June Conference to Examine Communication Issues
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — Rethinking the role of communication in a post 9/11 world will be the focus of a three-day conference at the University of Maine, June 28-30, sponsored by the National Communication Association.
Highlighting the conference will be keynote addresses by Constance Penley, director of the Center for Film, Television and New Media at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, coordinator of the Center for Asia-Pacific Cultural Studies at National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan.
Penley’s talk is “Melrose Space: Art, Politics, and Agency in an Age of Global Media”; Chen will speak on “Modes of Knowledge Production in the Contexts of Neo-Liberal Globalization.”
A plenary workshop, “Science, Journalism and Cultural Politics,” will feature leading writers, scientists and scholars discussing the cultural effect of the journalistic dissemination of scientific knowledge. Among the participants will be Paul Mayewski, director of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute; Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist now at the University of Wisconsin; and science writer Chris Mooney, author of the forthcoming Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.
The keynote addresses and plenary session are open to the public.
Science communication is an understudied yet critical component of our changing global context, says Nathan Stormer, a UMaine professor of communication and journalism who is coordinating the conference with Professor Kent Ono at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Today, it’s important to examine the effectiveness of science communication, how people comprehend the messages and what difference that understanding can make in individual lives or public policies.
Among the questions, says Stormer: How does information on issues moving and shaping society enter public consciousness? And how do media representations impact public understanding.
One of the goals of the conference is to interest graduate students in pursuing research on critical and cultural communication issues. Seminars for conference participants will explore more of these issues, including the current “security society,” globalization and media, intercultural politics and communication; cultural influences on political participation; and transnational feminism.
A similar conference focused on critical and cultural studies in communication, one of the fastest growing divisions in the discipline, was held in 2000 at the University of Iowa. The conference sparked a new NCA journal, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, in 2004.
UMaine’s conference also is part of a 600-level distance education summer course enrolling students from more than 10 universities across the country.