Colloquium Speaker Series

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	“Ghostly Presences: On the Uncanniness of Recordings.” ~ A Talk by Dr. Jeremy Wallach - March 5, 2010 This talk focuses on the unique play of presence and absence involved in the encounter with recorded music, film, television, and the like and argues that it is the nature of such media to offer simultaneously intense sensationa of human presence and the experience of a purely mechanized lack of human agency (other than that of the listeners controling the playback apparatus).
	“How Children of Immigrants Broker Language, Culture, and Technologies to Connect Their Families to the U.S. Health Care System.” ~ A Talk by Dr. Vikki Katz - January 29, 2010 This talk explores the important roles children of immigrants can play in their families' adaptation to the new commnity environments.
	“Social Network, New Technology, and the Public Sphere.” ~ A Talk by Dr. Keith Hampton - November 20, 2009 This talk explores how new technologies influence exposure to social diversity in the home, with the closest of social ties; in neighborhoods, with weak ties; and in urban public spaces, with strangers.
	“Facebook and the Self: A Status Update.” ~ A Talk by Dr. Jeff Pooley - October 30, 2009 This talk discusses Facebook’s potent and contradictory cocktail of self-promotion and expressive distinction, stirred by the self-improvement industries, the therapeutic professions, and especially advertising – the Facebook installments of a long-running show.
	“The Nollywood Diaspora: a Nigerian Video Genre” ~ A Talk by Dr. Jonathan Haynes - May 29, 2009 This talk will focus on “Nollywood,” the Nigerian video film industry, which now dominates audio-visual entertainment across Africa and has spread around the world.  A genre has emerged of Nollywood films with foreign settings, produced as collaborations between the Lagos-based industry and Nigerian expatriate communities in Europe, North America, South Africa, Brazil, China, and elsewhere.
	"Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst Marischka's 'Sissi' Films" A Talk by Dr. Heidi Schlipphacke - May 1, 2009 This talk will analyze the "Sissi" trilogy of the 1950s, the most popular films in post-war Germany and Austria. These films treat the courtship and marriage between the princess Elisabeth of Bavaria and the Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef.  Formally a hybrid between the regressive "Heimat" (homeland) film genre and the spectacular historical film, the "Sissi" films surprisingly complicate simplified notions of nation and nostalgia, engaging rather in an aesthetic of melancholy that reflects the mood of post-Holocaust Germany and Austria.
	"How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$” ~ A Talk by Dr. Gabriella Coleman - February 20, 2009 This talk will present a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as “Internet vs Scientology,” which in recent times has witnessed a different incarnation in the form of “Project Chanology,” which is orchestrated by a group called Anonymous who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests against the Church of Scientology.
	“Cell phones and the social interaction: Hypotheses concerning communication & mobility” ~ A Talk by Dr. James Katz - January 23, 2009 This talk will be a discussion of how mobile communication is affecting public culture and private lives. Professor Katz has devoted much of his career to exploring the social consequences of new communication technology, especially the mobile phone and Internet. Currently he is looking at how personal communication technologies can be used by teens from urban environments to engage in informal science and health learning.
	“The New Mobilities Paradigm” ~ A Talk by Professor Mimi Sheller - Dec 5, 2008 There is a “mobility turn” spreading into and transforming the social sciences, transcending the dichotomy between transport research and social research, putting the social into travel and connecting different forms of transport with the complex patterns of social experience conducted through various communications at-a-distance. This talk will introduce the “new mobilities” paradigm, its theoretical resources, and its methodological implications.