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Dr. Fox Harrell
Phantasms and Shapeshifters: Imagination and Identity in Computing

Computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts – here called phantasmal media, enable new forms of human creative culture while empowering diverse communities. This talk presents recent work theory and technology for developing empowering, transformative, and critical forms of imaginative discourse and identity expression.
Humans have the ability to creatively present themselves in fluidly nuanced and dynamic ways, seamlessly varying body language, discourse strategy, fashion, and more, often with an astounding sensitivity for context. Now, everyday computing technologies force users to represent themselves in digital media, which necessarily provide identity structures (avatars, profiles, characters, etc.) that allow for robust new experiences and social interactions. Harrell’s work bridges these two worlds, with cognitive science helping to close the gap, and proposes new technologies with an eye toward doing better.

Dr. Fox Harrell is a researcher, author, and artist exploring the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He directs the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab/Studio (icelab.lcc.gatech.edu) in developing new forms of computational narrative and poetry, gaming, social networking, and related digital systems with bases in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He has presented his work internationally; sites of his publications and presentations include the MIT Press, the University of Toronto Press, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) conference, conferences and symposia of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Digital Arts and Culture conference, CTheory, and other book chapters, journals, and conferences. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. He earned an M.P.S. in Interactive Telecommunications at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He also earned a B.F.A. in Art, a B.S. in Logic and Computation, and minor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, each with highest honors. He has worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer.

Event organised by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI) and co-sponsored by the Digital Literacy Center.

Virtually McLuhan: Theorizing Code and Digital Life

Dr. Kate O'Riordan – Encoding Digital Publics

Senior lecturer in Media and Film, University of Sussex

This presentation sketches out the contours of the kind of public encoded through the Californian biotechnology company 23andMe.
This public is constituted through an address to an:
       •   engaged citizen-consumer of science
       •   informed and consenting research subject for genomic
           science
       •   economic investor in information architecture, biotechnology
           and drug development
These structures of address, at the scene of interactive digital media, together constitute what we might think about as the encoding of digital publics.
The claim that this public is working unfolds in two senses, that on the one had it labours, or works as a operative entity currently generating capital, but also in the sense that on the other hand its publicity marks out a specific social imaginary. The encoding of digital publics around human genomics in this case brings publics into being through an attention to biotechnological stranger- relations (Warner, 2002). These publics are not just biosocial groups (Rabinow, 1992, Hacking 2006) but orientated towards an attention to reading and annotating their own, and others genomic information through digital media in an emerging social imaginary that could be thought about as biodigital.

Dr.Kate O'Riordan is a senior lecturer in Media and Film at the University of Sussex, where she co-directs the Centre for Material Digital Culture. She is also an affiliate of the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), which is part of the UK Genomics Network. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre for Cultural Studies, UCSC where she is completing a book project The Genome Incorporated. Kate's work is a cultural studies of technoscience, primarily concerned with the consumer interfaces, publics, and audiences of ICTs and human biotechnologies. Some of her recent publications include: From reproduction to research: sourcing eggs, IVF and cloning in the UK in Feminist Theory 10(2), 2009; Fragments of Creative Cloning: Time, Money and Relationships in Andy Miah [ed] Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty. FACT, 2008; Virtual Believers: Queer Spiritual Practice Online in Kath Browne, Sally Munt and Andrew Yip [eds] Queer Spiritual Spaces. Ashgate, 2009; Human Cloning and the Media: From Science Fiction to Science Practice, Routlege, 2008.

Dr. Stuart J. Murray – Post-Life: Theorizing the Global Village and the New Ends of Subjective Life

Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Writing, Ryerson University

Life in the “global village” is not as we know it. We speak with the promises of “digital life,” but live increasingly within the inassimilable spectacles of war, torture, and terror. McLuhan’s view is less than promising: “the global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.... When people get close together, they get more and more savage.” He claims that global technoculture leads to the loss of identity and thus to violence as a largely futile quest to mitigate this loss. This paper asks how subjectivity and our understanding of life have been transformed by instantaneous digital communications, the spectre of neoliberalism, and biopolitics­a spectacle the means and ends of which have become indistinguishable. I argue that conventional paradigms of subjectivity and knowledge are incommensurable with the kind of lives we now live. Can we imagine the subject of media literacy? I suggest that one strategy might lie in the rhetorical resources of a critical media theory.

Dr. Stuart J. Murray is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Writing in the Department of English at Ryerson University. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, after which he held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His work is concerned with the constitution of human subjectivity and the links between rhetoric, politics, and ethics. He publishes on the philosophy of technology, Foucault, biopolitics, the rhetoric of healthcare, and postructuralist approaches to bioethics. He has a forthcoming edited volume, titled, Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics (with Dave Holmes, Ashgate Publishing, 2009), and is currently working on a manuscript on the rhetorical dimensions of biopolitics and thanatopolitics, tentatively titled, The Living from the Dead.

Series organised by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI) and co-sponsered by Critical Studies in Sexuality, Department of English, Center for Culture and Identity in Education, Digital Literacy Center.

Virtually McLuhan: Theorizing Code and Digital Life

Dr. Arthur Kroker – The MisEducated Imagination: McLuhan's Creativity

Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory & Professor, Political Science, University of Victoria

The lasting legacy of Marshall McLuhan has everything to do with his creatively disruptive thought: art as an early warning system of major technological change, media theory as culture probes, words moving at light-speed, texts as worm holes to alternative futures, a festival of seductive paradoxes in writing, images, and aphorisms. With McLuhan, technology simultaneously stultifies and mobilizes the imagination, does violence to the human nervous system and creates electronic breakthroughs.
Dr. Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory & Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria. Author of numerous books on technology and culture, including The Will to Technology, The Possessed Individual, The Postmodern Scene and Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis, McLuhan and Grant. With Marilouise Kroker, he has edited the field-defining anthology, Critical Digital Studies and the internationally acclaimed electronic journal, CTheory www.ctheory.net).

Dr. Suzanne de Castell – One Code To Rule Them All

Professor and Dean, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University

When all that has been solid melts into code, how do we rethink and re-make scholarly praxistheory, research and pedagogybuilt from and for a literate universe? Quality becomes quantity, arts and sciences are re-fused, media fluidly converge, and even the ontology of the body, this too too solid flesh of Hamlets of distracted imaginings, becomes molten, as virtuality. This paper is part of a larger project which interweaves three strands of interdisciplinary scholarship: the conceptual work of forging a digital epistemology, the technological challenge of developing a multimedia, multimodal research tool capable of taking the measure of the re-mediated subjects and objects of interdisciplinary study, and the pedagogical call for the resuscitation of play as inseparable from and indispensable for teaching, learning and the advancement of knowledge under unprecedented conditions of uncertainty.
Dr. Suzanne de Castell is Professor and Dean pro-tem of the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She’s interested in relations between media and epistemology, between ‘knowing’ and ‘tools of intellect’, in relation to print literacy, new media studies, and game-based educational technologies. Books include Literacy Society and Schooling with Alan Luke and Kieran Egan), Language, Authority and Criticism with Alan and Carmen Luke), Radical Interventions with Mary Bryson) and Worlds in Play with Jen Jenson). Her current work is on the ludic epistemologies of game-based learning, exemplified in several projects co-developed with Jenson: Contagion, a compelling game about public health, Arundo Donax, a gripping engagement with Baroque music, and Epidemic, a social networking site where your ‘friends’ are contacts you manage to infect. She co-edits the Canadian Game Studies journal, Loading...

Series organised by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI) and co-sponsered by Critical Studies in Sexuality, Department of English, Center for Culture and Identity in Education, Digital Literacy Center.

Virtually McLuhan: Theorizing Code and Digital Life
McLuhan and the Body as Medium

Long before media theorists asked how we became post-human, McLuhan asked a much more compelling question: how did we become human? He found the answer to this question in the encounter of technology and the bios.

Dr. Richard Cavell is Professor of English at UBC and author of McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. He is also the creator of the website www.spectersofmcluhan.net and joint founding director of the Cultural Spaces series, University of Toronto Press.

Series organised by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI) and co-sponsered by Critical Studies in Sexuality, Department of English, Center for Culture and Identity in Education, Digital Literacy Center.

Bronwyn Davies – Legitimation: Neoliberal Imperatives and Post-structural Challenges

Le.git.i.mate (first definition): conforming to established standards of usage, behaviour, etc; based on correct or acceptable principles of reasoning; reasonable, sensible or valid; authorized, sanctioned by, or in accordance with law (Collins English Dictionary).

In this definition, legitimacy is concerned with conformity to practices that have, one way or another, acquired a status comparable to the law. In the broad field of social and educational research, legitimacy has been colonized, perhaps predictably, by those working in “empirical” research, a field characterized by adherence to the rules of scientific method, and by a belief in causal, evidence-based reasoning that is, more often than not, backed by statistical estimates of probability and generalizability. In scientific discourse, empirical means: “derived from or relating to experiment and observation rather than theory” (Collins English Dictionary). It is this conception of data as holding meaning independent of theory that best characterizes the empirical endeavor. In such research, truth claims rest on method, rather than the interpretive work involved in formulating and asking questions, generating data or the work that is done in representing and articulating the new forms of understanding that are emergent in the research. Indeed interpretation is to be abhorred as it introduces an “illegitimate” bias into otherwise pure data and mathematical calculations. This proprietorial claim on legitimacy by the empiricists poses an interesting dilemma for postempiricist researchers: do they abandon the terms as meaningless for their own purposes, or recolonise it through postempirical deconstructive work on it, or neither or both of these?
Dr. Bronwyn Davies is well known for her work on gender, classroom research and her writing on poststructuralist theory. More recently she has been working on a critique of neoliberalism as it impacts on subjectivities at work and on the relations between pedogogy and place. Her books include: Life in the Classroom and Playground; Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales; Preschool Children and Gender; Shards of Glass; Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identities; Poststructuralist Theory and Classroom Practice; Power/Knowledge/Desire: Changing School Organization and Management Practices; Gender in Japanese Preschools (with Hiroyuki Kasama); A Body of Writing; (In)scribing Body/landscape Relations; and Doing Collective Biography (with Susanne Gannon). She is currently working on a new book called Pedagogical Encounters.

Event organizer is the Institute of Early Childhood Education & Research (IECER), with the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI), the Centre for the Study of the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies (CSICS), the Department of Language and Literacy Education (LLED), and the Department of English as co-sponsors.

Ann Cvetkovich: Deep Lez: Performing Utopia on Womyn's Land

This paper will discuss my ongoing research as a long-time worker at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, focusing in particular on the distinctiveness of performance on womyn's land, both onstage and off.  It will also highlight the return to 1970s lesbian feminism and ideas of utopian space in recent art and performance by Allyson Mitchell, Lesbians on Ecstasy, and the LTTR collective, among others

Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003). She edited, with Ann Pellegrini, "Public Sentiments," a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online. She is coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Inspired by Public Feelings groups in Chicago, Austin, and New York, she is currently writing a book about depression.

Event is coordinated by the UBC Gender Performance Research and Reflection Group in conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery, and co-sponsored by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI).

Cressida Heyes: Keeping the (Gendered) Body in Mind: Doing Yoga with Foucault

“Philosophy of the body” often becomes something of an oxymoron: we think critically about bodies but usually from the head up, without integrating somatic practice into philosophical inquiry. For many practitioners developing bodily awareness is part of the solution to our disembodied existence. But awareness can itself come in different forms, some of which simply sediment the normalizing, panoptic experience of our embodied subjectivity that Foucault famously theorizes. This is especially true for women and for queer or gender non-conforming people, who are likely already to be self-conscious of their bodies due to objectification and alienation from their lived experience and desires. Thus the teaching of body politics can serve to perpetuate rather than genuinely undercut the embodied dynamics it purports to criticise. This presentation draws on the experience of teaching philosophy of the body and of teaching yoga (including within the same course) to argue that certain somatic practices can have politically liberatory effects for those who have been rendered “docile.”
Cressida Heyes is a Canada Research Chair in Sexuality at the University of Alberta. Dr Heyes was educated at Oxford University and is a Commonwealth Scholar at McGill University in Montreal where she completed her Phd in Philosophy.

Event is organised by the UBC Critical Studies in Sexuality (CSIS), and co-sponsored by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI).

Megan Boler, Darin Barney, and Douglas Kellner, Learning 2.0: Digital Cultures, Media and Citizenship for a New Millennium
UBC Celebrate Learning, Free and Open to the Public

Internationally renowned invited scholars present leading-edge research on Digital Cultures, Citizenship and New Media and take up key questions regarding education in what Castells has termed the "Network Society".

This scholarship foregrounds the ways in which key elements of education itself, such as "the right to know," shift significantly by means of careful analytic theorization of the impact of the Internet, convergent new media, social networks, and digital socialities. It also critically interrogates the impact of these new media – these technologies of knowing and of collectivities – on our notions of knowledge itself, of the self and community, of transnational globalization, and of new landscapes for democratic projects.

Pause for Thought: Millennial Citizenship, and Making Sense of “Truth(s)” and Media Politics through Satire

Despite widespread lack of faith in media and politicians, web-based multimedia digital dissent and other sociable web practices reflect diverse desires, rationales, and discourses striving to render sensible and coherent the political media landscape. This talk explores the motivations of user-generators, or producers of “digital dissent” – digital political art, blogs, and tactical media.
Dr. Megan Boler is Professor, Department of Theory and Policy Studies, OISE, University of Toronto.

Raising the Innovation Nation: Technology, Citizenship and Education

What does it mean to practice citizenship in the midst of technology, and what role does education play in cultivating or frustrating this practice? Arguing that engagement in political judgment is the central practice of citizenship, this talk explores the extent to which material and cultural conditions in technological societies support or undermine the possibility of politics, and what becomes of education in these circumstances.
Dr. Darin Barney is Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship, and Associate Professor, Art, History and Communication Studies, McGill University.

Digital Cultures, Media and the Transformation of Citizenship

Digital cultures are transforming the nature of research, communication, writing, and art, while proliferating novel cultural forms from My Space to YouTube. Using the US Presidential Election as a case study, this talk discusses the cultural transformations involved in the digitization of culture and the implication for politics, education, and citizenship. A critical analysis of digital literacy is elucidated alongside a careful consideration of the transformation of education needed to meet the challenges of a new era.
Dr. Douglas Kellner is the George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair and Professor, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA.

PRESENTED BY: Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI) Noted Scholars Lecture Series, Faculty of Education, Knowledge Media Network, and Network of Centres and Institutes in Education (NCIE)

Aihwa Ong, Worlding Cities, Pied-a-terre Subjects
Green College Coach House

The rise of Asian cities as centers of spectacle and speculation challenges conventional notions about the global city as a site of universal human rights. I argue that the ambitious Asian city is a branded state-space, a spectralized site that coordinates and generates flows of global knowledge, actors, and values.

Pied-a-terre subjects, especially knowledge nomads, are recruited and favored for their production of diverse material and symbolic values. But, while pied-a-terre subjects are crucial to the prestige and wealth of the worlding city, they are the embodiment of the denationalized character of capitalism. Poised between staying and going, the knowledge nomad performs a transfer of value that shapes the hyper-metropolis as both a national space and a site of mutating citizenship.

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted research on questions of modernity, citizenship, sovereignty, and neoliberalism in emerging Asia-Pacific contexts. She is the author of /Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia /(1986); /Flexible Citizenship /(1999); /Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America/ (2003); and /Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty/ (2006). Edited volumes include /Global Assemblages:Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems /(co-editor Stephen J. Collier, 2005) and /Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar /(co-editor Li Zhang, 2008). Her new work focuses on biotechnologies and sovereignty in East Asia. Ong has lectured around the world, and her writings have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

A Conversation with Dorothy Smith, Navigating Disciplines as Disciplinary Technologies: Orienting to the Challenges of Transdisciplinary Scholarly Inquiry.
CCFI Orientation Event Open to All Education Graduate Students

Dr. Dorothy Smith is an extraordinarily talented and accomplished scholar with a long and distinguished track record of academic work that is transdisciplinary, In this Orientation event, Dr. Smith will discuss what it is to do scholarship that contests and redraws boundaries and to work across disciplines and deal with the disciplinary power of territorialized fields of knowledge.

Dr. Dorothy E. Smith is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology & Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria. Smith has received numerous awards for her body of work, including the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Associations Outstanding Contribution Award (1990) and the American Sociological Associations Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999) and the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology (1993). Her books include The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (University of Toronto Press, 1987), for which she received the John Porter Award in 1990; The Conceptual Practises of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (University of Toronto Press, 1990); Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (Routledge, 1990); Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations (University of Toronto Press, 1998); and, most recently, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (Altamira Press, 2005).