Lunch and colloquium at 12:00pm

Room 300

Annenberg School for Communication

3620 Walnut Street

Space is limited, please RSVP here.

 

Abstract:

Drawing on research in post-earthquake Haiti, this talk explores how natural disasters demobilize and remobilize, producing uneven mobility and communication systems that reinforce unequal distributions of network capital and exacerbate uneven access to communication networks. Disasters strike at mobility systems but also engender their own unique mobilities and immobilities. When emergency responders, relief workers, and armed peace keepers and soldiers begin to move into a disaster affected area they not only take control of infrastructures of mobility such as roads, airports, ports, and communication networks, but they also have access to different topologies of Hertzian space (radio waves, satellite communications, etc.). Focusing on the use of mobile communication, remote data collection, aerial vision technologies, and high-tech visualizations assisted by satellites and aerial photography by disaster responders, I explore how disaster logistics produce highly skewed communication systems that may contribute to the exclusion of local participants (including government and civil society) in key recovery and rebuilding activities. I ask how we might raise awareness of these gaps in network capital and bridge these uneven topologies through building connectivity across differentiated communication platforms.

 

About the speaker:

Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities; and Associate Editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. As co-editor, with John Urry, of Mobile Technologies of the City (Routledge, 2006), Tourism Mobilities (Routledge, 2004) and several key articles, she helped to establish the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. Her recent books are Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014); the co-edited Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (Routledge, 2014); and co-edited book Mobility and Locative Media (Routledge, 2014). She received her A.B. from Harvard University (1988), MA (1993) and PhD (1997) from the New School for Social Research. She held recent Visiting Fellowships at the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University (2008-09); Media@McGill, Montreal, Canada (2009); Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); and Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania (2010-11).