[csaa-forum] IMAGINING CHANGE: TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION OF REGIONAL COMMUNITIES

[Warwick Mules]

Transformations presents a mini-conference to be held at the 
Bundaberg campus of Central Queensland University on Friday 5th 
November.

Keynote Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Darren Tofts, Chair, Media & 
Communications, Swinburne University of Technology.

For further details please contact Warwick Mules by replying to this email.


TRANSFORMATIONS SEMINAR SERIES: IMAGINING CHANGE: TECHNOLOGICAL 
MEDIATION OF REGIONAL COMMUNITIES

Transformations, in partnership with the Bundaberg Media Research 
Group, announces a series of seminars (mini-conferences) to be held 
over a period of time in 2004-2006. The theme of the series Imaging 
Change: technological mediation of regional communities, is designed 
to promote awareness of the potential for change within regional 
communities, and provide opportunities for people working within and 
across regional domains to think about and take action to instigate 
change where possible. In particular, the seminars will examine the 
potential for culture-the representational aspects of human life-to 
contribute to, and instigate change. But culture is itself a mode of 
production-representations are produced by various practices and 
technologies that collectively have the effect of binding people 
together in communities with common identities. Change thus needs to 
be thought in terms of the broader issues of what we are calling 
'technological mediation', or the consistent reproduction of 
representations through 'technological apparatus' (all manner of 
organised mediated process, such as media, art, literature, 
education, museums, business and community promotion, and the 
self-representations that people consistently produce in their daily 
dialogue with one another) that produce the sense and meaning that 
people identify with as part of their way of life. The potential to 
change means unsettling these residues and practices, not taking them 
for granted, and opening the way for a fresh imagination to emerge. 
In particular we are concerned with exploring the potential for new 
media technologies to produce different kinds of relation between 
people in regional communities, and with those well beyond. We are 
concerned to ensure that regional communities do not close themselves 
off from the potential to change, but remain open to new prospects.

First Seminar topic:
Concepts for Change: representation, community and the transformative 
power of technology.
There is an impasse in the way we think about non-metropolitan areas 
in Australia, and their relation with the forces that are currently 
reshaping the world. The impasse involves a stubborn refusal to think 
beyond the centre/periphery model that places the metropolis as the 
source, and the periphery as the beneficiary of change. The effect of 
this type of thinking is to lock regional domains into a passive, 
recipient mode of existence, or alternatively as the space of a 
recalcitrant 'other', a place of difference that exists only as a 
means of identifying the 'normal' self of the centred metropole.
This seminar is designed to draw out the kind of conceptual tools 
needed to submit such centre/periphery models to critique, thereby 
opening up the potential in regional domains for change, but change 
based on an interlinking with the forces of change that operate on a 
global scale.
These concepts may be focussed around ideas of the virtual, the 
network, the image, issues of representation, aesthetics and arts 
practice, narrative interventions, media constructions of community 
and regionality, questions of history and the institutionalisation of 
memory, global-local interconnections.
Drawn from a range of disciplines and areas of research and other 
experiences, these concepts will need the critical and analytical 
power to submit values and received ideas to scrutiny, and to 
generate new arrangements and assemblages of ideas and various 
mediated experiences. The seminar will focus on (i) submitting the 
existing idea of the 'bush' as the historically established motif of 
regionality to critical scrutiny, and (ii) to exploring new and 
imaginative ways of redefining regionality through the employment of 
technologies in media and art.

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___________________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Warwick Mules				Editor Transformations
Cultural Studies, 
	http://www.cqu.edu.au/transformations
Humanities, Central Queensland University
Bundaberg Campus,				email: w.mules at cqu.edu.au
Locked Bag 3333 DC				phone: 0741 507142
Bundaberg, Queensland,			mobile: 04122 92541
Australia  4670				fax:   0741 507080
_______________________________________________________________________________
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