Congratulations to MA Students!

Congratulations to the students who passed the MA Exam the January:

• Ben Grimwood
• Rudo Mudiwa
• Bridget Sutherland

That's the way to do it, y'all!

New Directions in Media Ethnography Lecture Series

Debating Ethnic and Professional Identity in an Online Magicians' Forum

Graham Jones (MIT)

Friday, February 3, 4:00-5:00 

Classroom Office Building 100 (800 East Third St.)

Also, at 1:00-2:00, Classroom Office Building 272

Discussion with graduate students about his article

"Talking Text and Talking Back: ‘My BFF Jill’ from Boob Tube to YouTube”

In 2009, a young and virtually unknown magician of North African descent began making weekly appearances on a primetime French talk show, performing card tricks for invited guests. It is uncommon for magic to feature so prominently on television and, not surprisingly, magicians themselves watched closely, voicing their assessments in a thriving online forum devoted to Francophone magic culture. Eventually, this thread would swell to over 600 posts, becoming the longest, and arguably most divisive, in the forum’s ten-year history. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among French magicians, I analyze this thread as a social drama that revealed tensions and precipitated schisms within this secretive community of entertainers. Debates about the significance of ethnic background in explaining this particular magician’s success reflected vexed attitudes towards ethnicity in contemporary France; they also articulated with questions of professional theodicy: why does anyone succeed or fail in this line of work, and what does this reveal about the cultural status of magic? In examining how considerations of ethnic and professional identity intersect within this thread, I also address the significance of the forum itself as a channel of communication with distinctive conventions and affordances.

Graham Jones is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist, whose research focuses on knowledge and rationality in practice, performance, and interaction. After studying literature at Reed College (BA, 1998) and anthropology at New York University (PhD, 2007), he was a postdoctoral member of the Princeton University Society of Fellows (2007-2010). Based on almost two years of field research, his first book explores the secretive subculture of entertainment magic in contemporary Paris, revealing how French magicians acquire the knowledge and skill necessary to produce their mystifying illusions. His related research explores the historical significance of magic in colonial spaces of intercultural performance, and the use of magic tricks as a medium for religious messages by Evangelical “gospel magicians” in the contemporary United States. He has also carried out extensive research on the linguistic dimensions of computer-mediated communication (particularly instant and text messaging), an area he continues to pursue. His new book is Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft (University of California Press, 2011).

Anthropology Speaker Series Today: "The Ethnography of Information"

A talk by David Hakken

Professor of Social Informatics

Indiana University, Bloomington

Monday, January 30 at 4:00pm

Fine arts Building, Room 102

Can "information" be studied ethnographically?  If so, what are some key reasons for such research and some central questions in its pursuit?  How do these articulate with the broader research agendas of Informatics and Anthropology?

David Hakken is an anthropologist whose career has centered on the study of digital technologies and socio-cultural change. After 27 years teaching anthropology in SUNY, in 2004 he joined the new school of Informatics and Computing at IU Bloomington, whose Social Informatics group he currently coordinates.  He was the first recipient of the AAA's Textor Prize in Anticipatory Anthropology in 1999 and was the founder of the AAA's Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing.

Italian Language Proficiency Exam-Spring 2012

The Italian Language Proficiency exam has been scheduled this semester for Friday, February 24 from 9:00-11:00 am in BH 011. In order to sign up, please email Valerie Puiatti (fritgs@indiana.edu) the following information by February 20:

- Name

- Department

- Student ID #.

The exam entails the translation from Italian into English of one or two articles from a current newspaper or journal.

Please note that DICTIONARIES are NOT allowed at the exam.

If you would like to have a better idea about what the exam entails, you may come to BH642 to request copies of the articles used for the exam in previous years.

PhD Defense Announcements Go Electronic

PhD Defense announcments should now be submitted online using the new edoc system. Find links to this on the University Graduate School Forms page in Onestart, or click HERE.

Teach at the Collins Living-Learning Center

Is there a course you've always wanted to teach, but never had the opportunity?

Have you designed a multidisciplinary course that doesn't quite fit into your department's curriculum?

The Collins Living-Learning Center invites faculty members and advanced graduate students with teaching experience to submit course proposals each semester for the following year.  This is an opportunity to teach a unique course in a special setting.

Collins courses carry university credit and are open to all IU undergraduates.

PROPOSAL DEADLINE FOR CLASSES TO BE TAUGHT IN SPRING 2013:  THURSDAY, MARCH 15 at 5 pm

There will be an optional information session for potential Collins instructors on Friday, February 10 in the Edmondson Formal Lounge at 5 PM.

The 3-credit Collins seminars are limited to a maximum of 20 students (15 in the case of fine arts classes) and meet at the Collins Living-Learning Center, which is fully-equipped for multi-media teaching. 

Graduate student instructors receive $6728 for a 3-credit course.  In addition, they are given $400 to spend on materials or activities, meal points for dining with students, and a parking pass.

Collins is also accepting applications from faculty to teach overload courses (with appropriate compensation).

GO TO http://www.indiana.edu/~llc/instructors/ for details.

Questions?  Call or email Carl Ipsen: 5-8905, cipsen@indiana.edu

The In/Visibility of America's 21st Century Wars Lecture Series Presents Nina Berman

Thursday, January 26
Wodburn Hall, room 120
7-8:30 pm

"Performance and Spectacle: Constructing the American Homeland Security State"

CFP The Co-production of Knowledge: Social Media, STS and...

The ubiquitous social and cultural adoption of social media, such as Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook can be seen to present a significant example of scientific and technological innovation in many contemporary societies. While some studies of social media and, more specifically, Web 2.0 platforms built around user-generated content, have made reference to the importance of the field of science and technology studies (STS) for understanding their development and diffusion, scholars working within this academic framework have yet to fully turn their focus on this area. This three-day symposium is intended to explore the intersection between STS and social media inquiry, with a specific focus on how Web 2.0 is both generative and challenging of different forms of knowledge (co-)production and the authority it commands.

• The user-centred and mass-collaboration characteristics of social media platforms have a clear affinity with recent STS models of the co-construction of technologies. Notions such as 'prosumerism' have been used to describe this blurring of the relationship between the consumer and producer. However, we need to ask whether this is to be seen as co-construction or primarily a re-engineering of labour relations and the locus of production? We also need to ask whether the ubiquity extends across all social media for all types of content. In other words, are new forms of expertise being inscribed, or are old knowledge hierarchies being reinforced?
•  STS challenges the traditional perception of scientific 'discovery' and technological advancement, to demonstrate the co-production of claims to knowledge and the different forms and assemblages of knowledge this involves: how does this map onto commentaries on the importance of lay knowledge and 'citizen science' found in Web 2.0 as individuals and groups distribute ideas and information across their social networks? Could this provide a new impetus for 'public interest science'?
•  How do the same issues relate to the social sciences themselves: how might Web 2.0 provide opportunities for new forms of data and data analytics (for example, as 'virtual knowledge' via crowdsourcing, real-time data streaming, by-product data etc) and in what ways do these challenge conventional social science by opening up questions about what data itself constitutes and what order of being it represents?
• How might lay, amateur knowledge be mobilised as 'citizen science' and what warrant, authorisation and location in established science might it secure? How might the contribution of Web 2.0 science platforms differ from the amateur societies of the 19th and 20th centuries?
• It has been claimed that algorithms and code play an increasingly powerful part in shaping and constituting everyday life, it has even been claimed that algorithms are creating new rules and power structures that unknowingly come to restructure social hierarchies and divisions. How, for example, do algorithms make decisions for us? How do algorithms bypass or re-craft human agency? What are the implications of this? Exactly how do algorithms, code and metrics shape everyday life and access to knowledge?
• Do the open source platforms and social media tools of Web 2.0 come into tension with the international standardisation and codification of global ICT infrastructures and local and global knowledge infrastructures?
• Finally, the more celebratory characterisations of social media emanating from the marketing world typically lack a critical focus: can social media and STS analyses build a political economy of Web 2.0 to provide such a focus, by explicitly addressing issues of participatory surveillance, exclusion and control?

Papers are invited that explore these broad questions around a number of possible  themes, including:

• The boundaries and future of social media as a medium of knowledge creation, dissemination, and regulation
• The co-production of knowledge via Web 2.0 platforms
• Knowledge, expertise and disruptive/disrupted authority
• Capturing social media: the commercial/political exploitation by or empowering of Web 2.0
• Ownership, dissemination and use of scientific knowledge
• E-governance and the regulation of knowledge within social media
• National practices and global opportunities
• Novel forms of knowledge creation through group processes, archiving, digitization etc.
• Public and visible science
• Scientific controversies online
•  
• For more information, including submission and registration instructions, please click HERE.

Media Arts & Sciences Speaker Series

Friday, January 27

12:30-1:45pm

room RTV 180

Media Arts & Sciences Speaker Series

Spring 2012

please join us this Friday for the second round in our Spring 2012 Media Arts & Sciences Speaker Series, with talks about current research projects by Bridget Rubenking and Travis Ross, and a response by special guest Eliot R. Smith, Chancellors Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU. coffee, tea, and cookies will be provided as usual!

Dynamic disgust: Dimensional underpinnings of responses to blood, brutality and politics - by Bridget Rubenking

This preliminary study explores summative and over time measures of dimensional emotion responses (positivity, negativity, and arousal) and the discrete emotion of disgust to disgust-eliciting television messages. Responses to different types of disgust eliciting content - from body products and gory deaths to higher-order, socio-moral disgusts, such as overt racism, and suggestions of sexual abuse are explored across 102 participants. Additionally, individual differences in trait motivational activation, gender, and political ideology are explored in response to these disgust-elicitors, as well as content featuring opposing political viewpoints and gay male characters.

The Impact of Norms on Player Behavior - by Travis Ross

Research regarding player motivation in video games has typically focused on how the content of games taps intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. However games have become shared social experiences, and so it is important to understand how the social context contributes to the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of players. Research in sociology and economics has identified that norms serve a number of roles in social/cultural interaction. They can provide information and/or carry expectations of what is, or is not, socially acceptable.

Research also indicates that norms are sensitive to contextual factors such as the network connections, incentive structures, and framing, so therefore only have salience under certain conditions. Beyond their interesting cognitive and economic consequences, norms can provide game developers with a plausible motivational tool. However, if this is to be the case then norms must be understood at both the individual and societal-level.  Research at an individual-level should identify conditions where norms will have an impact and contexts where norms are a better solutions than other motivational features. At the societal-level research should examine if and how the norms of an online social system can be changed, and if early adoption and information cascades can lead a community to a preferred outcome. This talk will discuss early results from Travis' Dissertation, which examines the impact of norms on player behavior.

Bios:

Eliot R. Smith, Ph.D., is Chancellors Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests include the emotions that people experience when they identify with social groups and their role in intergroup behavior; the cognitive processes and representations involved in perceiving other people and groups; and embodied and socially situated cognition.  His research has been recognized by the 2004 Thomas M. Ostrom Award for lifetime contributions to social cognition, as well as the 2005 Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SPSP).  He is Editor of *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Attitudes and Social Cognition*. Website:

http://www.indiana.edu/~soccog/home.html.

Bridget Rubenking is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Telecommunications at IU. Her research explores the relevant individual differences of media consumers and the content and structural features of media that influence cognitive and emotional processing of media, as well as attitude change and discrete behavior outcomes.

Travis Ross is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Joint Ph.D. Program in Telecommunication and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He focuses on two research paths. The first examines the motivational aspects of design - particularly decision structures in game and interface design.

The second examines how social and institutional forces shape behavior via social norms, rules, and laws.

Media Arts & Sciences Speaker Series

Every Friday

12:30-1:45pm

RTV 180

full info & schedule: http://www.indiana.edu/~telecom/news/t600.shtml

Employment Opportunity: Kent State University

The School of Communication Studies at Kent State University invites applications for a full-time, non-tenure track position at the rank of Lecturer or Assistant Professor. This is a teaching position, and applicants will be considered primarily on the basis of teaching credentials. M.A. in Communication Studies is required, Ph.D. is preferred.

Of interest are candidates who can teach a range of diverse courses in mass/mediated communication, global/international communication, and/or organizational communication.

The School offers undergraduate concentrations in organizational, public, global, interpersonal, applied, and health communication. The School of Communication Studies is part of the College of Communication and Information headed by Dean Stanley. T. Wearden, former director of the School of Communication Studies. The College encourages interdisciplinary work among the Schools of Communication Studies, Journalism and Mass Communication, Library and Information Science, and Visual Communication Design, as well as a program in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management. The School of Communication Studies places high value on collaborative work.

Kent State University, with 24,000 students on the Kent campus, has been ranked by Times Higher Education, a London-based higher education magazine, as one of the top 200 universities in the world. The Kent campus is located in the rolling hills of northeastern Ohio. Kent State is a major research university with a commitment to innovative strategies for learning and civic engagement. The town of Kent offers a delightful combination of a small but vibrant college-town environment and close proximity to the cultural, dining and professional sports activities of major cities, along with and the recreational opportunities of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and many lakes in the region.

Review of applications will begin on April 20, 2012 and will continue until the position is filled. We anticipate an employment start date of August 2012 or January 2013.

For more information, including application requirements and instructions, please click HERE.

Open-Access Publishing

Get published! Submit your manuscript to SAGE Open—an open-access publication.

Publish in SAGE Open, SAGE's groundbreaking, open-access publication of peer-reviewed, original research and review articles, spanning the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. More than 975 manuscripts have been submitted in the last year.

Submit your manuscript through SAGE Track, SAGE's web-based peer review and submission system, powered by ScholarOne Manuscripts™. Submitting your manuscript is free.

If you are accepted, then pay the author acceptance fee of $395 (discounted from the regular price of $695)! For more information, view the SAGE Open manuscript submission guidelines.

Learn more about who's publishing in SAGE Open and its various features:

• Latest Articles list and archived articles
• Subject Collections where you can browse articles by topic
• Public Usage Statistics by article
• 5-Star Article Ratings: rate an article for quality and impact—check the Reader Responses section in the sidebar of each article and start rating
• Podcasts: start listening to these valuable supplemental resources for select articles

CFP - ICA CAT Doctoral Consortium

he consortium intends to bring together PhD candidates working on Communication and Technology to give them the opportunity to present and discuss their research in a constructive and international atmosphere. The goals of the event are to provide feedback and advice to participating PhD candidates on their in-progress research thesis. Moreover, the doctoral consortium will provide the opportunity to meet
experts as well as fellow PhD candidates from different backgrounds working on related topics.

During the consortium, students will be invited to present their work, following which they will receive feedback from their fellow students and
faculty participants, all of whom will have read the proposals in advance of the Doctoral Consortium. In addition, one faculty participant will be assigned to respond in detail to each proposal. Besides the presentations of proposals, there will also be discussion of other topics such as ethics, research methods, publishing the thesis, and positioning one's work for the job market.

Applicants must be advanced to candidacy, and have their dissertation proposal topic. Ideally, students will be in the early stages of their
dissertation, where feedback would be helpful in refining and advancing their work. To apply, students must submit a proposal describing their research.

For more information, and application instructions, please click HERE.

CFP - Black Diasporas: Reimagining Race, Space, and Community

The Ninth Annual Herman C Hudson Symposium at Indiana University emphasizes the complex ways in which the concepts of “Black” and “Geography” inform each other and shape the formation of individual and community identities by examining the relationships between “Geography” and “Race” in historical and contemporary diasporic space and through the lived and imagined experiences of diasporic communities. Although the symposium privileges “Black” Diasporas, we welcome abstracts that can offer comparative perspectives. We encourage papers and artwork that deal with (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Writing the Body and Geographies of Race
• Queer Geographies/Diasporas
• The Body as a Geographic Object
• The Mind as a Geographic Space
• Displacement/Dislocation & Race
• Memory & Space
• Futuristic Geographies of Race
• Environmental/Social Justice
• Sound, Space & Race
• Sexualized Space(s)
• Religion & Space
• Eroticism & Space

We welcome submissions from graduate and undergraduate students, scholars, creative artists and community and cultural workers. Interested panelists should submit a 150-word abstract and a 50-75-word bio. Presenters who are interested in displaying visual art should submit a CD with a digital copy of their work in JPEG format along with a 150-word project statement that speaks to the symposium’s theme. Those interested in exhibiting their topic via poster board should follow the guidelines for submitting a paper and visual art abstract.

Proposals for panels should include the name and description of the panel, a 150-word abstract of each paper, the name of the panel

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2012

For submission instructions, please click HERE.

Congratulations to Aleena Chia!

Congratulations are due to CMCL PhD candidate Aleena Chia, who has just passed her PhD exam with distinction!

The In/Visibility of America's 21st Century Wars Series - Nina Berman

"Performance and Spectacle: Constructing the American Homeland Security State"  

Thursday, January 26th

Woodburn Hall, 120

7-8:30 pm

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. Her work has been extensively published, exhibited and collected, receiving awards in art and journalism from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation and the Open Society Institute documentary photography fund among others. Her images of wounded American veterans from the Iraq War are internationally known with recent exhibitions at Dublin Contemporary, the Whitney Museum 2010 Biennial, the Milano Triennale and, Princeton University. She is the author of two monographs, Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, and Homeland, both published by Trolley. She is a member of the NOOR photo collective based in Amsterdam. She lives in New York City.

Brown Bag with Nina Berman

Brown Bag with Nina Berman, 

before her lecture, "Performance and Spectacle: Constructing the American Homeland Security State"

Thursday, January 26
Swain Hall West 220, 12.30 to 2 p.m.

(undergraduates welcome)

Her broad lens includes glimpses of "fracking" in Pennsylvania, veterans in various settings, the production of a security state, mega-churches, occupy protests in Times Square, and more.  See:

http://www.ninaberman.com/

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. Her work has been extensively published, exhibited and collected, receiving awards in art and journalism from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation and the Open Society Institute documentary photography fund among others. Her images of wounded American veterans from the Iraq War are internationally known with recent exhibitions at Dublin Contemporary, the Whitney Museum 2010 Biennial, the Milano Triennale and, Princeton University. She is the author of two monographs, Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, and Homeland, both published by Trolley. She is a member of the NOOR photo collective based in Amsterdam. She lives in New York City.

CFP: Cinephile 8.1, The Voice-Over

 

During the past three decades, studying the voice has intrigued many film theorists and thinkers. Arguing that the cinematic image is an audiovisual space largely structured according to human body and voice, some scholars (Mary Ann Doane, Sarah Kozloff, and Michel Chion, among others) have been drawn to the various manifestations and mysterious connotations of the non-visualized voice. 

If off-screen voices foster a need to categorize and perhaps control their elusive nature, then the voice-over raises some challenging questions about its uncanny attributes and powers. Defined by a paradoxical present-absence, the voice-over adds layers to the narrative discourse of film that require further and closer analyses.

For our Spring 2012 issue, Cinephile welcomes essays aiming to critically organize and academically explain the variety of off-screen voices, study the evolution of voice-over in the history of global cinema, analyze the narrative and non-narrative applications and functions of it in different audiovisual experiences, and delve deeper into the socio-political and psychoanalytical aspects of this technique with regards to race, class, and gender implications.

For more information, please click here.