[Gfx-cafe] GFX Cafe Seminar Friday May 2, 2008

GFX Café Seminar Friday May 2, 2008
12noon, ARTS Lab Black Box Theatre ** Note change of venue **

Food will be served

TITLE:
Ironic Citizenship and User-Generated Content: Digital Media, Art
and Politics
by Megan Boler, University of Toronto

ABSTRACT:

In this talk Dr. Boler will introduce the range of web-based digital
media productions and documentaries she has authored. She will then
detail her recent three-year project on "Rethinking Media, Democracy,
and Citizenship," providing examples of user-generated viral videos,
blogs, and other web-based productions accompanied by analyses of
interviews with these author- producers. The talk will focus on "ironic
citizenship," and the appeal of fake news such as The Daily Show, fan
practices, and online productions that engage irony and satire as a
mode of expressing artistic and political interventions within the
broader political media-scape.

BIO:

Megan Boler is presently Associate Chair of Theory and
Policy Studies, Coordinator of the History and Philosophy
Program, and faculty affiliate at University of Toronto's
Knowledge Media Design Institute and the Center for the
Study of United States. She is a founder of the
interdisciplinary Media Education Working Group, a
partnership between Center for Media and Culture in
Education the National Film Board, Toronto District School
Board.

Her work is at the crossroads of digital media,
communications and journalism, and media arts. Throughout
her career she has developed programs and curriculum in
arts, culture, and media, first in her arts-based teaching
of the core course Arts and Heritage in a Multicultural
Society at the University of California (1989-1993). At
the University of Auckland, New Zealand she developed an
MA program in Media Education and Culture Technologies;
and while at Virginia Tech from 1998-2003,
cross-affiliated as faculty of the graduate program in
Science and Technology Studies and Interim Director of
Women's Studies, she worked with faculty and students
across colleges and departments to build an
interdisciplinary focus on Media, Education, and Cultural
Technologies. Her work includes multimedia production and
arts ranging from iMovie productions and screenings,
podcasts to wiki production web-based discussions,
electronic portfolios, in short documentary or artistic
electronic productions.

Her research program focuses on the motivations of
producers of viral videos, tactical media, and web-based
production and circulation of expressions of dissent. She
is Principal Investigator of a 2005-2008 SSHRC Research
Grant of $131,000 titled "Rethinking Media, Democracy and
Citizenship: New Media Practices and Online Digital
Dissent After September 11." www.meganboler.net. Her
forthcoming book is titled Digital Media and Democracy:
Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press 2008). She is co-editing
a special issue of the journal Electronic Journal of
Communication on "Irony and Politics: User-Producers,
Parody, and Digital Publics" (forthcoming July 2008).

--
Pradeep Sen
Assistant Professor
Advanced Graphics Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico

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