Panel I-A
Gestell, Apparatus, Stephanie Wakefield
The concept Gestell plays a crucial role in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy as well as in Giorgio Agamben’s recent re-elaboration of apparatus (dispositif) as “a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient” entities in the world. Agamben, however, makes an all too-brief remark on Heidegger’s retooling of the term Gestell in “The Question Concerning Technology,” where it is transformed from its ordinary usage to “the gathering together of the (in)stallment [Stellen] that (in)stalls man…as standing reserve” (1993 325). Outlining a trajectory of thought that proceeds from Heidegger’s 1949 Bremen Club lecture, “Insight into That Which Is,” through Foucault’s 1976 course “Society Must Be Defended,” and up to Agamben’s 2006 essay, “What is an Apparatus?” this paper will delve further into Heidegger’s deployment of Gestell as a necessary precondition for conceptualizing the functioning of apparatuses today.
UNMANNED, Saraswathi Anna Subbaraman
UNMANNED explores multiple issues and perspectives surrounding the reality of robotic warfare – which has taken off in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, as well as here in the United States. Currently the United States has control over 5,300 drones around these areas and 12,000 ground level machines in Iraq alone.
SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System), weighing 200 pounds with a speed of up to four mph, carries a M249 light machine gun. The Warrior X700, weighing 250 pounds can travel up to 10 mph carrying a .30 caliber machine gun alongside an “articulated arm” that can lift up to 150 pounds. The MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System) weighs 235 pounds, travels up to 7 mph, and can have “no-fire zones” programmed into it in order ”to prevent fratricide” (Sofge). The MULE (Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment) carries up to 2000 pounds of cargo or can be armed with “four antitank Javelin missiles and a turret-mounted M240 machine gun” (Sofge).
All of these machines can be operated from a remote location, with a remote control, thousands of miles away from their mark.
Inside the Garden of Bifurcations: Technologies of Composition, Recuperation, and the Work of the Soul in Neoliberalism, Stevphen Shukaitis
In an interview for the Sunday Times on May 1st, 1981 Margaret Thatcher famously declared that for her “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” That is to say that neoliberalism, as a social and economic transformation, was not just about changing institutional or political arrangements, but rather instead intended to attempt to enact a kind of degree zero rewriting of the fundamental conditions of labor and subjectivity. In recent years social theory explored how precise and accurate a statement this was, from Jason Read’s theorization of the subsumption of subjectivity within the labor process (2003) to broader discussions about the nature of biopolitics, affective and immaterial labor, and the possibilities or blockages of subversion around transformed compositions of labor.
This presentation will bring together various strands of thought on such subject, exploring through an autonomist framework oriented around issues of class composition. Autonomist analysis focuses on the ways that capital and governance, rather than acting as autonomous and self-contained entities, are shaped by the continual necessity to render energies of struggle and subversion into new modes of accumulation. New regimes of production and epochal shifts, for instance from Fordist to post-Fordist production, carry within them traces of the social revolt, technologies of struggle if you will, that held together the previous balance of labor, capital, and governance.
From this we can ask, how does the attempt to reshape the soul and the social that Thatcher gestures to operate as a form of class decompositon, one that attempts to pre-empt attempts to find new avenues for the political recomposition of struggles? In particular it will explore these questions through the writings of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and his explanation of how the soul is ‘put to work’ within a hyper-subsuming capitalist logic that can only result in pathological overload of immaterial and communicative dynamics. While Berardi’s work analyzes with insightful prescient the dynamics of soul shaping labor that work to prevent the recomposition of labor subversion in these conditions, at face value they seem to point to a politics of hopelessness. Rather than accept a logic of collapse as the end of a politics of autonomy, the goal will be to return to earlier moments in the autonomist tradition to reconstruct how practices of workers inquiry and class composition analysis, by understanding what brought about this collapse, can rebuild a new approach to labor, subversion and autonomy from within the ruins.
Panel I-B
Nonviolence activism: A digital archive as method, Carolina Muñoz Proto
Me·mos·co·pio \me-mō –skōpēō-\ noun [from memory + kaleidoscope]: (1) A collective act of memory and creation; (2) An online archive of testimonies about peace and nonviolence; (3) A kaleidoscope of images, text, video, and audio.
To me·mos·co·pe \me-mō -skōp-\ verb [from memoscopio]: (1) To upload testimonies to www.memoscopio.org; (2) To document, study, and promote movements for peace, nonviolence and social justice. E.g., to memoscope the World March World March For Peace and Nonviolence.
As a participatory action research project, Memoscopio sits at the intersection of activism, social research and advocacy. Through a digital archive of oral/visual histories, Memoscopio studies the psychosocial significance of an international grassroots campaign titled The World March for Peace and Nonviolence. How does new media expand the boundaries of legitimate methods? What do we gain from simultaneously collecting and disseminating data in ways that are relevant and useful to the activist and grassroots communities engaged in nonviolent activism? The presentation explores these and other questions.
Annihilation of Space by Media: Making Connections through a Fragmented Landscape of Political Practice, Rachel Goffe, Shivaani Selvaraj, co-presenters
Looking at the unfolding practices of a Philadelphia organization, this paper explores how building a media and communications infrastructure can short-circuit and supplant the fragmentation of political struggles. In the work of the Media Mobilizing Project this question emerges as twofold, both involved with the politics of representation. In practice these moments —constituting collectives and explanatory frameworks—are both entwined in “the telling of untold stories.” This phrase takes media as a dialogic form; a process through which collectives are constituted that exceed the boundaries of organization, identity, urban and rural divides, and workplace vs. community based politics.
Comparative Qualitative Methodology: Applications, Benefits, and Complexities, Jessica Sperling
This presentation will discuss comparative qualitative research. It will specifically cover three components of such research: comparative research, qualitative research, and the union of these two methodologies – comparative research using qualitative data-gathering techniques. Regarding comparative methodology and qualitative research (specifically, interview-based research), I will discuss the benefits of such work, the context in which comparative methodology is most sensible, and the difficulties inherent in such work. I will then focus on using joint comparative qualitative research, drawing specifically on my early dissertation work which involves interviews with children of Latin American immigrants in Madrid and New York. I will pay special attention intricacies and difficulties of this type of research, such as dealing with and interpreting the variation of meanings between contexts, and the ways in which this type of research can further understanding of key sociological issues, such as the creation of social boundaries.
Social Time as Technology and Content Analysis Methodology, Colleen Eren
In discussing the importance of time in methodological considerations, sociologists contend with issues such as selecting historical data points, the challenges of longitudinal studies, generational differences, and availability of data and documents from certain time periods. However, after reviewing the literature, it is apparent that there has been scant reflection on the question of how time–social time–is a technology that structures tools for analyzing data, which in turn supports current social constructions of time and influence the outcome of studies in unexplored ways.
This presentation looks explicitly at content analysis of newspapers in the 20th and 21st centuries. It asks the question of how social time as technology (i.e. as a mode or pattern of thought) affects this methodological approach, and how then content analysis mirrors social time.
To Retrofit as Method, Adeola Enigbokan
I am writing a guidebook to thinking “experience” in “the city”, organized as a series of walking tours. Look at the crumbling walls in Tel Aviv, the scaffolding in New York; pass workers digging into the vast maze of sewers, pipelines and wiring under the ground in either city; or take the buildings with their period facades, and imagine the constant movement, the rotation of occupancy and design: sense the how the city is built in these different layers of time. Each walking tour takes the wanderer through different cities in different times via artwork created in, for or about each city. In this project I am gutting two older technologies: that of the guidebook, and that of the dissertation. The content and form for this hybrid creature derives from “field notes” created through a weblog. I am “retrofitting” the older-yet-not-quite-obsolete ‘guidebook’ and ‘dissertation’ technologies with the newer ‘blog’ technology.
The EMDR Machine: Sensory-Affective Methodologies and Psychiatric Culture, Kim Cunningham
EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is now one of the most widely-used psychiatric therapies for mass trauma internationally, from treating victims and soldiers in the war in Iraq to survivors of the tsunami. Through this mysterious practice, in which eye movements and tactile stimulation are used to rapidly increase recovery from traumatic experience, the body is positioned as a transmitter of affective information rather than speaking subject. As state governments and non-governmental organizations invest in EMDR, it can be understood as a machinic assemblage of the senses in which the transmission of inter-generational trauma, positioned as a population-level variable, is modulated. The author underwent EMDR in order to use EMDR itself as a methodology of study—to move from away from the position of relexivity of the researcher as subject and to instead attempt to enter to into haptic or sensational resonance with the object of study.
Diary Versus Data: Researching Teacher Blogs, Kiersten Greene
While the term technology has multiple meanings in the field of education, it has, in recent years, meant increased visibility of multiple high-tech gadgets and tools in both higher education and K-12 classrooms; the usage of social-networking sites and blogs in the teaching of various curricula; and an ever-expanding ability to do research on the Internet, often without ever leaving the comfort of one’s own home or office. And in the last ten years especially, educational researchers have begun analyzing and debating the utility of these various technological tools—in the classroom and beyond. However, the proposed paper takes a turn away from the utilization of technology as a pedagogical or curricular tool, and instead asks, what can blogs written by teachers tell us?
Technology-oriented approaches and their contribution to literacy research: Too much of a good thing?, Natalya Petroff
In the past 50 years, reading has been studied from a number of technology-oriented approaches (e.g., computers, fMRI). Yet, when we consider what these approaches have promised and what they have delivered so far, there appears to be a gap: many American students still struggle and lag behind their Asian and European peers in reading (e.g., PISA, 2003). The present paper proposes that we should not view “technology” as encompassing “method” but accept “technology” as “tools” that don’t produce new understanding per se but require an agent. “Method” (what literacy research does) should be conceived broadly, as a kind of social practice, with its own history and current institutions. Method in literacy research is best understood as scientific argument, articulated and challenged through shared practices, grounded in theory and its empirical examination through the use of tools. This framework is then applied to current practices in literacy research.
Medium as Message and Method: The Political Ecology of U.S. Cyberdominance in Youth Environments, Gregory Donovan
This presentation aims to situate U.S. youth as a point of tension in attempts by governments, businesses, and families to securitize cyberspace and to argue that from this point young people simultaneously emerge as subjects of domination and objects of power. The U.S. war doctrine of “cyberdominance” and its entailments with young people at multiple scales will be reviewed. MyDigitalFootprint.org, a participatory action research project with New York City youth ages 14-19, will then be discussed as a method for investigating the reciprocity between informational development and young people’s development within an empowering and dominating ecology. Finally, MyDigitalFootprint.org will be discussed as an open-source digital medium for building youth-based cyberempowerment.
Video Game Ratings and the Archive of Children, Benjamin J.N. Kampler
This essay examines the formation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, or ESRB, the group that is responsible for rating video games. Drawing from Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, I studied the Congressional hearings that were held in response to the production of a handful of graphically violent games; using Foucault’s concept of archival knowledge, I argue that Congress took action because children’s predilection for violent games interfered with the structure of what I call the archive of children. Congress held these hearings in order to preserve its concept of the innocent, violence-free child. Given that most video games inherently involve some level of violence, I argue that that the Congressional hearings illustrate that the archive of children excludes realistic violence, not violence per se. I also posit that Congress attempts to write video game executives as morally inferior because they produce violent video games despite the fact that Congress condones military violence.
Smooth scholarship and the politics of assemblage, Ali Syed
This presentation will outline some of the theoretical issues concerning the relationship between governance, risk society, and the production of scholarship as a technology of producing knowable subjects. In thinking about these processes turning to Deluze and Guattari’s concepts of “striated” and “smooth” space as well as Lucas Cassidy Crawford’s work on urban “striated spaces” linked to similarly striated bodies suggests a theoretical promise for what we might call “smooth scholarship.” If striated bodies and spaces are readable, knowable, and easy to capture then perhaps smooth bodies and spaces are ones that cannot be read, known, captured. Therefore, I ask how scholarship (as opposed to space) might produce what we might call smooth subjects and also hope to consider the kinds of methodological approaches that might be conducive to such smooth scholarship.
The End of Society, Pamela Brown
Over recent years, the American conversation has shifted from concern over equality to concern over freedom. The turn toward ideals of freedom and individualism has been termed “neoliberalism.” Most research on this transition focuses on the political and economic conditions associated with neoliberalism, and not on the relationship between this transition and the revolutionary change our media environment has undergone simultaneously. The paper argues that although accounts that seek to understand neoliberalism as a part of an ongoing ideological debate between conservatives and liberals are partially true, these accounts fail to provide a satisfying explanation of why these ideas have resonated so strongly at this time. By perceiving the moving image as the foundation of a fundamentally different mode of production, and by perceiving neoliberalism as an outgrowth of the breakdown of the historic relationship between labor and capital, we can understand neoliberalism as a change to social ethic associated with new technology.
The Digital Afterlife: Contested Notions of Personhood and Property in Online Estate Planning, Tamara Kneese
New online companies promise to organize individuals’ “digital assets” after they die. The idea of creating a living will for one’s Facebook profile, MySpace page, or Gmail account is a novel one, but one which makes practical sense in a world in which the lines between public and private, inanimate object and person, are increasingly blurred. As people’s online lives have become seemingly more public through social networking websites like Facebook, anxiety over the sanctity of the online identities of the dead has become a source of legal and ethical debate. What are the affective logics behind this desire to control online forms of personhood, even after death?
Using Bibliometrics in Decoding the Polysemy of Televised Texts., Dana Neacsu
For many, “bibliometrics” defines the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication. But its philosophy which regards human communications as records or texts need not to be limited to quantitative analysis.
All communication is built on references to some common knowledge among participants. All media content is to some extent self-referential and inter-textual. Bibliometrics starts from this perspective. Its position is that through references and citations knowledge from the referenced work is transferred to the secondary work. Within this process the secondary work will contextualize the meaning of the referenced work and test its potential readings. The context surrounded the citation or reference evidences how the referenced work was read. In this regard, bibliometrics is a useful approach to any study of meaning-making processes.
As a result I use bibliometrics to decode TDS’ polysemy as it transpires through tertiary texts. Through discourse analysis of TDS’ tertiary texts, audience-authored texts, by way of bibliometrics I search for TDS decoded polysemy. The advantage of this decoding perspective is that it limits the discourse analysis objectively: the context of the tertiary text limits the potential interpretation of decoding polysemy, informing or confirming the additional textual analyses.
Television and the Dissemination of Stereotypes, Elizabeth Miller
Reality television, which claims to present unscripted and unprompted behavior, is becoming an increasingly popular genre with television networks, producers, and viewers. In 2009, MTV aired Jersey Shore, which capitalized on the negative behaviors, conforming to existing and new stereotypes, of young people of Italian descent. This paper employs a content analysis of Jersey Shore to explore the problems of stereotypes in reality television, the effects of the presentation of stereotypes as “reality,” and the possibility that Jersey Shore’s popularity may fuel a proliferation of reality television programs that portray and reinforce negative stereotypes of racial, ethnic, religious, or other social groups. Because television can easily mold the public’s perception and opinions, the assertion of blatant ethnic stereotypes in “reality” programming has the potential to seriously undermine various minority groups’ mobility.
An attempt to bridge the gap between traditional and technologically-mediated approaches to research on naturally occurring conversation, Stephen M. DiDomenico
This paper aims to make the case that, for researchers of Conversation Analysis (CA), communication technology is a phenomenon of everyday sociality that can no longer be ignored. Grounded in the perspectives of participants through close, repeated analyses of video-taped recordings of naturally occurring interaction, conversation analytic research focuses on how individuals use language as a tool to accomplish a range of identity, relational, and institutional-level goals in conversational interaction. Despite this theoretical orientation, little attention has been given to the way individuals accomplish social actions and realities with the assistance of communication technologies. In the end, this paper considers the possibility extending the methodological boundaries of CA to include more recent communicative innovations in acknowledgment of how pervasive such technologies are in the mundane conduct of day-to-day life.
