conference on cybermobbing. In 1994, he was the subject of what is still the most famous case of academic dismissal in Canadian history. Dr. Eva Kort will also be on hand representing the Edwin Mellen Press.
A book by the late Joel Inbody, his factual analysis of being mobbed as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, will be released posthumously at the conference. His mother, New York educator Kimberly Lewis, will tell the story behind the book, and chronicle the events that led to Joel’s being slain by a gang of six law enforcement officers in New Mexico, in 2023.
Also sponsoring the conference is the Society of Socio-Economists. Its founder and leading light, Professor Robert Ashford, Professor of Law at the University of Syracuse, arranged for a session on academic mobbing way back in 2010, at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Ashford will address the conference on "Mobbing and Academic Freedom."
Registration remains open until July 1, or 100 participants, whichever comes first. If you or a colleague wish to present as well as attend but are finding out about the conference only now, after the proposal deadline, reach out to Dr. Meng via the conference website to inquire.
PLEASE JOIN US IN NIAGARA IN JULY,
AND SPREAD THE WORD TO YOUR NETWORKS!
The first Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing will convene July 22-24, 2024, at Niagara University in Niagara, New York, and registration is now open for participation and presentation proposals, in-person and hybrid.
Mobbing is a form of group abuse of an individual and has been documented in studies in sociology and related fields for almost half a century. Mobbing is associated particularly with workplaces, where persons act in concert to effect a victim's alienation and exclusion from the community.
Workplace mobbing is especially prevalent in academic institutions. A sociologist and expert on mobbing, Professor Kenneth Westhues has studied the phenomenon and why the academic work environment is especially fertile soil for mobbing behavior. Westhues maintains the website, Workplace Mobbing in Academe.
While forms of interpersonal abuse such as harassment and bullying have found traction in law and become recognized in popular culture as wrongful, mobbing has not yet come fully into its own. Mobbing behaviors are complex, involving multiple perpetrators with variable states of culpability, so mobbing is not always as readily recognizable as a more abrupt infliction, such as bullying. Like harassment and bullying victims, especially before the wrongfulness of those acts were widely acknowledged, mobbing victims tend to self-blame and self-exclusion, so might not bring mobbing behaviors to light.
A purpose of the planned conference, therefore, is to disentangle mobbing from adjacent behaviors, such as bullying, harassment, and ostracism. By recognizing mobbing as a discrete phenomenon and focusing study on mobbing as a cross-cutting scholarly sub-field, fields such as psychology, economics, organizational management, employment law, and criminal law can recognize and respond to the problem of mobbing more effectively, bringing relief to victims and preventing victimization to begin with.
A welcome and invitation at the Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing website explains the conference mission better than I have here, as resources available through Westhues's website well explain mobbing and its defining characteristics.
I am chairing the Scientific Committee of the Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing . The interdisciplinary committee also comprises Dr. Meng; Dr. Westhues; Robert Ashford, in law at Syracuse University; Walter S. DeKeseredy, in criminology at West Virginia University; Joseph Donnermeyer, in criminology at Ohio State University; and Tim Ireland, provost at Niagara University.
The conference is grateful for technical and logistical support from Niagara University's Yonghong Tong, PhD; Michael Jeswald, MBA; Valerie Devine, assistant director of support and web development; Michael Ebbole, audio visual systems coordinator; William Stott, audio visual systems specialist; and Chang Huh, PhD.
The Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing is a project of Conference on Workplace Mobbing Ltd., a New York nonprofit organization.
ACA/PCA is multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and its Law Area has issued this CFP:
LAW AREA
Call for Proposals: Sessions, Panels, Papers for ACA/PCA National Conference in Chicago – March 27-30, 2024
We invite papers and presentations on all aspects of law and American culture and law and popular culture, including but not limited to: representations of the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and current cases and controversies; pop culture depictions of civil and criminal law, attorneys, and the judicial process; cinematic representations of law and justice; papers that comparatively examine the way different literary texts, musical genres or works in art history depict law and outlaws; historic preservation law. We welcome submissions on all historical, interdisciplinary, and contemporary topics related to the justice system and legal practice. Submit your paper or presentation proposal to: https://pcaaca.org/page/nationalconference.
The proposal should include an abstract of more than 250 words, and complete contact information (name, presenter’s institutional affiliation, and e-mail address). Proposals must be submitted through the PCA website. Only current, paid members can submit proposals. The submission deadline is November 30.
Area Chair: Patricia Peknik, ppeknik@berklee.edu
The PCA website further articulates submission guidelines. PCA membership starts at $50 and includes a digital journal subscription. The PCA conference site indicates that there will be sessions dedicated to undergraduate research.
I'm pleased to share this CFP on behalf of my colleague Professor Peknik at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Author guidelines and the official CFP are at the journal website. Manuscripts, preferred length of 3,000 to 5,000 words, are sought no later than April 30, 2021, and will be peer reviewed.
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| Dr. Manish Verma |
The information flow in digital societies has been discussed and analysed for more than a decade with close watch on social media networks. The shift from traditional forms of communication to social media enables users to gratify their daily needs of information digitally. The current paper builds on narrative analysis of selected social media active users and their digital social engagement to understand how a user and a network of users engage with information. To understand the role of social media literacy, the current paper interviews the users and correlates the findings with contemporary literature on social media. The results show that social media literacy becomes a pillar of information system, but it works in micro-level of societies at crossroads of online and offline spaces.
The authors survey digital media users to analyze the efficacy of efforts by social media platforms to enhance digital literacy to combat misinformation. The paper concludes that the efforts are less than efficacious because they derive from a holistic vision of society and politics rather than an understanding of the literacy deficiencies of individual users.
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| NEPSA art |
The call for proposals (CFP) deadline has been extended to February 19, 2021. NEPSA will convene on April 23 and 24, 2021. The CFP is open to faculty and graduate students. I have tremendously enjoyed this conference in past years and found it to be a collegial, inclusive, and supportive environment for scholars both junior and senior, and both political science and interdisciplinary, including law students.
NEPSA subject-matter sections are: American Politics, Comparative and Canadian Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, Politics and History, Public Law, Public Policy, and Technology and Politics.
The epidemic state means a period of extraordinary circumstances affecting many contractual relationships. Civil law provides for certain constructs that will enhance the content of contracts in exceptional circumstances, but only to a limited extent. Many situations caused by SARS-CoV-2 do not qualify for the use of mechanisms such as rebus sic stantibus, or lack of liability due to force majeure, and yet, it seems axiologically inappropriate to be indifferent to such cases. Here the key role of the legislator is revealed.While Sołtysiak contemplates a need for the exercise of legislative power, I contributed a piece to Law Against Pandemic on the need in the United States for the federal executive authority to step up to the challenges of the coronavirus crisis.
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LAW REVIEW
CALL FOR SYMPOSIUM PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS
November 14, 2018
We are pleased to announce the 2019 UMass Law Review Roundtable Symposium, currently titled “Law and Media.” In the age where the 24/7 news cycle and social media have impacted current politics and where data protection, personal branding, and technology have affected entertainment and media as well as the rule of law, an investigation of the relationship between law and the media of our current times is timely and warranted. Accordingly, the UMass Law Review seeks thoughtful, insightful, and original presentations relating to the impact of the law on media as well as the impact of media on the law.
Interested participants should submit a 500-word abstract to cshannon@umassd.edu, with “Attn: Conference Editor – Symposium Submission” in the subject line by December 31st, 2018 for consideration. Selected participants will be notified by the end of January and invited to present their work at the 2019 UMass Law Review Symposium taking place in late March of 2019. Selected participants may also submit a scholarly work for potential publication in the 2019-2020 UMass Law Review Journal. If you have questions about submissions or the Symposium, please contact our Business/Conference Editor, Casey Shannon or Editor-In-Chief, Kayla Venckauskas (kvenckauskas@umassd.edu). We thank you in advance for your submission.
Sincerely,
Kayla Venckauskas
Editor-in-Chief
Casey Shannon
Business/Conference Editor
‘Law and Development Conference’ 
