Stream - Inspiring Critical Thought (E-Journal)
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Introduction: Celebrating Graduate Scholarship
Get PDFIt is with great pleasure that I am writing this introduction to this special issue of Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology dedicated to the conference proceedings of the Graduate Masters Sessions (GMS) hosted by the Canadian Communication Association/Association Canadian de Communication (CCA-ACC) at our annual meeting with the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Calgary in 2016. As the former President of the CCA (2014-2016), I worked for several years as a champion of the Graduate Masters Session, seeing them as a vital means of professionalizing young scholars in our discipline. Not only an opportunity for master’s students to “experience†a large conference and develop the skills necessary present their research to a conference audience, the GMS provide early graduate students with an important opportunity to network, build a community, and see how their work participates in a conversation with students and more senior scholars of communication from across Canada. I have been delighted to oversee the GMS sessions over the last few years, in no small part because I, like my colleagues on the Board of the CCA, value that conversation and the critical contributions made at our annual meetings. Sibo Chen, the English Language Graduate Student Representative on the CCA Board (2015-2017), is to be credited with the idea to produce conference proceedings of the GMS as without his focused energy it would never have gotten off the ground. Further thanks must be extended to the Guest Editors for this issue, Philippa Adam, Chris Chapman, and Dugan Nichols of Simon Fraser University, for their work in cultivating the four papers that appear here. Their work has undoubtedly contributed greatly to the further professionalization of the contributors as they embark on extending the dissemination of their research through publication
Contingency and Satisfaction under Digital Capitalism
Get PDFExplorations into today's labour context reveal a wide schism between those workers who live under conditions of precarity and contingency and those who seem to be living the dream - and not only in terms of wages. The standardized work day and Taylorized division of labour that characterized most of the industrial era has transitioned, at least in large part, into a regime of flexibility and insecurity that reconstitutes not only working but lifestyle conditions. This paper is intended as an initial conceptual investigation of a dual trend in the conditions of labour under digital capitalism: the rise of contractual contingency and insecurity and the introduction of fun and hipness into the office environment as a means of work intensification
PhD Defence: “Iranian Community Media in Stockholm: Locality, Transnationality, and Multicultural Adaptation†by Daniel Ahadi
Get PDFOur dear colleague, Daniel Ahadi, will defend his PhD Dissertation on Monday, June 27, 2016 at Harbour Centre, Library Thesis Room, Bennett Library Room 2020, (10:30 am - 1:30 pm). Here is the abstract of his dissertation “Iranian Community Media in Stockholm”
Building and Mobilizing Social Capital: A Phenomenological Study of Part-time Professors
Get PDFThis paper explores the experiences of new part-time professors (instructors hired on a semester-by-semester basis that have been working at the institution for less than five years) and considers the phenomenon of how they connect with peers. It examines whether a lack of connection exists among part-time professors at the University of Ottawa and how this may affect their experience (i.e. teaching and career), lead to barriers to connection, and affect their social capital (i.e., their ability to access or use resources embedded in their social networks). Using Moustakas’ (1994) phenomenological approach for collecting and analyzing data and Creswell’s (2007) approach for establishing validity, we uncovered several thematic patterns in participants’ experience that indicate barriers to connection and affect the ability to access and mobilize social capital: Feeling uncertain or impermanent, isolated, overwhelmed, and like second-class citizens. The paper concludes that inadequate social capital may not only influence part-time professors – it may also have problematic implications for students, the department, and the University as a whole.
Keywords: Social capital, barriers to communication, phenomenology, qualitative methods, part-time professor
Being-in-the-Anthropocene: A Place-Based Understanding of Anthropogenic Climate Change
Get PDFUsing Marcuse’s reconciliation of Marx’s historical material critique of capitalist relationships with a phenomenological approach, this paper aims to develop a better understanding of the conceptualization of reason in the era of anthropogenic climate change. Along with reference to Marx and Freud, Marcuse employs Heidegger’s phenomenology in his analysis of the dynamic interrelation between capital and the historical development of civilization, which I argue creates a comprehensive analysis of reason within the context of capitalist technological progress. The intersection of phenomenological analysis and the history of capital creates a moment, through the resurgence of the slumbering potentiality within place, for a radical shift in perspective
Public Event: Brown Bag Lecture Series: Financialization, Debt and Housing
No full textThe next Brown Bag Seminar will be at noon on April 13, 2016 at SFU Burnaby in the Mallinson Conference room, K8652. The title is: Financialization, Debt and Housing: Modes of Profit, Forms of Contestation, Projects for ResearchThere will be presentations by Graham Mackenzie, Didi Han, and Enda Brophy. This session shares preliminary and ongoing research into three overlapping and increasingly controversial sources of accumulation: finance, debt and real estate. Graham Mackenzie considers the relationship between the commodity form and contemporary real estate markets. Didi Han describes the alternative financial institution Bin-Go in South Korea as a grounded endeavour in the reorientation of financial knowledge and practice. Enda Brophy outlines an inquiry exploring the contested connection between debt and ICTs within digital capitalism. Lunch will be provided.For more details, please see the attached PDF. 
MA Defence: “To Fight the Battles We Never Couldâ€: The Militarization of Marvel’s Cinematic Superheroesâ€
No full textPublic Event: Documenting Nikkei Histories
No full textA panel discussion and film screening event, titled Documenting Nikkei Histories, will be held on Sunday, January 15, 2017, from 1:00pm - 5:00pm at The Special Events Hall in Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre (6688 Southoaks Crescent, Burnaby BC V5E 4M7).This event is co-sponsored by FCAT's Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities, SFU's David See-Chai Lam Centre for International Communication, Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre and Powell Street Festival. For details, please see the attached poster
Safety Information under Neoliberalism: The Chilean Case
Get PDFThis paper explores the production and supply of safety information under a neoliberal regime, where economic incentives and competition rather than regulations, supervision and enforcement, comprise the common sense to guarantee a safe workplace. Following a political economy of communication framework on the Chilean sector, this assessment unpacks the relationship between Workers' Compensation Boards' (WCBs) informational resources and their economic process of exchange within a neoliberal context. The purpose of this paper is to provide a well-grounded theoretical outline to analyse safety information, and to offer a glimpse of the particular kind of informational resources and goods produced by neoliberal WCBs. The following analysis discloses that WCBs are compelled to cede control over their symbolic content to the dynamics of the market place and the logic of profit maximization. Economic and competition imperatives trigger the production, on the one hand, of informational resources as distorted rates, and on the other, of informational goods as pro-corporate safety knowledge. Workers are cognitively misled and left physically and mentally unprotected at the worksite. This paper claims that due to a free market model, Chilean WCBs fail to protect workers' health and safety by producing and supplying distorted rates and corporate friendly knowledge
To Upvote or Downvote: Parental Supervision of Screen Time on Reddit
Get PDFScreen time is a controversial subject in media and technology studies. Situated within the media harm debate, binary arguments have developed in discourse about the effect screen time has on people and society. The widespread use of screen-based media is the culmination of user-friendly smartphones and tablets as well as the ubiquitous nature of screen-laden media. How parents define, implement, and manage screen time is imperative to understanding how children engage with screen-based media and the observed effect it has. To understand this discourse, I conducted a social network content analysis of conversations surrounding screen time on the user-generated platform Reddit. The analysis focused on contributors' uses of the term "screen time" and the conversations relating to the implications of screen time for children. Preliminary data suggests that groups form around clusters of information that deem screen time as having a positive, negative or neutral effect - a position that also determines a parent's decision to provide unlimited or restricted access of screens to their children. The conceptual framework for this research draws from Pinch and Bijker's (1990) social construction of technology to understand how social groups form and how these groups share meanings they attach to the artifact (in this case, screens). The group formations around screen time mimic the media harm debate, with children viewed as competent (able to use technology to create, participate and build digital literacies) or vulnerable (subjected to harmful content, physical risks, and potential delays in cognitive development). The problem with the tendency to view children's screen time as positive or negative, rather than both, is it limits management strategies on how to minimize risk and maximize benefit