SpCom 438, Sec. 2, "Seminar in Rhetorical Theory: Technology and Social Space," Prof. Hay

1 unit
2:00 - 5:00 W
184 Lincoln
Call number 08267

This seminar has two convergent aims. In part the seminar will review theoretical writing from the 20th and 21st centuries about Place, Space, and Environment. This review will consider social, political, and cultural theorists (e.g., Benjamin, Kracauer, Gramsci, Delueze, Guattari, Virillio, Lefebvre, Foucault, Jameson, de Certeau, Barthes, Eco, Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Habermas, Baudrillard, Morris, Urry, Hardt/Negri, Sassen, N. Rose, Bennett) who may be known for having written about issues other than space but whose writing informs contemporary thinking about social space. We also will review recent theoretical work from disciplines such as Geography, Urbanism, Architecture, Landscape and Environmental Studies (e.g., LeCorbusier, Venturi, Tafuri, Harvey, Soja, Davis, Massey, G. Rose, Dear, Gregory, Smith). We will address how conceptualizations of space and how studies of spatial practices have posed a new set of historiographic issues concerning cultural history, popular memory, museums, monuments, tourism, urban "development," planning or conserving landscapes and habitats. Other key issues that will converge throughout the syllabus include modernity/ postmodernity, the public-private sphere, social relations (interaction, separation, diaspora), political/cultural economy (the distribution of resources), identity politics, the City, Land/ landscape, the Nation, Globalization, Suburbanization, Home, and "everyday life". In this respect, the seminar is interested in fostering an inter-disciplinary understanding about social space and in thinking about the place-bound and space-producing conditions of knowledge and research.

In that social space is produced, organized, inhabited, and governed through particular kinds of technologies (and in that the "built environment" can be understood as a technology or a technological assemblage), the seminar will devote considerable attention to the relation between technology and social space. While there are many ways to discuss technology, this seminar will be most concerned with writing about the relation between technology and the production of social space (e.g., Buckminster Fuller, Harold Innis, Marshal McLuhan, Raymond Williams, James Carey, Armand Mattelart, Bruno Latour, Mark Poster, Manuel Castells, Jody Berland, Kevin Robins, Frank Webster, David Morley--not to mention many of the individuals cited above). The seminar's focus upon the relation between technology and social space will pertain mostly to developments in the late-twentieth century, particularly writing about the relation between material/terrestrial and virtual environments. Considering this relation should allow us to discuss the relation between communication/information technologies and more traditional technologies that continue to organize social space. Particularly toward the end of the semester, we will devote considerable attention to how media and communication technologies matter in the production of social space.

This is an introductory seminar. Students are not expected to have read extensively on social space or technology.

Students will be expected to participate in discussions about assigned readings and to complete a final paper.