Tag Archives: STS

Critique of Media & Technology Workshop @LatourBot #sts

CRITIQUE OF MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP 

Wednesday, April 29, 2015
10:20-12:00     Scarfe 1209
Year of Research in Education event #yreubc

CRITIQUE OF MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY

Stephen Petrina
University of British Columbia

This workshop focuses on the Critique of Media & Technology. The first part of the workshop includes a presentation and discussion on a forthcoming chapter. The second part of the workshop focuses on the process of researching and writing with special attention to philosophical and historical research 2.0 and narrative. How can we or ought we write a (big) history of the critique of media and technology?

The chapter begins with the spiritual critique of media and technology and proceeds historically through cultural criticism and social, psychic, ontic, and identic critiques. Differentiated from the spiritual critique that precedes, cultural criticism of media and technology emerges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a mode of describing and depicting the mechanical arts. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spiritual critique is displaced through a rejection of religion and theology as sources of modern authority. With spiritual ground undermined, social, psychic, ontic, and identic critics of media and technology compete for defensible ground for leverage. The history of critique is a search for ground. This chapter historicizes the critique of media and technology as well as critique as a practice that has run out of steam. “Critical distance” from or “free relation” to media and technology— a seductive orientation since the 1940s— has been instrumental in critique’s gradual decline. The critique of critique has quickened the decline. The conclusion questions the short-term future of machinic critique and long-term renewal of spiritual critique.

Download the Critique of Media & Technology chapter.

#Latour on the death of Ulrich Beck

Photo by Regina Schmeken

Photo by Regina Schmeken

Bruno Latour, January 3, 2015– Ulrich Beck had deeply transformed the social science, the very notion of the modernist project and was also a good friend. We were contemplating together, less than three weeks ago, all the projects we had in common. It is a tragedy. I published many times on his work, including an imaginary dialog for his 60th birtday, and we had a long dispute around cosmopolitics versus cosmopolitanism. Our thoughts are going to his wife Elizabeth and to his team with which we have in Paris many connections.

Read Beck & Latour Interview, May 2014.

#UBC course: Hermeneutic Phenomenological Research and Writing #sts #hwl

UBC COURSE:
HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND WRITING

EDCP 585D (032)
Winter 2015; Wed 4:30-7:30, Scarfe 1210
Norman Friesen
How can the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics be used to investigate the relationship between (new) technologies and user appropriations? Similar to empirically-oriented approaches to technology like Actor-Network Theory and Social Constructivism, hermeneutic phenomenology is oriented towards the “lived experience” of a sociotechnical lifeworld. The purpose of this course is to give a multi-perspectival introduction to the methods involved in researching the nature and meaning of this lived experience. Based largely on the work of Max van Manen and Bernhard Waldenfels– but also drawing on Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Sara Ahmed and others– it focuses on the practices of writing and analysis that are a part of hermeneutic phenomenological research. Students will learn about and apply hermeneutic phenomenology as it relates to graduate research projects, particularly in connection with education, technology & new media.

Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, UBC
For more information, please contact norman.friesen@ubc.ca

Norman Friesen Ph.D.
Visiting Professor, Media & Technology Studies
University of British Columbia
norman.friesen@ubc.cawww.normfriesen.info