I attended (and very much enjoyed) the 2011 HASTAC Conference in Ann Arbor earlier this month. The keynotes are available online– make sure to check out Cathy Davidson’s and Siva Vaidhyanathan’s.
The conference twitter hastag (#hastac2011) was really active and includes lots of analysis and links for your reading pleasure.
A project of the Central New York Peace Studies Consortium
Conference Theme:
“GLOBALIZED RESTRUCTURING, NEW MEDIA, & MOBILIZATION”
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York, USA
Sponsored by: Le Moyne College Peace and Global Studies Program &
Center for Urban and Regional Applied Research
CONFERENCE THEME:
“GLOBALIZED RESTRUCTURING, NEW MEDIA, & MOBILIZATION”
Accelerating global flows of people, money, technology, images, ideas and narratives are transforming the ways we humans connect, inspire one another, participate in informal economies, and organize social movements. The intersection of globalized economic restructuring and widespread access to Internet-based media provide an appropriate context in which to understand such phenomena.
International relations both in the colonial context and that of neo-liberal corporate capitalism have been characterized by “plunder” – the “often violent extraction by stronger international political actors victimizing weaker ones”*. Such plunder has produced tremendous social upheavals, dislocations, dispossessions, impoverishment etc., especially in the post-colonial world. It also entailed the globalized political-economic-social restructuring that set the stage for contemporary US/European strategic alliances with repressive regimes. The tightly intermeshed disposition of global capital and finance has made a recession with roots in US real-estate speculation into a worldwide crisis, in which the poorest have borne the brunt of further impoverishment, unemployment, hunger, dislocation, and desperation. The uneven impacts of climate change on food security are also shaped in part by this history of exploitative globalization.
Adding to this the phenomenal growth of Internet-based communication in recent years produced conditions for the massive demonstrations and popular uprisings that are transforming the world today. This form of network mobilization characterizes contemporary movements on many fronts; from anti-coal to pro-democracy. The revelations of WikiLeaks regarding regime leadership; access to web-based independent news coverage; and the use of handheld devices, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogging as organizing and reporting tools, can rapidly produce broad coalitions of activists and shift the power balance between repressive states, large corporations, and citizens, with results that are unfolding before the eyes of the entire world. Educated and media-savvy youth have played a central role in organizing and supporting these movements, connecting with expertise and resources worldwide to evade state surveillance and speak truth to power on a global stage. The full significance of these changes and of potential reactions remains to be seen. At a minimum, these events throw a new light on efforts of states and large corporations to control media access and to privatize the Internet.
The rise of globalized media also has its downside. The social disruptions attendant on neo-liberal restructuring and worldwide privatization of wealth have generated conditions of desperate need and impunity for wrongdoers in many parts of the world. This, combined with the speed, anonymity, deterritorialization and sheer volume of Internet communications have generated burgeoning opportunities for trafficking along with widespread dependence on illicit economic exchange for survival and social mobility.
The Peace Studies Consortium invites submissions for papers relating to any part of this general theme including but not limited to those suggested by these linkages:
- the participation of women
- resource conflicts (resource curses?)
- Internet-based organizing
- formal organizations vs. fluid networks
- “apolitical” coalitions vs. ideologically based organizing
- (educated) youth unemployment
- food security and political instability (green & local etc. food movements)
- relationship of weapons and other trafficking to conflict escalation
- military response to peaceful protest
- histories of plunder and resistance
- middle class participation in pro-democracy uprisings
- secularism in these movements
- globalized youth culture
- (your idea here)
* This is the definition offered by Laura Nader and Ugo Mattei in Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (2008, Blackwell, Oxford UK.).
More details here: http://peaceconsortium.org/peace-studies-conference
There is a great slate of writers among the University Lectures guests at SU this year. I think I’m most excited about Jonathan Franzen’s talk with George Saunders (3/6), but David Sedaris (10/11), Zadie Smith (3/20), and Katrina vanden Heuvel (10/4). All these lectures are free, people.
If any of you from my Research In the Digital Age Class this summer are still interested, On the Media had a whole hour on Google this week. Don’t b evil!
Treasures from SUL’s Belfer Archive are now available daily on WAER and on a great newly-launched website: SoundBeat.org.
Check out yesterday’s episode, “The First Hillbilly To Own A Cadillac”.
More from SoundBeat on facebook & twitter.
The New York Times has a story on annotation and Association copies this morning. I love the following quote:
“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”
Indeed!
Learn more about a new poet everyday:
From February through April of 2011, the Foundation will host a retrospective examining more than sixty years of American poetry. The retrospective will include a daily blog featuring essays by emerging poets on all past Winners of the National Book Award for Poetry, as well as a series of public programs in three U.S. cities.
Each day for ten weeks, beginning on February 14, 2011, the Foundation will publish a brief, original blog essay on a National Book Award Winner, beginning with William Carlos Williams, Winner of the first National Book Award for Poetry in 1950. In addition to the essay, each blog page will include a brief biography of the poet and related information and links.
The NBF poetry blog is now live.
If you have visited any databases in the ProQuest family (which now includes Chadwyck-Healy and CSA) since the last week of December, you may have noticed some major changes to the look and capabilities. ProQuest has updated the structure of their databases to allow more searching among packages, filtering of results, and other customizable enhancements. Notable databases which are affected include:
American Periodicals Series (PQ)
ARTBibliographies Modern (CSA)
British Humanities Index (CSA)
British Periodicals (PQ)
International Index to the Performing Arts (PQ)
International Index to Music Periodicals (PQ)
MLA International Bibliography (CSA). Periodicals Archive Online (PQ), and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (CSA) will follow to the new platform later in the year. You can visit ProQuest central (http://libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/pqcentral?accountid=14214 ) to view the complete list of resources available on the new platform. In my opinion, there are several improvements to the usability and responsiveness of the platform, and I welcome your feedback. We are submitting comments to the vendors, so please contact me if you have any suggestions. Also let me know if you’d like a personal overview of the changes. More information can be found here: http://library.syr.edu/blog/news/archives/001741.php
The latest NYT article on digital humanities was published over the weekend. (Here’s the first.) I like how the graphic for the frequency of “Christian” looks like a skyline filled with churches.
The full project is available online at victorianbooks.org, where the researchers have kindly made their data available open access.
Via the Vintage Ad Browser (which is like a free version of Ad*flip)
Recent Books at Bird