[Air-l] yet another open seat candidate

[Jonathan Sterne]

Hi,

I am writing you all to accept a nomination for an open seat.  Here's a little
about me and my platform:

Who I am:

I am an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.  My research focuses
on technology and communication, broadly defined, and I have published several
articles about the internet and new communication technologies.  I also co-direct
_Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life_, which is one of the oldest
continuously running publications online.  I've been online in one form or another
since 1984.  My full c.v. (more or less) is available at
http://www.pitt.edu/~jsterne/webcv.html if you have more questions about my
experience.

My platform:

I am a musician, academic, intellectual, and activist.  My work in an open seat
would reflect this background.  Specifically, I will promote:

1.    Increased intellectual breadth and depth in internet scholarship -- within
and without the organization.  Internet studies is a young field, and it still
needs to make connections with longer, more established intellectual traditions so
that it can both extend them and challenge them.  I am especially interested in
seeing internet scholarship connect up with other studies of media and social
relations.

2.    I believe that all research works within and promotes specific sets of
values.  While acknowledging that any healthy scholarly organization must be
resolutely pluralistic in the approaches and orientations is admits and fosters, I
will work actively to promote "critical" scholarship within AoIR.  "Critical" is
of course a buzzword for lots of different things: I mean to promote research that
is driven by an intellectual engagement with fundamental philosophical or
social/cultural-theoretical questions, or research that is driven by political and
ethical engagement with questions of access, social justice, and social change.  I
am also interested in promoting scholarship that connects with the use of new
technologies for new forms of creative expression.

3.    Like every other candidate that has ever run for an elected position in a
scholarly organization, I would like to promote connections between AoIR and other
organizations or community groups.  But in specific, I would like to forge
connections between AoIR researchers and groups actively working to democratize
communication and technologies through access intiatives, education, and other
approaches.  And I would like to forge connections between AoIR and groups that
are using new technologies in their battles for social justice around the world.

I hope that this platform is sufficiently concrete and distinct that it helps you
decide whether to vote for me.  If you support my platform, I hope that I will get
your vote.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

--Jonathan

P.S.    I am happy to answer questions via email, though I may be offline for
several days starting Wednesday.