Panels

Panel 1 - Passions, perspectives, and realities from kindergarten to graduate school

Briefly consider the strengths and weaknesses of the pedagogical theories and approaches with which you are familiar. What are some of the important underlying assumptions that inform these theories/approaches? Please also consider diferent educational models such as “pedagogies of the home”, or the metaphor of teacher “companionship”, with special consideration of the needs of students from differing racial, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds.

Panel 2 - Passionate Objectivism

One prominent dichotomy that appears in much discourse about passion is the pitting of logic or reason against passion or affect. The dichotomy enters discourses about pedagogy in the form of arguments for formal logic in the classroom vs. passionate attempts at persuasion. It enters discourses about journalism and media in the form of rather passionate claims that journalism ought be objective which somehow precludes passion. It enters discourses about communication in the form of scholarship that would theorize passion and communication as separate entities. In your position paper, drawing from the abstracts you submitted, your own or others work, and your particular theoretical position, please elaborate your thoughts on this prominent dichotomy. How are we to understand the relationship between “reason” and “passion” that pervades academic scholarship and everyday discourse? Are they separate entities or emergent from the same social processes? What are the consequences of maintaining such a dichotomy?Where might we go from here? In what ways has this dichotomy informed your own work, or in what ways has your work sought to challenge it?

Panel 3 - Arts and Technologies for Social Change

What opportunities do artistic or technological mediums provide for social change that the unmediated oral channel does not? What about the particular mediums specificity that you examine make it a viable means for social change? Are all artistic mediums and technologies equally endowed with this capacity? How do certain mediums presume, enact, or facilitate particular configurations of communities or publics?

Panel 4 - Race and Privilege

In what ways do your own positionalities of privilege and/or oppression inform your research?
In your own work and interpretations, what moves a text/performance/interpretation beyond the “merely cultural” and into the realm of activism and change? In your analysis of the texts you are confronting, can you distill the contingent elements that are most (in)effective in disrupting racial hegemonic processes? As a researcher, how do you determine when racial representations are significant objects of analysis?

Panel 5 - Campus Activism and Racial Discourse

Please reflect on the following questions: 1) How does your research address the relationship between political commitment, critical pedagogy, and social movements? 2) How do/might campus communities negotiate tensions between their commitments to freedom of expression and to diversity and pluralism? 3) How might campus communities fruitfully engage in dialogue about racial privilege?

Panel 6 - "Where the Wild Things Are": Locating Wildness in Place, Experience, and Discourse

How are mediated discourses of the “primitive,” of wildness and wilderness, the ancient and archaic, the ecstatic and ineffable, best approached in our hyper-technological society? The “primitive” is arguably no longer confined as it once was to critiques through the lenses of post-colonialism and race theory, as it is now constantly reformulated, re-sited, parodied, and invoked to various discursive ends. How are these pervasive themes best treated? How are they related to the alienation effects of a mass consumer and technological society? What do they say about our relation to various spaces (urban and rural) and the “natural” world?

Panel 7 - Media Effects/Affective Media

How is the "affective economy" of media images from film, television, advertisements, and their accompanying digital technologies, best considered? Perhaps, in terms of passionate or dispassionate resposnses? How is the viewer/consumer's seduction by media texts and products based in novel sensations and disposable emotional stimulation, or conversely, by generic repetition and consumer literacy and savvy? What are the communicative processes by which mediums are able to affect arousal in an audience? By what criteria do you select an appropriate methodology for critical inquiry into subjective media arousal and seduction?

Panel 8 - Public Policy & Inequality

Drawing from your research experience and methodologies, discuss how social perceptions of, and public sentiment toward, certain groups are variously constructed and manipulated to either stymie or facilitate public policy initiatives? More broadly, discuss how public policy constructs and reinforces inequality in society, and how it may be a means to foster social justice and equality. What is the role of the academic in the latter effort? How might scholars collaborate with other sectors of society to pursue these goals?

Panel 9 - (Mis)representation, Identity, and Authorship

Given the panelists common interest in issues of representation/recognition of the self or others, please reflect on the following questions: 1) What is the role of choice in representing and (mis)recognizing selves? Whose choice is it anyway? 2) What is the significance of the public-private dialectic in constructing representations of identity? 3) In what ways might matters of (relative) power and equality enter your work on authorship, representation, recognition, and identity?

Panel 10 - Performance

Participants in the "Performance" panel have not been asked to write position papers in acknowledgement of the claim that the performance itself functions as a legitimate knowledge claim. This premise, the content and outcomes of the performance, and a variety of other contemporary issues of performance, including the relationship between performance and social change, its role in the academy, and its place in contemporary communication theory will be possible topics for engagement during the discussion period following the performances.

Panel 11 - Construction of Knowledge in the Academy

Please reflect on the following questions: 1) What is the role of personal experience in the Humanities and Social Sciences? 2) What criteria should be used to measure the value of scholarly work? 3) What are the philosophical and theoretical assumptions that inform your responses to the preceding questions?

Panel 12 - Sex, Silence, and Yuan Fen: Constructing Relations in Cultural Practice

Panelists in this session all investigate particular social practices, whether a group gathering in silence together, non-monogamous sexual encounters, or the invocation of cultural terminologies, as constitutive of relations between groups, individuals, and “non-living” objects. Given this approach, can the communicative practice you investigate be treated as exclusively authoring of social relations given other powerful forces like history, systems of capital, or political structure? Can any communicative practice be constitutive of social relations? In what ways does the practice you investigate move from "mere behavior" to constitutive of particular relationships? What are the necessary conditions in order for your practice to accomplish this? Also, please briefly elaborate the methods and theoretical conceptualizations you find most useful for addressing issues of communication's abilities to shape our relationships to one another, the divine, or “non-living” objects.