[Image: "Pragmatic Geography" by Luis Camnitzer, courtesy Alexander Gray Associates] Posted on [iDC] by Trebor Scholz: Dear all,

Many of you on this list have participated in discussions around the Free Cooperation conference in 2004, Share Widely in 2005, Situated Technologies one year later and recently The Internet as Playground and Factory. In the context of these large-scale events, we did not use social media as secondary publicity but as canvases of as yet unthought practices and understudied or sidelined areas of enquiry that are able to meaningfully engage publics in discourse- from the German media theorist Christoph Spehr’s theory of free (versus forced) cooperation to commercial and governmental surveillance, digital labor, mobile education and self-learning through the lens of Austrian theorist Ivan Illich and the French philosopher Jacques Rancière.

Conferences can give ideas and iterations an early context but they should also make us rethink conferencing itself: everything from traditional event hierarchies to public education. The broad (and largely free) distribution of scholarly research has always been a core value of these events, which is much aligned with Canadian educator, activist, and author John Willinsky who emphasized that “a commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of this work as far as possible, and ideally to all who are interested in it and who might benefit by it” (Willinsky 5).

These conferences quietly transformed and reformulated the conference as a space of opportunity for the development of emerging forms of genuine mutual inquiry and academic community building. Such events are always transitory and therefore it is essential to understand what remains when all is said. Our conferences were always sites of production of video, online discussion archives, exhibitions, books, bibliographies, websites, and other documents that chronicled these encounters for the long term.

Today, we are starting a new chapter: MobilityShifts. First of all, there is the call for proposals. You might have seen it already. There are still two weeks left until the July 1st submission deadline. I invite you to join forces, propose a panel, a workshop, or a short talk for this summit at The New School in NYC. http://mobilityshifts.org/conference/calls/

A few contributors are already committed: Juliana Rotich (Kenya), Michael Wesh (USA), Tania Bustos (Bolivia), Henry Jenkins (USA), Oliver Grau (Austria), Janek Sowa (Poland), Cathy Davidson (USA), Irit Rogoff (UK), Shin Mizukosji (Japan), Kiko Mayorga (Peru), John Palfrey (USA), Jan Schmidt (Germany), and Anya Kamenetz (USA), Ramon Sanguesa (Spain), Elizabeth Losh (USA), John Willinsky (Canada), Rolf Hapel (Denmark), Kate Crawford (Australia), Mimi Ito (USA), Nishant Shah (India), Juan Manuel Lopez Garduño (Mexico), Geert Lovink (Netherlands) and many others. Shveta Sarda (India) will discuss CyberMohalla and Nitin Shawney will present his work with youth in the Gaza Strip. While this summit has a strong international focus, we’ll go beyond the framework of the nation state and also study transnational phenomena.

MobilityShifts exhibitions will present the work of Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer and the worldwide network Ghana Think Tank. Writer and director Cecilia Rubino will bring students and teachers from New York City’s high schools together with New School undergraduates and youth from the city’s most underrepresented, high need minorities working with the Institute for Urban Education to create a theater piece about their use of mobile digital media for learning.

I’m proud to say that MobilityShifts has an excellent group of co-chairs as well: Elizabeth Losh, Edward Keller, David Theo Goldberg, Matthew K. Gold, and Sean Dockray. Karen DeMoss is the co-chair for the policy strand of the conference, which will include Hal Plotkin, Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education. I’d also like to mention Jennifer Conley Darling, the producer of this year’Over the next few months, all participants will introduce themselves and run brief debate sessions related to the summit themes, usually limited to four or five days. Caroline Buck who has joined our New School MobilityShifts team from Duke University will facilitate the discussion.

Welcome to all and Caroline, take it away.

best,
Trebor

Trebor Scholz

Relevant links:
http://www.autonomedia.org/node/41
http://tinyurl.com/5w8avw8
http://vimeo.com/ipf2009/videos/sort:plays
http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/75
http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/7
http://newmediaeducation.org/
http://digitallabor.org/
http://learningthroughdigitalmedia.net
(Many of you contributed to the Open Peer Review process.)
http://twitter.com/idctweets
http://www.facebook.com/mobilityshifts
http://mobilityshifts.org/
http://mobilityshifts.org/conference/participants/all
http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla
http://www.openculture.com/2011/02/michael_wesch_rethinks_education.html
http://mobilityshifts.org/index.php?cID=235
http://mobilityshifts.org/exhibition/
http://mobilityshifts.org/theatre/

Willinsky, John. The Access Principle. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2006. Print.

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