Communication Geography: A Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers

Chicago 2006 CGSG Sponsored Sessions

 




Between Place and Virtual Place

Actual places and imagined places blend into each other in mediated representations. From the fantasy environments of computer games to the online representations of Middle America to the notorious and semi-mythical origins of spam, this session charts the blurry line between place and virtual place.

Michael W. Longan - Valparaiso University
Representing Northwest Indiana on the Web

Matthew Zook - University of Kentucky
Your Urgent Assistance is Requested: The Intersection of Imagined Nations and Internet Spam

Leigh Schwartz
Othering in Video Games: Representation of Foreign Cultures in World of Warcraft, Suikoden III, Shenmue, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Daniel Z. Sui, Professor - Texas A&M University
Geographical consequences of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp)

Ben P Clifford - King's College London and Mark Tewdwr-Jones - Univesity College London
Between Recreated Past and Threatening Future: Representing Urban Planning in Post-War British Media


Communication and the Construction of Community

Social movements, ethnic groups, and interest groups depend on various media for their formation and maintenance. This session explores how community-building activities have employed various types of communication to create a sense of solidarity and shared identity, as well as the closely related issue of privacy.


Melanie McCalmont - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Science for the People: A Retrospective

Jonathan M. Smith - Texas A&M
The Geography of Delight: Cultural Practices and Intergenerational Communication

Michael R. Curry - University of California, Los Angeles and Leah A Lievrouw - University of California, Los Angeles
Rethinking anonymity: New media and the ecology of attention and forgetting

Thomas A. Wikle - Oklahoma State and Jonathan C. Comer - Oklahoma State University
International Diffusion of the Cellular Telephone

James Tedrick - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Municipal Wireless Implementation: Chaska and Moorhead, MN


Communication Networks and Messages
 

Kristof a.m. Van Assche - St. Cloud State University
On networks and metaphors: new and seeing the new in the network society

Richard A. Waugh - University Of Wisconsin, Platteville
The Diffusion of Message Ribbons in American Culture as a Case Study of the Stimulus Diffusion of Meaning

Melinda J. Laituri - Colorado State University
The role of the Internet in presenting Indigenous Data

Paul C. Adams, Ph.D. - University of Texas at Austin and Emily Skop, Ph.D. - University of Texas at Austin
Internet Use and Attitudes toward Cultural Preservation among Asian Indians in the US


Geographies of Media I: Cinema

Amy Siciliano - University of Toronto
Framing a 'surplus humanity': La Haine and the contradictions of urbanization

Brent J. Piepergerdes - University of Kansas
Re-envisioning Nationalism: Film Neorealism and the Politics of Scale in Postwar Italy

Joseph Palis - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Cinema North Carolina: Cinematic Articulations of Place in "Loggerheads" and "Junebug"

Kevin E. McHugh - Arizona State University andAnn M. Fletchall - Arizona State University
Un-poetically 'Man' Dwells: Age and Alienation in the Film About Schmidt


Geographies of Media II: Media and Society

Sarah F Ives - University of Washington
South African Soap Operas: Performing the Post-Apartheid Citizen

Christina Dando - University of Nebraska-Omaha
Of Cycles and Spheres: American Women, Mobility and the Media

Stephanie L Boucher - University of Maine at Farmington
Signing the Scenery: The Dialogue Between the Production, Consumption, and Contestation of Outdoor Advertisements

Oli Mould - University of Leicester
Re-conceptualising the Creative Industries: The horizontalisation of the Film and TV industry in Sydney

Discussant: Harald Bauder - University Of Guelph


Geographies of Media III: Media Spatialities  

James Craine - San Diego State University
Beyond Deleuze: Pierre Levy and Affective Geovisualization

Jason Dittmer - Georgia Southern University
Popular Geopolitics, Comic Book Discourse, and the Tyranny of the Serial

Harald Bauder - University Of Guelph
The Border As Cube

Ken Hillis - University Of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
eBay and an Online Space for the Trace

M. Marian Mustoe, Ph.D. - Eastern Oregon University
Three Train Wrecks Since Minot, What Is New With The Emergency Alert System



The Rise of the Network Security Society
From Castells to Hardt and Negri, and from Latour to G.W. Bush, everyone is talking about "the Network." And "The Network" has become an indispensable framework for critical geographical understandings of the varied spatial interdependencies and technological linkages of contemporary social life. In many ways, The Network (taken literally or metaphorically) has come to embody a certain kind liberation (and democratization); of political and cultural expression, of economic exchange, of social reproduction and consumption. The Network promises to provide us with infinite choice, of entertainment, affiliations, consumables, and it ensures us that such choice is our right. But in recent years, rather than freedom it is Security--controlling who and what is allowed to access, compose, and circulate within The Network--that dominates popular, political, and economic concern. The landscapes and technological forms that allowed for the new-found freedoms of international personal banking, exotic food consumption, or transcontinental video conversations, now cast a shadow of suspicion, paranoia, and terror at the threat of infection, contamination, or worse, disintegration altogether. This session examines The Network, broadly cast, and particularly the maintenance of its security as a form of hegemonic power and seeks to understand the technologies, landscapes, and activities that underpin and resist it. This session seeks to critically examine the "Rise of the Network Security Society," its contradictions, power, and prospects.

Carrie Breitbach - Chicago State University
Securing food or securing the industry: the National Animal Identification System

Matt Hidek – Syracuse University
Hidden Societal Vulnerability Within the Confines of the Security State

Jamey Essex - University of Windsor
USAID and trade capacity building: Development, security, and the state

Clayton Rosati - University of Vermont
The Terror of Communication: Critical Infrastructure and the Culture of Security

Discussant: Scott Kirsch - University of North Carolina


Postmodern Geographies of Experience (Panel Discussion)
This panel session invites scholars to discuss the current state of geographic research addressing the problem of experience. In Geography's attempt to understand the variety of ways humans inhabit the earth, the place of individual experience has been alternately lauded and demonized. The session aims to uncover the ways in which the critiques of such geographic inquiry have been assimilated, understood, rejected, and synthesized. Specifically, the session will take up the challenge of a diversity of experience evident in postmodernity. Is it possible to speak of a human experience? Or, is experience necessarily limited to the scale of the individual? Key points around which the discussion will focus include:

• Methodology: how do we access experience in a social context?
• Scale: how many people can we talk about in terms of experience?
• Notions of evidence: what indicates the experience of one or of many?
• Individual agency: is experience other than a social construction?
• Representation: in what ways do our means of communication shape our experiences? 

Organizers
Christopher Limburg
Nicholas Bauch - University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panelists
Jamie Winders - Syracuse University
Michael R. Curry - University Of California, Los Angeles
J Nicholas Entrikin - University Of California
Prof. Paul C. Adams - University of Texas at Austin
Robert D. Sack - University of Wisconsin



Virtual learning communities in geographic higher education (Panel Discussion)
Session Description: A virtual community is a group whose members share common interests in cyberspace rather than in physical space. Such communities can exist by means of discussion groups, chat rooms, listservs, and blogs, as well as function as clearinghouses for interest-based internet resources. The role of virtual "learning" communities in the future of higher education may be linked to their ability to straddle traditional research universities and the growing number of distance-learning projects. Geography is ideally suited to lead the charge in this arena (and should!) due to its interdisciplinary nature and tradition of innovative use of new technologies. Virtual communities have the capacity to create a sense of immediacy and intimate contact with the subject matter of interest. This can foster personal investment and collaboration in teaching and learning among individuals and groups in distant locations and different types of institutions. We envision online "places" where students, faculty/researchers, citizen stakeholders, and policy makers can "interact' and discuss common interests, collaborate, and access images and teaching materials both inside and outside of the strictly academic realm. As distance educators, we also feel virtual learning communities can expedite distance learning and cultivate cross-intuitional collaborative courses. This panel will address what makes a successful online community, how virtual learning environments might be used in both teaching and research, and geography's role in its innovation.

Organizer
Bronwyn Sigrid Owen - University of Colorado-Boulder

Panelists
James A. Brey - University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley
Janet Smith - Shippensburg University
Dr. Rich B. Schultz - Elmhurst College
Michael W. Longan - Valparaiso University
David Butler - University Of Southern Mississippi
Bronwyn Sigrid Owen - University of Colorado-Boulder
Mark Carper

 

 
 

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Updated March 17, 2006