CMN Brownbag: Topologies of Coordination: A Triptych

Topologies of Coordination: A Triptych

Event Date

Location
Kerr Hall 386, or Zoom 974 4807 7707
  • Time: 12-1PM, February 8, 2024
  • Location: Kerr Hall 386, UC Davis
  • Zoom: 974 4807 7707

 

Topologies of Coordination: A Triptych

Erica Robles-Anderson

 

Abstract: Topologies of Coordination focuses on key ideological institutions that anchor social reproduction: church, home, and school. Drawing on fifteen years of original archival research, interviews, and fieldwork I ask: how do traditional cultural narratives shape migrations into new technological regimes? 

 

This talk is a glimpse of a three-book project, a history (post WW2 – present) in triptych. Each section centers a conservative enterprise in innovation: megachurches, multilevel marketing, and Classical Christian education. Together, they constitute a topology of communicative interdependencies and thus a ground for thinking about the mechanisms and mediations for continuity and cultural change.

 

Bio: Erica Robles-Anderson is an associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, affiliated in Religious Studies. She is currently the Leonore and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Erica is interested in forms of collective life in network society. Behind dominant discourses about technology, she argues, is an implicit individualism that under-recognizes how cultural narratives shape technological regimes. Her work challenges this tendency by focusing on under-recognized drivers of technological change – sites of social reproduction such as schools, churches, families, and public cultures. Her work has been published in venues such as Public Culture, Computational Culture, International Journal of Design, Human-Computer Interaction, and Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World. She is the recipient of the Mahoney Prize for outstanding paper on computing and information technologies from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). As part of her commitment to supporting new frameworks for public discussions about what counts as innovation, she is a founder of the OIKOS interdisciplinary working group on kinship economy at the Institute for Public Knowledge. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Public Culture.

 


The series: The Department of Communication Brown Bag Series is a regular meeting for developments in Communication and related disciplines, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Communication. It is held at noon on most Thursdays during the academic year.