[Air-L] CF Participant for NCA Panel on Information Politics

[Rysavy, Wayne Erik]

Hello,

My colleague, Bryan Behrenshausen, and I have organized a panel we plan to submit to the Media Ecology Division of the 2014 National Communication Associaion conference. We already have a confirmed chair/respondent and another participant, but are looking for one more person to join our panel. Below, I've included our rationale. We are particularly interested in bringing someone on who has interest in information politics and explores information and/or theories of information and information flow from a critical perspective employing critical theory, discursive analysis, and/or historiographic analysis. 

Interested participants should email me at wrysavy at email.unc.edu. Inquiries about the panel are also welcome.

Rationale: A fiercely contested term, commodity, and palliative, "information" is neither static nor neutral; it is relational, contextual, and deeply implicated in power relations that traverse the personal, social, cultural, and economic. As an object purportedly central to many contemporary techniques and technologies, information participates in various processes of social organization that bear decidedly political aims. It positions people and things, and it generates contexts for the ongoing work of managing their relations. Information is material, yet ephemeral—an object to be "owned" and "managed," and yet indecipherable outside the particular political and economic relations that valorize it. In precise but shifting relation with "data" and "knowledge," information authorizes and mobilizes multiple—often fractured and contradictory—truth claims. Information's historic (re)articulations persist today, shaping the ways in which popular discourses of "information" make discussing, using, and interpreting it possible. Examining information and information technologies through critical theoretical, historiographic, and discursive analyses, this panel re-contextualizes information, tracks its role in everyday systems of meaning and power, and explores the way past discourses of information influence the way we conceptualize it in the present.

Thank you for your interest.

Wayne Erik Rysavy, M.A.
Doctoral Student and Teaching Fellow
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
115 Bingham, CB#3285
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
wrysavy at email.unc.edu

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." –Ludwig Wittgenstein