[Air-L] Announcing Keynote and Plenary Speakers

[Hector Postigo]

Hello Everyone

It's my pleasure to announce AoIR 14’s Keynote Speaker and Plenary Panel speakers.  Our Keynote Speaker this year is Gabriella Coleman.  Prof. Coleman is Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University.  Her first book, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking, is available from Princeton University Press. Her second book on Anonymous is forthcoming from Verso Press.

Our Plenary Panel Speakers are as follows:

Our first Plenary Panel will be themed “Race, Gender and Information Communication Technologies.”  Our speakers for that panel are Jenna Burrell, Lisa Nakamura and Christina Dunbar-Hester.  Jenna Burrell is Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her first book, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana, is available from MIT Press.  Lisa Nakamura is Professor in the Department of American Cultures and the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She is the author of a number of books on race and the internet including Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet from the University of Minnesota Press and Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet from Routledge Press.  Christina Dunbar-Hester is an ethnographer who studies activism in technical cultures.  She is Assistant Professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University.  Her book on low-power radio activism will be published in 2014 by MIT Press, and her current NSF-supported research centers on efforts to promote "diversity" in hacker spaces and FLOSS.

Our second Plenary Panel will be themed “Political Economy of Technoculture.”  Our speakers for the second panel are Tarleton Gillespie, T.L. Taylor and Gina Neff.   Tarleton Gillespie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society from MIT Press, and is finishing his second book on the implications of the content policies of online platforms for Yale University Press.  T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She has authored a number of pieces on gaming and multi-user spaces, including her recent book Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming from MIT Press. Gina Neff is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Communication. She has authored research on how work, communication technologies, and organizational structures relate to one another and the commercial production of mediated culture in communication industries. Her recent book Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries is available from MIT Press.

My deepest gratitude to all of them for accepting my invitation to join us and to you, my fellow AoIR list readers and members, for your ongoing support of our conference.  As the date approaches please visit www.ir14.aoir.org for more information on our invited speakers and their forthcoming discussion topics.



All the best,

Hector Postigo

AoIR 14 Resistance and Appropriation 

Program Chair