| ICA 2007 Conference [Theme] Keynotes
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Keynote 1:
This year's conference theme is 'Creating Communication: Content, Control and Critique'. Within this broad theme, the opening plenary event will explore stimulating and diverse perspectives on the possibilities for critique. An invited panel of speakers will ask, what constitutes critique in today's intellectual and political context? Are we all critical scholars, in one way or another, or is critique itself fading from our field? Possibly, we all mean something different by critique. So, what are the most insightful and incisive sources for developing a critical focus in communication scholarship? As societies become more complex, commercialised and globalised, and as traditional political divisions and familiar ethical values are uprooted or challenged, what critical standpoints, if any, would the panel make their priority for future research?
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Keynote 2:
This panel focuses on the changing structures of the book publishing industry - its structures, institutions and powers. Its starting point is the irony that one of the only media industries in which academics have any direct involvement as active players is the publishing industry, and yet this is the one media industry about which academics know almost nothing. This lack of reflexivity on the part of the academy is regrettable, given the importance of this industry for the future of academic disciplines and of the academy itself and given the difficulties faced by this industry today, and it urgently needs to be redressed. In this panel, a keynote presentation is complemented by the reactions of two respondents who comment on current developments in both book publishing and journal publishing.
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Keynote 3:
From MySpace and YouTube to collective journalism and open-source software production, online social networks are transforming our lives. This panel will take a critical look at the changes under way. Leading researchers Howard Rheingold, Beth Noveck, Henry Jenkins and Tiziana Terranova will introduce key questions surrounding the mediated social networks they have studied. They will map the social and technological forces driving the rise of these networks, as well as the debates surrounding that rise. They will conclude by assessing how digital social networks interact with offline cultural and political institutions and the roles that scholars might play in shaping that relationship.
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Keynote 4:
This panel aims to discuss how blogging and journalism can develop into new informational and representational practices that advance our democracies. Questions will be raised on the democratic potential of the transformations of journalism(s), through the cross-fertilization of journalism with blogging. Simultaneously this panel will critically address the limitations and restrictions, the struggles and counter-strategies that these democratic innovations have to face, in taking on the more hegemonic articulations of journalist identities and the resulting practices.
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