'Enclosure, Emancipatory Communication and the Global City'

[Image: Photo from New Jersey by Dave Beckerman.]

'Enclosure, Emancipatory Communication and the Global City' is an upcoming conference with Dan Schiller, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Dorothy Kidd and Dee Dee Halleck, and a keynote address by Mike Davis. From the website:

The field of culture and communication manifests struggles between contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, pressures from capital and state sometimes promote various forms of enclosure — the private appropriation, suppression or marginalization of socially-produced public expression. [...]

On the other hand, progressive forces, from artists and academics to broad social movements, are not only resisting such enclosure, but developing practices and policies that prefigure emancipation — new ways of re-organizing culture and communication democratically. [...]

These forces of enclosure and emancipation increasingly come together in the global city, a site which stands at the nexus of changing national cultures and policies, of transnational migrations and markets, of media flows and audiences, and of consumption and surveillance.

[Image: Photo from New Jersey by Dave Beckerman.]

The Union for Democratic Communications (UDC) conference will be held in Vancouver, Canada, hosted by Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication on October 25 - 28, 2007.
Something to definitely check out for any readers in those parts at the time.