::fc-announce:: CCCS Seminar - Prof Georgina Born - Digitising Democray

[Geert Lovink]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "CCCS Admin" <admin.cccs at uq.edu.au>
> Date: 4 July 2006 6:32:08 AM
> To: <cccsinfo at lists.uq.edu.au>
> Subject: CCCS Seminar - Prof Georgina Born - 25th July
>
> ARC CULTURAL RESEARCH NETWORK AND THE CENTRE FOR CRITICAL AND CULTURAL 
> STUDIES
> PUBLIC SEMINAR SERIES
>  
> Tuesday 25th July 2.00-3.30pm
> Professor Georgina Born
>  
> SS & H Library Conference Room, Duhig Building,  St Lucia Campus
>  
> Digitising Democracy: Digitisation, Pluralism, and Public Service 
> Communications
> Professor Born will begin by noting the lamentable absence of due 
> attention to the challenges posed by cultural pluralism and by social 
> and economic inequalities in debates over the future of public service 
> broadcasting in Britain. She will go on to critically outline and 
> assess the prevailing policy discourses in the UK concerning the 
> social and political potential of digital media – notably the internet 
> and digital television – and their relation to public service 
> communications. Professor Born will then compare the policy debates 
> with current academic discussions of digital media in relation to PSC, 
> and find that there are common limitations to both academic and policy 
> discourses, limitations that are highlighted particularly when held up 
> against the BBC’s actual interventions in digital media, a significant 
> proportion of which are subtly conceived and inventive in their 
> design. She will turn to post-Habermasian social philosophers who have 
> been engaged in reframing democratic theory in relation to the 
> politics of difference; she will suggest that key principles can be 
> derived from them which provide a means to rethink public service 
> communications in conditions of pluralism and inequality. Finally, on 
> the basis of these normative ideas, Prof Born will sketch a typology 
> of the several communicative vectors that might be required by a 
> pluralist communicative democracy in light of the expanding range of 
> possibilities offered by digital media. She will argue that new 
> normative thinking of this kind is urgently needed to reinvigorate the 
> ‘institutional design’ of public service communications systems suited 
> to the present.   
>  
> About the Presenter:
> Professor Georgina Born is a College Lecturer in Social and Political 
> Sciences and Director of Studies; Reader in Sociology, Anthropology 
> and Music and Official Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge 
> University.  Following several years as a professional musician, she 
> studied for her first degree and PhD in Anthropology at University 
> College London.  From 2002 she has been Academic Secretary in the 
> Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. She has held two ESRC 
> grants, one in the Media Economics and Media Culture Research 
> Programme which resulted in the most extensive inside study of the BBC 
> in recent decades, and one examining the implications for public 
> service broadcasting of digitalisation. She is the author of many 
> publications and writes on the sociology of culture, and in particular 
> on cultural production and the politics of culture in relation to 
> music, information technologies and broadcasting. She is known for her 
> ethnographic studies of major cultural institutions. Her next book, 
> based on her ethnographic study of the BBC, gives an analysis of the 
> transformation of public service broadcasting in an era of 
> commercialisation and globalization. She also broadcasts on Radio 3 
> and writes for the press in the UK. Members of the university 
> community and the general public are invited to attend this free 
> seminar with refreshments to follow.  For further information please 
> visit the website at 
> http://www.cccs.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=49219&pid=16094
>  
> Further information please contact: Rebecca Ralph ph. 3346 9764 or on 
> email: admin.cccs at uq.edu.au
>
> Rebecca Ralph on behalf of CCCS admin
> Phone: 3346 9764
> Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
> University of Queensland
>  
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