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digest 2006-04-15 #002.txt
litsci-l-digest Saturday, April 15 2006 Volume 01 : Number
167
In this issue:
SUB 06: Becoming/Real: The Future of the Virtual
SUB 06 The Untimely Eruption of Evolutionary Memory
SUB 06 One Candle, Ten Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme
SUB 06: NEBULIZER: The Asthma Files
=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?SUB_06:_=93I_Believe_That_Comic_Book_Heroes_Wal?=
=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?k_the_Earth=94:_Animal,_Vegetable,_and_Mineral_?=
=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?Becomings_in_a_Monstrous_World?=
SUB 06 - IN THE BEGINNING WAS SLIME MOLD: EVOLUTION & THE GROTESQUE
SUB 06 PANEL: Opportunistic Infections: Disease and Power in
Literature and Film
SUB 06 Social Marketing as Global Communication Technology
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:05:57 -0400
From: "Charles Baldwin"
Subject: SUB 06: Becoming/Real: The Future of the Virtual
TITLE: Becoming/Real: The Future of the Virtual
Presenters: Sandy Baldwin, Toni Dove, Alan Sondheim, Tom Zummer
Keywords: Virtuality, Performance, Narrative, Embodiment, Becoming=20
This panel consists of four presentations at the breakdown and
permeability=
of art, theory, and digital media. The presentations will dissolve =
oppositions of performance / lecture, showing / talking. The goal is not
=
to separate real versus the virtual, but to insist on their porosity or
=
"fuzzy" overlap. The "virtual" is not the subject of the work. These are
=
works about the becoming of the virtual and the real towards other
content =
- - or even towards the "content of the other" - on political, social, =
sexual, linguistic, narrative, psychoanalytical, even spirtual grounds.
Sandy Baldwin
Assistant Professor of English/Director of the Center for Literary =
Computing, West Virginia University
TITLE: "The virtual has potential." ABSTRACT: I will discuss codeworks
at =
the intersection of computer gaming and recycled text. These works make
=
scenes in first person shooters and tactical military computer games, =
re-purposing the games but also falling for the war world that they
posit =
- -- which is nothing less than the world we all inhabit today. These
works =
are the temporal playing out of figures cut in game-space, serial =
metonymizations of contexts that "take place" in the real time of
digital =
media. Digital writing names the space of this taking place. In these =
works, writing is the terminal point of visibilities that become images
=
and graphematic sign chains that become codified. I call these works =
"digital literature," where literature is not a canon of works but a =
problematization of mediation, a "turning literary of the literal," a =
stoppage where media become literature. I argue for a turn against the =
theoretical promise of the readable image or the perceived text (which I
=
take as the premise of "media theory"). This turning shows the purely =
institutional relation of representation and context within our notions
of =
mediation, on the one hand; and intimates at interiority within
mediation, =
on the other.
Toni Dove
Independent Artist/Scholar
I work with narrative responsive environments - environments that
combine =
computer programs designed to assemble and display media with interface
triggers that accomplish this assembly in real time. Programs that =
perform, or perhaps I should say programs that perform the body, perform
=
perception. These works involve re-seeing narrative through an analysis
of =
perception and re-casting cinema as a spatialized, embodied experience.
In =
other words, we perceive our environment and each other based on an =
assembly of physical sensations cued by environmental triggers. How can
=
this be articulated in interesting ways to create virtual space?
Mutable improvisational media loops with the body to create place, a =
sensory, embodied experience. In this case, the virtual is a space of
potential and affect. It exists as much in time and in physical
experience =
as it does in media. The players activate programs, audience is
performer =
- - time is experienced through improvisation in real time - the urgency
of =
time - the suspense of time.
BIO: Toni Dove writes, directs and produces interactive video
installations=
and performances that engage viewers in responsive and immersive =
narrative=20
environments. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe
and =
Canada as well as in print and on radio and television. Her current =
project under development is Spectropia, an interactive cinema
performance =
for two players that also exists as a feature film.
Alan Sondheim
Independet Artist/Scholar
My performances "bring together video projections of cyborgian,
mutating, =
sexual bodies and the artifacts of battlefields soaked in banal
horror.=20
Together, they offer a distorted beauty of the disasters of war and the
=
pleasures of love." I work through laptop performance of video in =
combination with live audio and real-time text. I inhabit the semantic =
domain, whether real or virtual - I make no distinctions, and this
absence =
of boundary is part of the work's content. Analog and digital, mathesis
=
and physical reality, intertwine. The subject and subjectivity move =
through, and are transformed by, the presentation. The message is the =
medium, not the other way around.
BIO: Alan Sondheim's books include the anthology Being on Line: Net =
Subjectivity (Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, =
1988), .echo=20
(alt-X digital arts, 2001), Vel (Blazevox 2004-5), and The Wayward
(Salt, =
2004). His video and film have been widely exhibited. Sondheim=20
co-moderates several pioneering email lists, including Cybermind, =
Cyberculture and Wryting. Since January, 1994, he has been working on =
an=20
"Internet Text," a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, =
language, body, and virtuality. In 1999, Sondheim was the second =
Virtual=20
Writer in Residence for the Trace online writing communit. In 2004, he
was =
a 5 week resident of the Center for Literary Computing and the
Virtual=20
Environments Laboratory at West Virginia University, and in 2005 he was
=
resident artist/writer at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. He has
=
a=20
number of cds, including a forthcoming one from Firemuseum. In 2001, =
Sondheim assembled a special issue of the America Book Review on =
Codework,=20
which was seminal in its genre. Sondheim taught in the Trace online =
writing program for four years; in 2001-2 he was professor of new media
=
at=20
Florida International University in Miami. This year he hs been working
=
with the Swiss dancer/ choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilite on new work=20
premiered across Europe. This May Sondheim will have a major exhibition,
=
at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles. Sondheim's work is trans-media;
his=20
emphasis is on writing, theory, and digital performance.
Tom Zummer
Indpendent Artist/Scholar
"An Inverse Genealogy of Disembodiment." In this paper I will address
the =
disposition of the material body in its various mediations, tracing =
certain modifications of corporeality through a technical register =
including online and telecommunications systems, cinema, radio,
television,=
telegraphy and telephony, but also examining the popular mythologies of
=
disembodied virtuality in literary accounts of ether, spiritualism, =
vivisection, and robotics. The history of 'modern spectrality'-what =
Jacques Derrida has called 'hauntology'- is folded into the history of =
technology's relation to bodies. I will trace some of the familiar, as =
well as some of the more unlikely, tributaries of the virtual. =20
BIO: Thomas Zummer is an independent scholar and writer, artist and =
curator. His drawings, media, and sculptural works have been exhibited =
worldwide, and he is the author of various essays on mediation and =
virtuality, He is currently completing a book-length study,
Intercessionary=
Technologies: Database, Archive, Interface, on the early history of =
reference systems, and a small book on photography. Mr. Zummer has
curated =
exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Cin=E9Club/Anthology Film
=
Archives, Thread Waxing Space, the Katonah Museum of Art, and the Palais
=
des Beaux-arts/Brussels. In 1994 he curated CRASH: Nostalgia for the =
Absence of Cyberspace, with Robert Reynolds, one of the first major =
exhibitions to have a significant portion of works as digital/online or
=
other forms of transmission. He and Mr. Reynolds also edited the book =
accompanying the exhibition. In 1995 he won 5th Prize in the ACA/CODA =
Architectural Design Competition for the City of Atlanta for the 1996 =
Olympics. Thomas Zummer is a frequent lecturer on philosophy,
aesthetics, =
and the history of technology, and is currently Senior Lecturer in =
Critical Studies, at Tyler School of Art/Temple University, and Regular
=
Visiting Professor in the Transmedia programme/post-graduate at the =
Hogeschool Sint-Lukas/Universite Leuven in Brussels. In 2006 he will be
=
Visiting Professor at the Transart Institute in Linz, Austria.
- -
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 08:47:56 -0400
From: "Jennifer R. White"
Subject: SUB 06 The Untimely Eruption of Evolutionary Memory
The Untimely Eruption of Evolutionary Memory in Linda Hogan's Novel
Solar Storms
Many Native American novels stage a temporal conflict between native
sacred time, usually expressed as timelessness or cyclicity, and the
linear, teleological time of the so-called Western world expressed in
Judeo-Christian millennialism, capitalism, and philosophies of
history. Chicksaw novelist Linda Hogan seems to write in the same
vein, yet her use of evolutionary memory in Solar Storms represents
a radical departure. Because evolutionary discourse is not part of
typical minority memory or cosmology, my paper investigates the
politics of evolutionary memory. What does it mean to remember being
fish in the context of debates on ethnic identity, human identity,
and environmentalism? In answering these questions, this paper will
critically examine whether evolutionary memory proposes a more
environmentally-based alternative to existing race-based temporal
cultures. I will consider what work evolutionary memory does and does
not do in the novel, and what the implications are for the novel's
ethnic and environmental projects. I will argue that Hogan's
evolutionary memory represents the recuperation of a misunderstood,
misused discourse to engineer a new kind of pastoral impulse based on
an ongoing natural law rather than an idealized past time or place. I
will close by exploring the philosophical and political implications
of this new pastoral impulse.
Keywords: biology, evolution, ecocriticism, ethnicity, humanism
Jennifer White
English Department
Columbia University
jw765@columbia.edu
- --
- -
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:57:54 -0400
From: William Benzon
Subject: SUB 06 One Candle, Ten Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu
Meme
SLSA Abstract Submission, NYC 2006
One Candle, Ten Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme
=20
I consider a single "meme," the word /xanadu/, and how it has traveled
from
a 17th century book, to a 19th century poem (Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"),
int=
o
the 20th century where it was picked up by a classic movie ("Citizen
Kane")=
,
an ongoing software development project (Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu),
and
another movie and hit song, Olivia Newton-John=B9s "Xanadu". The
aggregate
result can be seen when you google the word: you get 2 million hits.
What i=
s
interesting about those hits is that, while some of them are directly
related to Coleridge's poem, more seem to be related to Nelson's
software
project (no surprise there), Olivia Newton-Johns film and song, and
(indirectly) to Welles' movie. Thus one cluster of Xanadu sites is high
tec=
h
while another is about luxury and excess (and then there's the
Manchester
Swingers Club Xanadu).
keywords: memetics, distant reading, cultural evolution, hybridity,
genealogy
(Possible panel with Matt Lowe on the evolution of the sestina.)
Bill Benzon
Independent Scholar
- --=20
William L. Benzon
708 Jersey Avenue, Apt. 2A
Jersey City, NJ 07302
201 217-1010
"You won't get a wild heroic ride to heaven on pretty little
sounds."--George Ives
Mind-Culture Coevolution: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/=20
- -
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:43:49 -0400
From: Mike Fortun
Subject: SUB 06: NEBULIZER: The Asthma Files
- --Apple-Mail-75--702294654
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=WINDOWS-1252;
delsp=yes;
format=flowed
NEBULIZER: THE ASTHMA FILES
PERFORMANCE AND PANEL
Organizer and contact: Mike Fortun, Department of Science and =20
Technology Studies,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy NY 12180 =20
(fortum@rpi.edu) Tel. 518-276-6598
(NOTE TO CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS: This event should be scheduled for a =20
gallery space, or similar space that can accommodate the performance =20
elements.)
Keywords: asthma, genetics, public health, performance art and education
This panel includes an installation and performance about asthma as =20
an experience, social and political-economic phenomena, and object of
=20=
scientific concern. The installation and performance is the combined
=20=
work of a video artist (Surajit Sarkar), an ethnomusicologist and =20
dancer (Tomie Hahn), an electronic musician (Curtis Bahn), a =20
historian of science (Mike Fortun) and a cultural anthropologist (Kim
=20=
Fortun).
It will take audience members approximately thirty minutes to move =20
through the installation space and see the performance. The =20
performance will be followed by commentary from two discussants, =20
followed by open discussion. The first discussant, Richard Doyle, =20
is in the English Department at Penn State. The second discussant, =20
Alexandra Shields, is in the Institute for Health Policy, Harvard =20
Medical School.
INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE
This installation and performance conveys many different perspectives
=20=
on asthma =96 from the vantage point of affected people, their care-=20
givers, and scientists from different disciplines; at different =20
scales, from the genetic to the community to the national; through =20
different modes of expression, including video, dance and scientific =20
representation. The installation is a structure that can be easily =20
and inexpensively set up at different sites, with some content =20
customized to reflect local conditions and to address specific =20
audiences. The installation directs viewers through a serious of =20
spiraling tunnels that, in different segments, take them through the =20
lived experience of asthma; possible triggers and physiological =20
dynamics of asthma; efforts to understand how gene-environment =20
interactions contribute to asthma incidence and exacerbation; diverse
=20=
ways of treating asthma; and, finally to trackings of extraordinarily
=20=
uneven prevalence of asthma in different locales today.
The viewer then enters into the performance space at the center of =20
the tunnels. Here a dancer performs how factors and contexts =20
encountered in the tunnels come together in a human subject, =20
dramatizing multiple influences and perspectives on asthma. The =20
dancer and her layered costume unfold to become a projection space =20
for images and sounds of various facets of the asthma experience. =20
Across different bodies, social groups and locales, and at different =20
physiological and social scales, the cumulative effect should be =20
sensorially rich and immersive yet underdetermined. The goal is to =20
give viewers a sense of what asthma has become =96 personally, =20
socially, and scientifically =96 in the 21st century.
PARTICIPANTS
Curtis Bahn, Associate Professor, Department of Arts and Integrated =20
Electronic Arts (iEAR) Studios, Renssealear Polytechnic Institute =20
(cbr@rpi.edu)
Kim Fortun, Associate Professor, Department of Science and Technology
=20=
Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (fortuk@rpi.edu)
Mike Fortun, Associate Professor, Department of Science and =20
Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (fortum@rpi.edu)
Tomie Hahn, Associate Professor, Department of Arts and Integrated =20
Electronic Arts (iEAR) Studios, Renssealear Polytechnic Institute =20
(hahnt@rpi.edu)
Surajit Sarkar, Department of Arts and Integrated Electronic Arts =20
(iEAR) Studios, Renssealear Polytechnic Institute =20
(surajit.sarkar@gmail.com)
Rich Doyle, Professor, Department of English, Penn State University =20
(rmd12@psu.edu)
Alexandra Shields, Associate Professor, Institute of Health Policy, =20
Harvard Medical School (ashields1@partners.org)
Mike Fortun + Associate Professor
Department of Science and Technology Studies
Sage 5112 + Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th Street + Troy + NY + 12180
518-276-6598 + Fax 518-276-2659
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 08:13:40 -0700
From: Phillip Thurtle
Subject:
=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?SUB_06:_=93I_Believe_That_Comic_Book_Heroes_Wal?=
=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?k_the_Earth=94:_Animal,_Vegetable,_and_Mineral_?=
=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?Becomings_in_a_Monstrous_World?=
=93I Believe That Comic Book Heroes Walk the Earth=94: Animal, =
Vegetable, =20
and Mineral Becomings in a Monstrous World
Phillip Thurtle
Assistant Professor, Comparative History of Ideas, University of =20
Washington
It is a common conception that superheroes are super because they =20
possess the agency to change the world. Under this conception, a =20
superhero battles evil by using his special powers to change the =20
world. Unfortunately, this conception of superhero agency does not =20
account for how the superhero became super in the first place. =20
Through an affective/phenomenological analysis of the ways that comic
=20=
books inform their readers and a critical examination of the role of =20
disasters in post-industrial society, I am able to argue that =20
superheroes inform us about our world precisely because they lose =20
human agency by becoming part of their surroundings. =46rom this =20
perspective, the superhero is super through his intertwining with his
=20=
environment. This characteristic allows comic books to conceive of =20
the possibility of anomalous events outside the usual bounds of =20
representational practices. It also offers superheroes as exemplars =20
of moral engagement with a world that is only dimly understood and =20
often monstrous in its consequences.
Keywords: comic books, affect, phenomenology, disaster, anomaly=
- -
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 11:28:29 -0600 (MDT)
From: White Eric
Subject: SUB 06 - IN THE BEGINNING WAS SLIME MOLD: EVOLUTION & THE
GROTESQUE
SLSA 2006 NYC Abstract
IN THE BEGINNING WAS SLIME MOLD: EVOLUTION & THE GROTESQUE
The life cycle of cellular slime molds entails a commingling of
biological
categories: unicellular amoebic entities so long as food is abundant,
when
their food supply has been exhausted, the hitherto free-ranging amoebas
spontaneously aggregate to form a multicellular slug-like creature whose
subsequent transformation into a spore-forming fruiting body completes
the
slime mold life cycle when the release of spores ensues in the next
generation of amoebas. At once single-celled and multicellular,
combining
attributes associated with animals, plants, and fungi, cellular slime
molds are precisely grotesque in their composite, acategorical
character.
Slime molds may in fact be understood to exemplify what Mikhail Bakhtin
has famously described as the grotesque body of carnival culture, a
traditional figuration of communal vitality precisely as a mutating
throng
of heterogeneous parts that remain, Bakhtin says, always in process,
never
resolved in a closed unity or final form. The present paper will
reflect
upon the extent to which Bakhtin's discussion of the grotesque-- and its
reworking in Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection-- may provide the
basis
for the aesthetic appreciation of an organism that, I will further
suggest, may itself serve as a pleasing synecdoche for the evolutionary
becoming of terrestrial life in general.
KEY WORDS: slime mold; grotesque; abject
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Eric White
Department of English
226 UCB - University of Colorado
Boulder CO 80309
Tel: 303-492-8930
Email: Eric.White@colorado.edu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 14:37:49 -0400
From: "Rebecca Garden"
Subject: SUB 06 PANEL: Opportunistic Infections: Disease and Power in
Literature and Film
Opportunistic Infections: Disease and Power in Literature and Film
Panel Description:
This panel explores the political use of the biological as represented
and
contested by literature and film. Taking as their premise state and
corporate claims of production of and dominion over the healthy and
productive body, these papers tease apart the mechanisms of power in
relation to the biological by examining representations of health and
disease in texts that contend with national (and multinational) control.
Some of the texts under discussion frame the diseased body as the limit
figure of state power or as a threat to political stability, while
others
figure state and corporate power as disease or controlling virus. This
panel brings together a range of examples of artistic responses to
social
control through medical regimes of the body and frames activist
interventions in the narratives of state power.
Papers and Panelists:
Rebecca Garden
Assistant Professor, Bioethics and Humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical
University, Program Chair, Consortium for Culture and Medicine,
gardenr@upstate.edu
Contagion, Immigration, and Politics: Yellow Fever, SARS, and Avian Flu
in
the U.S. American Imaginary
In 1793 in Philadelphia, then the capital of the new republic, the
seasonal
occurrence of yellow fever exploded into a devastating epidemic, which
resulted in the loss of over 5,000 Philadelphians, over ten percent of
the
city's population. The cause and transmission of the disease were
unknown
and occurred in conjunction of the arrival of refugees from Haiti, where
a
slave rebellion was overturning French colonial rule, while
revolutionary
terror reigned in the colonial power, France. The movement of peoples
and
revolutionary ideologies around the Atlantic were interpreted in the
U.S. as
deadly contagion; these social phenomena were interwoven conceptually
with
the physiological and the metaphorical. My paper will examine the
representations of this conflation of disease, immigration, and
revolutionary ideology in the novels of early U.S. American author
Charles
Brockden Brown, reading these representations as a historical template
that
organizes current understandings of contagion. I will unpack this
influence
in media accounts of recent and ongoing fears about deadly
pandemics--specifically SARS, monkey pox, and avian flu in the
twenty-first
century--tracing conflations of the biological and metaphorical and the
use
of the rhetoric of disease in accounts of immigration.
Sue Laizik
PhD candidate, Instructor, Department of English and Comparative
Literature,
Columbia University, spl8@columbia.edu
Cancer and the Corporation in Richard Powers' *Gain*
Richard Powers in several of his novels explores the relationship
between
narrative and illness. In his novel *Operation Wandering Soul,* for
example,
narrative is a contagion. A resident pediatric surgeon in a hospital in
an
impoverished section of Los Angeles tries to control the effect of the
sickness around him by blocking out the narratives of his patients. In
Power's novel *Gain,* the spread of cancer in a dying woman becomes the
analogical model for the history of a large multinational corporation,
providing a narrative structure in which willful and controlled agency
is
called into question, in which growth does not necessarily imply
progress,
and in which the human body is the site of narrative. Illness,
particularly
cancer, offers a perspective that distinctly contrasts with the
expansive
suggestiveness of the trope of evolution, which implies slow, forward
progress on a large scale. Focusing on the novel *Gain,* I will examine
Powers' complex representations of illness, not simply as a
physiological
phenomenon, but as a trope, and as itself a creator of relations and
connections and thus narrative.
Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree
PhD candidate, Instructor, Department of English and Textual Studies,
Syracuse University, hyonjoo@twcny.rr.com
The Incurable Feminine and the Hygiene of the Nation in Contemporary
Korean
Cinema
Foucault argues the classical form of sovereign power to kill and let
live
undergoes transformation into the sovereign right of the modern state to
make live and let die where the state power is primarily defined by its
right to generate and expand civic life. This creative biopower extends
the
sovereign power beyond the power to discipline and punish.
Manufacturing of
the hygiene policies and discourse is the culmination of the sovereign
right
to make live. Nation-states co-construct biophysics and pathology as a
new
field of power/knowledge necessary to maintain the healthy and
productive
body of the nation which culminates in the medical regime. I argue the
core
of the medical regime is in the invention of the incurable which denotes
the
limit of that technology, and thus, the body to be feared. The creation
of
the incurable within the technology of hygiene is crucial in
consolidating
that very technology as the epistemological power that undergirds the
power
to institutionally control civic body in general. In my paper, I will
examine this "reason" of the incurable through the representation of the
diseased feminine body (particularly, with mental illness and AIDS) as
the
incurable and the limit figure of the patriarchal nation in contemporary
Korean cinema.
Ziv Neeman
Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows, Visiting Assistant Professor,
Department of English Literature and Languages, University of
Michigan,
neeman@umich.edu
From the Material to the Informational: Viral Contagion in William S.
Burroughs' Middle-Period Works
In *Naked Lunch* (1959), one of the central tropes William S. Burroughs
uses
to describe drug addiction is contagion. A single exposure can cause
immediate and extreme physical, psychological, and behavioral
transformations. In the Cut-Up Trilogy--*The Soft Machine* (1961), *The
Ticket That Exploded* (1962), and *Nova Express* (1964)--the
epidemiological
framework and contagion are rendered with greater specificity. However,
the
trope now comes to be associated mainly with language. Hence, the trope
changes from one associated with drugs, a material substance, to one
associated with language, an informational medium. This shift can be
correlated with Burroughs' changing conceptualization of his writings'
central theme--control--and his role as a writer. In *Naked Lunch,* drug
addiction functions as the central figure for control with Burroughs
(ambivalently) warning against its terrible toll. In the latter works,
the
forms of control become total and increasingly psychological, and
Burroughs
offers his radically disjunctive texts as an antidote to the "language
virus" controlling people's "thought feeling and apparent sensory
impressions." Burroughs thus imaginatively transforms the medical
(material)
concept of contagion into an informational trope that will influence
later
writers and artists. It also, to an extent, prefigure Dawkins' notion of
"cultural meme" and computer viruses.
keywords: biopower, disease, corporation, virus, contagion
Rebecca E. Garden, PhD
Assistant Professor
Center for Bioethics & Humanities
Associate Editor, The Healing Muse
725 Irving Ave., Suite 406
Syracuse, NY 13210
gardenr@upstate.edu
315-464-8451
www.upstate.edu/cbh
-
-----------------------------------------
Roddey Reid
4/15/2006 3:20:44 PM
SUB 06 Social Marketing as Global Communication Technology
This paper will look at the spread of social marketing as a global
communication technology for translating public health expertise into
community practices in a post-colonial world.
An interdisciplinary field based in the methods and tools of the
behavioral sciences and the entertainment industry, social marketing??s
roots are transnational and go back to the 1960s and programs in
international development. Before being adopted in the US, Europe, and
Australia, many of the contemporary commercial marketing methods and
techniques used in health promotion were first developed during the
1970s and 1980s for family planning and breast feeding campaigns in
South and East Asia, Latin America, and Africa by US private firms and
adopted by US-based foundations and international NGOs and
organizations. This was often done in conjunction with the World Bank,
US government agencies, and national and local governments. As its
focus, this paper will look at several social marketing firms (for
example, The Academy for Educational Development) and their worldwide
activities in terms of claims for social marketing as a flexible,
?¨systems approach of universal application regardless of problem or
local situation?Æ; methods of segmenting populations and assessing
consumers?? ?¨needs?Æ (through focus groups, etc.); the choice of
communication media; and neoliberal forms of government.
Keywords: public health, media, communication, neoliberalism,
globalization
Roddey Reid, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Literature, 0410
University of California, San Diego
email: rreid@ucsd.edu
