Monday May 16th, 10:30-12:00 – Group 3a

10:30-12:00

Victoria Carrington (in Room 203, upstairs)

Lori McIntosh
‘Can We Play Fun Gay?’: Disjuncture and  Difference, and the Precarious Mobilities of Millennial Queer Youth Narratives

This paper takes up the complex project of unthinking neoliberal accounts of a progressive modernity. The authors position their anxieties about an ‘after’ to queer as an affect modality productive of both an opportunity, and an obligation, to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when queer, and therefore gay, were organized in a relation of explicit politicization. The authors interrogate celebratory, modernist readings of millennial queer youth narratives where the potentially democratizing significance of the Internet as a cultural technology is deemed constitutive of mobility, play, and possibilities for a redistribution of rights of recognition, communicality and knowledge in a significant public sphere.

Kedrick James
Altogether Now: Online Agents and Artificial Poets

This presentation considers generative and procedural poetics as advancing new literacy practices that foreground reader engagement with streaming texts and act metaphorically to shed light on how new literacies more generally are adapting to an infosphere in which navigating excess has become a basic ‘skill’. Extending from notions of artificial creativity (Elton, 1995; Gero, 2002), programmer/poets are using algorithmic processing by intelligent robots to gather, cut and remix texts from the world wide web, producing poems that sample online discourse from blogs, websites, twitter feeds and so on, to create generically authored, often epic texts. As search engines and information feeds currently play dominant roles in the accessing of information, these computational poetic practices not only give randomized samples of online discourses, but also integrate new literacy practices that enhance dialogue between human and artificial agents (Schmidhuber, 2007). In this presentation, I argue that drawing on the (online) social resources of language is akin to human poetic practices, and pose questions about whether humans are enculturing computers or computers are technologizing culture, as seen within the context of contemporary ‘avant garde’ poetry.

Jen Jenson
How Much is too Much?: Supporting Student Learning in a Voluntary Media Production Club

This paper will report on an ongoing research project at an “at-risk” Middle School in Toronto area, where students participated in a voluntary lunch-time and afterschool media production program once per week. During this time, students created short stop-motion animations in small groups that were focused on social issues chosen by the students such as bullying, school punishment and family life. Inverting the usual “saviour” tale, we show here the difficult, sometimes impossible task of scaffolding students to make learning meaningful to them, first and foremost.