Quebec’s independent daily newspaper, Le Devoir, has announced a year long string of activities to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2010. The programme of commemorative events, unveiled at a press conference in Montreal on 17 November, includes a television documentary, a series of public lectures – and an international symposium organized by Media@McGill and the Centre d’études sur les médias.

Update: Audio is now available for this event. You can download it from the site in MP3 format (~93 MB), or subscribe to the Media@McGill podcast through iTunes.

This conversation event is a collaboration of Media@McGill with the SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster, "Situating Science: Humanist and Social Studies of Science."

It will take place November 12, 2009, from 5:30-7:00 pm, at the McGill Faculty Club ballroom. (map)

Themes that Darin Barney and Preston Manning will discuss include:

• Recent controversies surrounding conservatives and science in Canada;
• Moral and ethical issues arising from scientific inquiry and technological development;
• The role of government, politicians, and the public in science and technological innovation in Canada;
• Science, technology, industry and the economy in Canada.

Media@McGill, in collaboration with the Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship, is pleased to present Lisa de Wilde, Chief Executive Officer from TVO, Ontario's public broadcaster.

29 October, 3-5pm, in ARTS 160.

The theme of Lisa's remarks will be "Increasing the impact of public broadcasting in the emerging media environment." This theme is developed around some questions found on the Media@McGill's site: "Is the culture of technology a culture of citizenship?" And "How can media practitioners and users collaborate to promote citizenship?"

According to de Wilde, these questions are fundamental to TVO's existence, and she will be highlighting some of the innovative ways they are impacting the people of Ontario through digital media.

As Darin Barney (Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship) says: "Lisa de Wilde is one of the most forward-looking broadcasting executives in Canada. Under her leadership, TVOntario has set new standards for public interest broadcasting, and for creative and dynamic adaptation to the emerging media environment. Few people have thought as clearly about the challenges and opportunities facing public broadcasting as Lisa de Wilde. This is a unique opportunity for scholars of broadcasting, communication policy and emerging media to engage with a leader in the field."

McGill University, Montreal
October 23-25, 2009

Media@McGill is pleased to collaborate to the 2009 CACS annual conference.

Plenary panels are free and open to the public!

Thomson House, 3650 Rue McTavish (map) 

Friday Oct. 23, 2:30-4:00 Thomson House Ballroom

Plenary Roundtable 1: Cultural Studies in Canada and Québec
Moderator: Will Straw, McGill University

Panelists:
Ian Angus (Simon Fraser University)
Anouk Bélanger (Université du Québec à Montréal - UQAM)
Boulou d’bBéri (University of Ottawa)
Line Grenier (Université de Montréal).

Media@McGill is pleased to host Mimi Sheller who is Beaverbrook visiting scholar this fall. On 15 October, she will give a public talk, Infrastructures of the Imagined Island: Media, Mobility and Tourism, in collaboration with the AHCS Speaker Series and the department of geography, at 5h30pm, in Lecture Arts, W215 (map).

Sheller is the Director of the Mobilities Research and Policy Center Professor of Sociology, in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Abstract:

Travel and leisure destinations, especially in the Caribbean, are being disembedded from national territories and repackaged as unique natural enclaves connected to global metropolitan media, transport, and communication systems. Through a discussion of Zaha Hadid's master plan for a new resort on Dellis Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands, this paper explores how state space, informational space, and tourist space are recoding and rescaling island space into newly mediated configurations that combine virtual and physical geographies. As Caribbean states and territories adjust to complex new infrastructures and architectures of software-supported mobility, they may prefigure processes of postcolonial urbanism that are restructuring private property, cyberspatial property, and state territory in other parts of the world.