This year I’m serving as the Program Chair for Association of Internet Researchers’ annual meeting to be held in Denver Co, USA. It’s my pleasure to announce AoIR 14’s Keynote Speaker and Plenary Panel Speakers, some of which are contributors here at Culture Digitally. Our Keynote Speaker this year is Gabriella Coleman. Prof. Coleman is Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University. Her first book, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking, is available from Princeton University Press. Her second book on Anonymous is forthcoming from Verso Press.
The Plenary Panel Speakers are as follows:
Our first Plenary Panel will be themed “Race, Gender and Information Communication Technologies.” Our speakers for that panel are Jenna Burrell, Lisa Nakamura and Christina Dunbar-Hester. Jenna Burrell is Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her first book, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana, is available from MIT Press. Lisa Nakamura is Professor in the Department of American Cultures and the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of a number of books on race and the internet including Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet from the University of Minnesota Press and Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet from Routledge Press. Christina Dunbar-Hester is an ethnographer who studies activism in technical cultures. She is Assistant Professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Her book on low-power radio activism will be published in 2014 by MIT Press, and her current NSF-supported research centers on efforts to promote “diversity” in hacker spaces and FLOSS.
Our second Plenary Panel will be themed “Political Economy of Technoculture.” Our speakers for the second panel are Tarleton Gillespie, T.L. Taylor and Gina Neff. Tarleton Gillespie (Co-Founder with me of culturdigitally.org) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society from MIT Press, and is finishing his second book on the implications of the content policies of online platforms for Yale University Press. T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She has authored a number of pieces on gaming and multi-user spaces, including her recent book Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming from MIT Press. Gina Neff is an Associate Professor of communication at the University of Washington. She is author of Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries from MIT Press and co-editor ofSurviving the New Economy from Paradigm Press. She is finishing a book about technologies used for design collaboration entitled Constructing Teams.
My deepest gratitude to all of them for accepting my invitation to join the conference in Denver. To our readers here, I hope you will join us here at Culture Digitally as we continue presenting research and discussion on timely topics related to digital technologies and culture and maybe also join us out in Denver too. For more information on the conference please visit www.ir14.aoir.org