FALL 2008

Technology & Society Lecture Series

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From Hypermodernity to Multiple Worlds

September 26, 2008

Michael Cronin

Dr. Michael Cronin is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies. He is author of Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Identities (Cork University Press, 1996) and Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation (Cork University Press, 2000) which was awarded the CATS Vinay-Darbelnet Prize. He is co-editor of Unity in Diversity: Current Trends in Translation Studies (St. Jerome 1998) and Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002).

Usual Suspects and Strange Bedfellows: Networks of Privacy Advocacy in Surveillance Societies

September 26, 2008

Colin Bennett

Dr. Colin Bennett is a professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Victoria. He has been a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (1999-2000), and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley (2007). His research has focused on the comparative analysis of surveillance technologies and privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels. In addition to numerous scholarly and newspaper articles, his most recently published books include The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective (MIT Press, 2006) and (Ashgate Press, 2003) with Charles D. Raab, The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (MIT Press, 2008), and Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security, and Identification in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2008) with co-editor David Lyon.

Narrating Consciousness: Language, Media and Embodiment

October 3, 2008

N. Katherine Hayles

Dr. N. Katherine Hayles is a noted postmodern literary critic and theorist as well as the author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (University Of Chicago Press, 1999) which won the Ren Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998-1999. Her most recent book is Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). She is currently a professor in the Literature Program and the Information Science and Information Studies program (ISIS) at Duke University.

After Life

November 21, 2008

Eugene Thacker

Dr. Eugene Thacker is a writer, theorist, net.artist, and professor. He teaches at the School of Literature, Communication & Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is author of several books and articles that combine philosophy, science and technology. His recent books include Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (MIT Press, 2006), and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007) co-authored with Alexander Galloway.

FALL 2006

Queering Ideology Symposium

November 9, 2006

Mary Bryson

When Jill Jacks in . . . Queer Virtualities and the Politics of Mis/Recognition

Mary Bryson is Associate Professor and Director, Graduate Programs, ECPS, Faculty of Education, UBC. Her primary interest is in sociocultural scholarship concerning technology, equity, and pedagogically transgressive use of digital tools. She has numerous publications on theoretical treatments of gender and technology, queer theory, and equity in education, including Radical In<ter>ventions (SUNY Press). In 2000, Bryson was a recipient of the Canadian Pioneer in New Technologies and Media award. Her SSHRC research, “Queer Women on the Net,” is focused on new media, identity, and discursive emplotments of network formation, community and agency (http://www.queerville.ca).

Arthur Kroker

Nietzche in Drag in the Theater of Judith Butler

Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory and Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Co-editor of CTheory and Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (www.pactac.ca), he is the author of numerous books on technology and culture, including The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (with M. Weinstein), and The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx.

Religion, Technology, & Terrorism Symposium

October 19, 2006

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Stephen Pfohl

Technologies of the Apocalypse: The Left Behind Novels and Flight from the Flesh

Stephen Pfohl is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College where he teaches courses on social theory; postmodern culture; crime, deviance and social control; images and power; and sociology and psychoanalysis. Stephen is the author of numerous books and articles including Death at the Parasite Café, Images of Deviance and Social Control, Predicting Dangerousness ,and the forthcoming volumes Venus in Video and Magic and the Machine.  A past-President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and a founding member of Sit-Com International, a Boston-area collective of activists and artists, Pfohl is also co-editor of the 2006 book Culture, Power, and History: Studies in Critical Sociology.

Andrew Wernick

The Passion of the Social: Reflections on the Seattle Rave Killings

Andrew Wernick is a sociologist and historian of ideas as well as a cultural theorist and jazz pianist. He is the founder and director of Trent Univesity's Institute for the Study of Popular Culture as well as the current chair of Trent's Cultural Studies Department. His interests are in media theory and advertising in the place of religion in postmodernity, and in the notion of time in contemporary culture.  He is the author of Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression (Sage, 1991), Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: the Post-theistic Project of French Social Theory, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and co-editor of Shadow of Spirit: Religion and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992) and Images of Ageing (Routledge, 1995).

CTheory Live:
Stephen Pfohl and Andrew Wernick in Converstion with Arthur Kroker

October 19, 2006

May 17, 2006

Taiaiake Alfred is a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) philosopher, writer and teacher and has emerged as an influential figure in the new generation of Indigenous leaders. Dr. Alfred holds a Canada Research Chair and is a Professor in the Indigenous Governance Programs and the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. He is the author of three books, Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors, Peace, Power, Righteousness, and Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom.

April 26, 2006

N. Katherine Hayles is a noted postmodern literary critic and theorist as well as the author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics which won the René Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998-1999. Her most recent book is My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. She is currently the Hills Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles, where she has taught since 1992.

April 20, 2006

Stelarc is a world renowned Australian-based performance artist whose work explores and extends the concept of the body and its relationship with technology. He is Visiting Professor, School of Art and Design, at the Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.

March 13- 14, 2006

Session One . Monday March 13 . 2:30 - 3:30

James Tully
Foucault and the Question of Agency

Arthur Kroker
Before Foucault: Power & Cynical Ideology

Session Two . Tuesday March 14 . 2:30 - 3:30

Warren Magnusson
Before Foucault: Scepticism, Relativism, and Modernity

Rob Walker
Foucault, Self-Determination, Limits

MARCH 7 - 18, 2005

This two week graduate seminar consists of a detailed reading and discussion of Taiaiake Alfred's new book, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, which focuses on the restoration of the warrior ethic as the basis for regenerating indigenous identities and struggles to free ourselves from colonialism.

Taiaiake Alfred is a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) philosopher, writer and teacher and has emerged as an influential figure in the new generation of Indigenous leaders. Taiaiake holds a Canada Research Chair and is a Professor in the Indigenous Governance Programs and the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. He is the author of two books, Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors and Peace, Power, Righteousness. Supported by : Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture.

MARCH 16, 2005

This presentation joins the conversation concerning the changing value and meaning of the term “life,” bios.  Specifically, by what terms, whose grammar, which techniques and technologies, are we coming to understand “life” in the contemporary scene? 

I will turn to Foucault’s late work on ethics as the “care of the self,” which is characterized as that style of life that unfolds in the self’s transformative relation to itself.  I contend that in this shift from biopolitics to bioethics, Foucault employs two antithetical notions of life.  It is the latter, relational, notion of life that I read alongside Italian theorist Paolo Virno’s recent work, A Grammar of the Multitude (2004). 

Stuart Murray received his PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.  He currently holds a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he is also a Senior Fellow at The McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology. 

JANUARY 25 - 26, 2005

DR. WILLIAM LEISS F.R.S.C is Canada's leading thinker on risk and responsibility in the age of biotechnology. He is the author of numerous influential books, including: Under Technology's Thumb, The Domination of Nature, In the Chamber of Risks, Risk and Responsibility and Mad Cow and Mother's Milk. A "public intellectual" in the tradition of Thorsten Veblen, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, Dr. Leiss has projected his critique of technological determinism into public life, serving as President of the Royal Society of Canada and advising widely on the social and ethical implications of risk controversies and public policy.

William Leiss is a Fellow and Past-President of the Royal Society of Canada; NSERC/SSHRC Research Chair in Risk Communication and Public Policy in the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary; Professor, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University; and Executive-in-Residence,Mclaughlin Centre for Risk Assessment, University of Ottawa.

SESSION ONE :
GENETIC ENHANCEMENT : THE NEW TECHNOLOGY OF BODY AND MIND

SESSION TWO :
GENETIC ENHANCEMENT : DNA, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION

THURSDAY JANUARY 20, 2005

First Session :
Rob Walker, "Internationalism, Imperialism, Exceptionalism"
Warren Magnusson, "The Politics of Scale"

Second Session:
James Tully, "The Persistence of Empire"
Arthur Kroker, "Born Again Ideology"

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 26, 2004

Paul Hegarty is an associate professor at University College Cork, Ireland, where he has taught in the French department since 1996, specializing in 20th century thought and visual culture. He is also involved in the new Art History program and has taught in the schools of architecture and critical theory at the University of Nottingham in England. He has published a book and articles on Bataille as well as published articles on performance art, architecture and conceptual art. His article on "Japanese Noise Music" was published in CTheory. Hegarty is also a practicing artist. He has most recently authored Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory (Continuum)

FRIDAY OCTOBER 22, 2004

Dr. Stephen Pfohl's presentation, "Data Banked Bodies: New Global Technologies of Power" is a mixed-media performance exploring the social, psychic, and economic dynamics of information -- intensive forms of global capitalist technology.

Stephen Pfohl is Professor and Chairperson of the Sociology Department at Boston College where he teaches courses on social theory, deviance and social control, postmodernity, social psychoanalysis, and the sociology of technology, art, and culture. The author of numerous books and articles, including Images of Deviance and Social Control (McGraw Hill, 1994), Death at the Parasite Cafe (St. Martin's press 1992), and the forthcoming Venus in Video: Cybernetics and Ultramodern Power. Stephen is also Past President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, a member of the editorial board of CTheory, performance artist, and founding member of the Boston-based Sit-Com International.

FRIDAY OCTOBER 22, 2004

Clare Dunsford will read from her book-in-progress, Spelling Love With an X: A Mother, A Son, and the Gene that Binds Them. Part medical memoir, part poetic meditation on identity in the age of the gene, the book is also the love story of a mother and her son.
Clare Dunsford is an Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, she received her B.A. in English from St. Louis University and her Ph.D. in English from Boston University. She has been an adjunct lecturer at Harvard University and Boston College, teaching courses in writing, poetry, modern literature, narrative and interpretation, literature and censorship, and literature and illness. She is currently writing a book reflecting on her experience as the mother of a boy with Fragile X Syndrome.

THURSDAY OCTOBER 21, 2004

In every advanced industrial society, there exist disparate groups who have tried to spotlight excessive levels of surveillance, online and offline. They have protested ID cards, video-surveillance programs, intrusive marketing practices on the Internet, the integration of personal databases, and so on. They have attempted to "out" excessively intrusive organizations, and to render transparent their surveillance practices. There is plenty of evidence that these groups have become more active and more visible. But who are the "privacy advocates"? What are their main strategies, and why have their activities assumed a greater importance? The range of issues surrounding the collection, use, processing and dissemination of personal information by public and private organizations employing the most sophisticated information technologies is commonly assumed to be one of the critical issues of the "digital age." But how do the advocates attempt to translate a strong, but vague sense, of public unease about privacy into meaningful social action? Is there the potential for a more coherent and international social movement to coalesce around these issues of similar strength and visibility to the environmental movement?

Dr. Colin Bennett received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Wales, and his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1986 he has taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he is now Professor. From 1999-2000, he was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government Harvard University. His research has focused on the comparative analysis of information privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels. In addition to numerous articles, he has published three books: Regulating Privacy: Data Protection and Public Policy in Europe and the United States (Cornell University Press, 1992); Visions of Privacy: Policy Choices for the Digital Age (University of Toronto Press, 1999, with Rebecca Grant); The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in the Digital Age (Ashgate Press, 2003, with Charles Raab).

THURSDAY OCTOBER 28, 2004

Life in the Wires is about life today, from Al-Jazeera to eBay, from creatively understanding new media to analyzing how questions of gender, race, class and colonialism have been deeply transformed by networked society.

Life in the Wires, is in essence what Jean-Paul Sartre calls a "fused community" -- a global intellectual community of theorists, musicians, artists, filmmakers, computer programmers, multimedia designers, architects, engineers, Soweto poets, Net activists; young and old; a multiplicity of race, class, gender, nation and disciplines, writing from universities, industry, media, the streets; the design and programming centers of IT, from anti-globalization street protests, from mediawatch, from the badlands of Texas, the streets of San Francisco, the hybrid cities of Cape Town, London, Toronto, New York, Paris, Helsinki, Singapore and Berlin.

THURDAY MARCH 18, 2004

Donna Haraway, author of the much discussed, "The Cyborg Manifesto," is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she teaches feminist theory and science studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the Women's Studies, Anthropology and Environmental Studies Departments at UCSC. Dr. Haraway is the author of Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (Yale University Press, 1976), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989; Verso,1992), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge,1991; Free Association Books, 1991), Modest Witness @Second Millennium. FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse (Routledge, 1997) and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)

WEDNESDAY MARCH 10, 2004

A multimedia/print book launch and lecture.

The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism explores the future of the twenty-first century in the language of technological destiny. Presenting Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx as prophets of technological nihilism, it will be argued that every aspect of contemporary culture, society and politics is coded by the dynamic unfolding of the 'will to technology'.

Posthumanism, then, as a harbinger of our technological future.

Dr. Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology,Culture and Theory and a Professor in the Political ScienceDepartment at the University of Victoria. He is the Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC) and co-editor (with Marilouise Kroker) of CTHEORY <www.ctheory.net> for 'The Will to Technology' Multi-Media Version [click here] . Multi-Media Designer : Spencer Saunders (Communicate New Media)

THURDAY FEBRUARY 12, 2004

What is the future of human genetic engineering?

Are the clones and chimeras likely to be produced by human genetic engineering part of the biotech future? Or is this vision of the posthuman future something long implied by the cultural history of technology? Are we moving towards the age of the posthuman, or are we trapped in a technological cycle first explored by the writings of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum?

William Leiss is a Fellow and Past-President of the Royal Society of Canada; NSERC/SSHRC Research Chair in Risk Communication and Public Policy in the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary; Professor, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University; and Executive-in-Residence,Mclaughlin Centre for Risk Assessment, University of Ottawa.

THURSDAY JANUARY 29, 2004

Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in NYC. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine, and a host of other periodicals. His work as an artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. Miller has recorded a large volume of music as "Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid" and has collaborated with a wide variety of pre-eminent musicians and composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kool Keith, Yoko Ono, and Thurston Moore. He also did the music score for the Cannes and Sundance award winning film "Slam" starring critically acclaimed poet Saul Williams. Paul D. Miller is a member of the editorial board of CTheory.