Archive for the 'Conference' Category

Join us for a reception on the first evening of the Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference to celebrate the release of Technology Community Member Marcus Breen’s new book, “Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences.”

Toast the New Year and chat with fellow Technology Community members over refreshments and a cash bar.

We hope to see you there!

We are pleased to welcome Victoria Vesna to the 2012 Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference as one of our plenary speakers.

Victoria Vesna is a media artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). She is currently a Visiting Professor and Director of Research at Parsons Art, Media + Technology, the New School for Design in New York and a senior researcher at IMéRA – Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille, France and Artist in Residence at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bristol. Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Victoria has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions, more than seventy group shows, has been published in excess of twenty papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow, Minnesota Press. In Press is Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. Edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy. Intellect Press, 2011.

For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Henry Jenkins to the 2012 Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference as one of our plenary speakers.

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than a dozen books on media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy. As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics, and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking Web sites, networked computer games, online fan communities, and other advocacy organizations, as well as emerging news media outlets.  Prior to joining USC, Jenkins spent nearly two decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. While there, he directed MIT’s Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1999-2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism, and entertainment.

For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website.

Langdon Winner is a political theorist who focuses upon social and political issues that surround modern technological change. He is the author of Autonomous Technology, a study of the idea of “technology-out-of-control” in modern social thought, The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, and editor of Democracy in a Technological Society. Mr. Winner is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, and his views on social, political and environmental issues appear regularly in Tech Knowledge Revue, published in the on-line journal “NetFuture”.

Praised by The Wall Street Journal as “The leading academic on the politics of technology”, Mr. Winner was born and raised in San Luis Obispo, California. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He has also taught at The New School for Social Research, M.I.T., College of the Atlantic, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and has lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe. In 1991-1992 he was visiting research fellow at the Center for Technology and Culture at the University of Oslo, Norway.  During the spring semester of 2001, he will be Hixon-Riggs Visting Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

A sometime rock critic, he was contributing editor at Rolling Stone in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has contributed articles on rock and roll to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Encylopaedia Britannica. At present he is doing research and writing on a book about the politics of design in the contexts of engineering, architecture and political theory. Another book, a collection of essays on technology and human experience, is also underway.

For more information about the conference please visit our website.