Vinkkaan mielenkiintoisesta key note -esiintyjästä Helsingin yliopiston tutkijakollegiumin järjestämässä kaksipäiväsessä tapahtumassa “HCAS SYMPOSIUM: Mediating Belonging – Re-thinking Social Theory Today“. (Ilmoittautumaan ehtii vielä!). Symposium järjestää myös avoimen tapahtuman Korjaamolla perjantaina illalla “Muukalaisena elämässä? Keskustelua kuulumisen ja vierauden tunteista” tapahtuman (tsek Facebook).
Perjantai 27.3.
13:30 III Key Note Professor Susanna Paasonen, University of Turku, Volatile, vital networks: affect, connectivity and technology
Chair: Research Fellow Nora Hämäläinen, HCAS
14:30 Comments and Discussion (Dr Stephanie Alice Baker, City University London)
15:00 Closing of the Conference (Johanna Sumiala, HCAS)
Professori Susanna Paasonen on mediatutkimuksen alan guru, jonka viimeaikaiset tutkimukset ovat keskittyneet mm. pornoon ja affektiteoriaan.
Abstrakti: Volatile, vital networks: affect, connectivity and technology
Smart devices and network connectivity have ubiquitous presence in everyday life. As citizens, we are dependent on their accessibility and functioning in carrying on with our everyday lives in acts of work and play alike, by ourselves and in connection with others. Since technological failure is nevertheless always imminent, these dependencies are also sources of ambiguity, frustration, irritation and fear. Drawing on student essays describing the sensations evoked by technological failure, this presentation explores the visceral, affective intensities involved in constant connectivity to, and dependency on, network media. By examining how the essays articulate and configure the notion of “the user,” the paper addresses network
media as both volatile and vital in the ways that it modulates (increases, sustains and diminishes) the users’ capacity to act in the world — to the point of undermining the notion of the user itself. It does so through a dialogue with theorizations of affect (e.g. Ahmed; Featherstone), network culture (e.g. Kember & Zylinska), STS and actor-network theory (e.g. Latour; Schüll). Much more than an instrument for communication and information exchange, connectivity therefore becomes figured as a vital component of the networks that comprise the social world and individuals’ potentialities for action within.