Ongoing

Led by Professor Christine Ross, the Mediatopias research project is an interdisciplinary and inter-university group based at McGill University (Department of Art History and Communication Studies), in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Between 2009 and 2013, Mediatopias' program of research will be focusing on the study of the impact of media on the (modern/postmodern) notion and experience of space, under the generic theme of The Inhabitability of the Contemporary World. Our team brings together artists, art historians, specialists in the field of communication and media studies, as well as geographers.

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of communication. Inventor, entrepreneur, politician, diplomat and successful lobbyist, he more than any other individual shaped the age of electronic media. Marconi saw a world of seamless, wireless communication, and between 1896 and 1937 he was at the centre of every major innovation in communication technology. Alarmed by his power and determination to create a global monopoly on wireless communication - the Internet of his day - the world's great powers gathered in Berlin in 1903 and set the course for what was to become an international system for radio regulation. What we know today as broadcasting is directly derived from Marconi's technical innovations. Microsoft, Google and Facebook, to name but a few, are built on a corporate model pioneered by Marconi. Marconi was also instrumental in the set-up of the BBC and foresaw such modern media as television, the fax machine, mobile telephony and radar. Today's phantasmagorical discourse about the emancipatory benefits of communication technology originated with Marconi, sixty years before McLuhan.

This project traces the origins and emergence of today's networked system of global communication through the stunning life and career of Guglielmo Marconi. The research connects significant parts of Marconi's story that have never before been looked at in a single scholarly work: his early days in Italy, the launch of his first patents and corporate empire in pre-WWI England, his groundbreaking transatlantic experiments between Canada and Europe, his role in the creation and flourishing of what would become the 20th century US media giants General Electric, RCA and NBC, and the part he played in the international conventions that shaped the modern worldwide electronic media system.

This will be the most comprehensive study ever done of Marconi, his role and influence on modern communication. It is based on previously untapped archival sources in four countries and several languages, encompassing personal papers and correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, rare corporate and regulatory records, confidential as well as public documents, transcripts of international conference proceedings, and an exhaustive critical reading of the published material on Marconi.

Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the McGill Faculty of Arts, and Media@McGill, the research will result in the first independent critical biography of Guglielmo Marconi.

In the twenty-first century, the ubiquity of electronic networks in many parts of the world suggests that the field of communication and information policy (CIP) has emerged as a new form of governance in which civil society needs to play an active role. CIP includes governance of broadcasting, telephones, computers, and telecommunications, Internet, freedom of government information, privacy, and intellectual property (IP). This research project examines a specific intervention having to do with the IP dimension of CIP.

The project focuses on one intervention, which is led by Consumers International as a global federation of 200 consumer rights organizations around the world, called the "A2K project". The A2K project is a response to the push for stronger international copyright protections. This push, led by the US and the EU, mainly benefits copyright holders in developed countries. Other governments, particularly those of developing countries, are pressed to ensure very strong protections for rights holders. The study examines the A2K project's efforts to achieve more balanced IP regimes that protect consumer/citizen, not simply business/government interests in IP. It explores several key questions: What is the global scope of the institutional infrastructure focused on advocacy around A2K issues? To what extent can A2K activism be considered a social movement, as some have asserted? How is CI's A2K global advocacy project actually taking shape? What are some of the political, economic, geographic, and cultural tensions that have emerged in CI's A2K advocacy work? How do A2K issues relate to consumer, citizen, or human rights claims? What are the strategic and tactical issues involved in asserting one or more of these rights frameworks?

At 3:20 am on March 13, 1964, Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, a 28-year old Italian-American and lesbian woman was assaulted by knife on two separate occasions, raped and then killed by Winston Moseley, a 29-year old African-American homeowner and family man. It is famous, however, as the case in which 38 neighbors were said to have witnessed the assault and did not call the police, a number that later was revealed to be unsubstantiated. In the milieu of 1964, the Genovese case provided a politically expedient allegory about social apathy, white crime fear and what psychologists term "the diffusion of responsibility" in the midst of a growing federal panic about black civil dissidence and urban unrest. The story of Genovese's neighbors fit neatly into the racialized social order of the United States and the moralizing and racist media portrayals of innocent white female victims and black male predators.

This book project looks at the network of public discourse that came to define this case, focusing in particular on key cultural intermediaries' means of accounting for the phantom 38 witnesses. Through their work, newsmen, psychological researchers, TV producers, script writers, filmmakers and book authors stood in for the witnesses who could-have-been. Through their cultural intermediation, the Genovese story not only became one of the most internationally known crime stories of the mid-20th century, it also became a paradigm for the dangers of broken national community, the atomized conditions of urban life, and the neoliberal social conditions of individual self-reliance and weakened social supports.

This book project seeks to explain how this paradigm developed, not because of the 38 witnesses, but in spite of them. Drawing on archival research, on-site analysis of the place of the murder, performance studies of major and minor stage productions, media analysis of TV and film productions and extensive documentary research, Witness Failed examines how a New York murder story became an international paradigm of witnessing and humanitarian non-intervention.

This project, which is in its beginning stages, examines regional manifestations of cultural difference in Canada in order to evaluate whether national and provincial diversity/multiculturalism policy frameworks are equipped to address locale-specific tensions and persistent inequalities. Different regions and urban/rural areas face distinct issues, depending on the proportion of economic migrants versus refugees, the degree of ongoing transnational connections to former dwellings, the embedded local narratives about race and crime, the economic ups and downs of regions reliant on resource exploitation and temporary labour, the length of residence of migrant populations, and many other factors. Broadly, this project builds on my research on Canadian and Québecois debates about cultural difference, religious minority rights, and the pace of demographic transformations in urban regions. I am also interested in whether the urban studies literature on the ethics of indifference (e.g. Fran Tonkiss, Louis Wirth, Richard Sennett) might pose a worthwhile challenge to ideas of liberal tolerance that have guided the development of cultural diversity policies in Canada. Another aspect of this project seeks to develop a comparative framework in order to relate Canadian conflicts relating to religious minority rights and the endurance of anti-black racism (e.g. in police profiling and racializing media discourses) to similar conflicts in the UK and the Netherlands.