A link to the podcast of this lecture is now available here.

Critical and Cultural Studies Public Lecture

Reimagining Media Technology and Social Change: Critical Disability Perspectives on Contemporary Culture and Research

In this lecture, I draw on the rich, emerging area of disability, as a source of critical perspectives on understanding contemporary culture and research on media technology. Roughly 1 in 5 Australians live with significant disability, and across the world, especially in our Asian region, we find disability emerging as a priority area of social and economic concern. In Australia, we are well underway with the landmark National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), a complex reform with implications that touch all our lives. 2016 marks the tenth anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which reminds us of the claims for political participation and cultural citizenship that have global support.

Technology looms large in this global landscape of disability. Disability is an area where, perforce, ‘media’ has a much more expanded meaning than it has usually assumed; and where technology is often intimately and decisively woven into everyday life. And while it is a relatively new area of cultural studies, disability has been emerging for some three decades as a multi-faceted, diverse area of interdisciplinary inquiry, with many crossovers with gender, race, sexuality, animal, and other areas of critical research. Like these areas, disability calls upon us to rethink our research relationships, modes of inquiry, engagement and communication.

Drawing on a range of case studies––disability, voice, and listening; disability activism and social media; the smartphone as haptic media; and emergent technologies such as driverless cars––the lecture brings together insights from critical disability to suggest ways to reimagine media technology and social change. Such disability perspectives, as I shall argue, are also helpful for considering productive directions for critical and cultural studies now.

Gerard Goggin is Professor of Media and Communications, University of Sydney. He is also an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, investigating disability, digital technology, human rights, and media policy.

Goggin is a pioneering figure in cultural studies research on mobile phones and media, Internet histories, and disability. Key authored books are Disability and the Media (2015; with Katie Ellis), Global Mobile Media (2011), Cell Phone Culture (2006), and, with, Christopher Newell, Disability in Australia (2005) and Digital Disability (2003). His co-edited volumes include Routledge Companion to Disability and the Media (2017), Locative Technologies in International Context (2017), Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories (2016), Locative Media (2015), Internationalizing Internet Studies (2009), and Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (2004).

5.30pm for 6.00pm start
Friday 24 June 2016
The University of Queensland Art Museum
James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre (Building 11)
University Drive, St Lucia

Refreshments will be served prior to the start of the lecture
RSVP : 17 June 2016 (click here)

Venue

University of Queensland Art Museum, James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre, University Drive, St Lucia