Liquid Archives
Keynote Presentation: Dr Jaimey Hamilton Faris
Even as big data can be used to visualize our moment-by-moment shipping activities, it is difficult to capture how these activities affect sea levels and ice caps in a single image. How to come to terms with this contradiction? Perhaps one way is to be more attentive to oil and water as quickly accumulating repositories that challenge our very systems of conceptualization, innovation, and analysis. If we follow this path, we will need to think of them as archives, as media, as heterogeneous witnesses of the past, present and future – and not merely as assets and resources to be used in the now. This talk will introduce this notion of “liquid archives” and a selection of artists (often in conjunction with writers, scientists, geographers and others) who have established new visual and interpretive strategies to make this archive known and felt. They attempt to make visible the important geological, cultural and historical markers hidden in our oceans, atmospheres, icecaps, aquifers and oil veins. They also seek ways to visualize the information flowing through government agencies, global business and bundles of fiber-optic cable on the bottom of the sea-floor as accumulating markers of the recent history of techno-capitalism. These various efforts to establish the liquid archives all necessitate radical adjustments in our perception of the moment when global flows meet climate change.
Everyday Surveillance: A Case Study of Student Information Systems
Featured Presentation: Professor William G. Staples
In my book, Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life (2014), I focus attention on the relatively mundane techniques of keeping a close watch on people – what I have dubbed the “Tiny Brothers” – that are increasingly present in the workplace, the school, the home and the community. I show how our bodies, behaviors and movements are being tracked by a host of public and private organizations – sometimes with our consent, sometimes without – through Internet use, cell phones, video cameras, credit cards, license plate readers, loyalty shopping cards, and more. One example of this phenomenon I highlight is internet-based student information systems (SIS) that offer students, parents, teachers and administrators immediate access to differentially detailed student profiles. Students can check their grades while parents can see if their child is in class, access assignments, and view a teacher’s grade book in “real-time”, while administrators can review student demographic data, behavior and disciplinary files, health records and family information, teachers’ comments to students and parents, and more. I will report on in-depth interviews with a sample of students, parents, teachers, and school administrators to derive accounts of how the SIS actually operates and how these participants experience life with an SIS. Interviewees report that the SIS increases communication among school stakeholders, while their responses suggest that in doing so the systems intensify the performance and behavior monitoring of students and encourages micro-level assessments of their everyday lives.
Eco-Diplomacy – Water Conservation/Protection at US Embassies Demonstrating Best Practices for a Sustainable Built Environment
Featured Presentation: Donna McIntire-Byrd
As segments of the world’s populations are increasingly impacted by water scarcity, the State Department is committed to conserving water resources and providing leadership in water resource protection at our embassies overseas. By reducing water demands on public systems and local groundwater, increasing water reuse on-site, and protecting water quality at our diplomatic and residential facilities, the United States sets an example and demonstrates best water practices that impact our host nations. Aligned with federal mandates, the Department aims to reduce potable water use in buildings and outdoors. To support this challenge, we routinely incorporate water-saving technologies and strategies into capital construction projects and major renovations. To optimize water use at existing facilities, we conduct comprehensive water audits at posts with high water use or at posts experiencing water shortages, and are planning new projects to reuse rainwater and treated wastewater effluent for landscape irrigation and for use within building systems. Three embassy case studies will be presented in this workshop: London, United Kingdom; Monrovia, Liberia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Through these case studies, participants will learn about best practices for water conservation and alternative water sources, such as rainwater and treated wastewater. After instructions on how to work toward a net-zero water solution, participants will use tools developed to enable architects and engineers to identify and evaluate water resources and balance them with development demands, working in teams to develop and present their solution to the group.
Statistics in the Cognitive/Risk Era: Bridging Knowledge, Solutions and Pathways to a Sustainable World
Featured Presentation: Dr Nathaniel Newlands
Humans interact with real and virtual ecosystems. Virtual (model and collaborative) ecosystems continue to expand in their knowledge, sophistication and influence in addressing increasingly complex situations and challenges involving real systems. Our world, however, continues to struggle with escalating inequality and insecurity, economic volatility, environmental resource scarcity and pollution, population growth, rapid urbanization, extreme weather, invasive species and political upheaval. Despite increasing global awareness of the urgency to address climate change and become more sustainable, societies continue to struggle in how best to transition to a low-carbon economy and take broader action aligned with sustainable development pathways. This is due to a complex array of trade-offs, varying uncertainties, changing inter-dependencies and unforeseen risks. Much of our knowledge is also domain-specific, relying strongly on historical observations of patterns and processes. To bridge this ‘knowledge-to-action’ divide, statistics has an increasingly critical role in unraveling the complexity of our world and how we construct reliable/flexible real-world solutions from interdisciplinary knowledge.
The talk will broadly cover the concept of ‘integrated risk’ and how it may transform our current sustainable development dialogue, enabling more informed action/s. Our collective ability to sustain ecosystems and our societies in the future, over the long-term, will involve a stronger symbiosis of human and machine intelligence (‘super-intelligent tools’ that support complex decision-making). Such tools are capable of transforming our current understanding and future capability to respond to anticipated/emergent extreme conditions and tipping-points (dynamical changes of a system’s state), in a coherent and informed way. Perspectives and recommendations on the broad application of statistics in addressing sustainable development challenges, drawing on my research within the food-water-energy nexus and agricultural sector (i.e., modeling of greenhouse-gas emissions, climate interpolation, operational forecasting, sensor-based monitoring networks, sustainability assessment), will be discussed.
Methodologies for the Collection of Comparative Community Level Public Health Data: Obtaining Powerful and Statistically Meaningful Findings for Small Populations
Featured Presentation: Professor James W. McNally
Recent health emergencies such as the ebola outbreak in 2015 and the current zika virus reflects the pressing need for the rapid and statistically meaningful collection of data, often within small geographic areas. The collection of public health data at the community level is challenging for a number of reasons. Building respondent trust and gaining local support are key, but even when these barriers are overcome the choice of questions and how they are asked is central to the success of a study and to its impact on health improvements and policy change. One of the common problems found in many community level studies is the lack of comparability and the inability to generalize findings beyond the study area. While interesting and useful information is often obtained, translating this information into a framework that facilitates policy impact often proves difficult due to a lack of comparability. The NACDA Program on Aging has been promoting a methodology for overcoming the challenges of generalizability and comparability that has been successfully employed in several small area studies of public health and healthcare unitization. The presentation will describe this methodology and provide examples of its efficacy in real-world research situations. The presentation will provide supporting materials to guide interested users in applying this approach for their own research specializations. This approach is flexible and works across languages and research disciplines so it can be applied in a variety of public health studies, including RAPID AREA ANALYSIS (RAP) situations.
“It is Happening Again”: Re-imagining in Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks
Spotlight Presentation: Dr Richard Donovan
In the early 1990s, David Lynch, film director, and Mark Frost, creator of The X-Files, collaborated on the groundbreaking television series Twin Peaks. Though it only ran for two seasons and a feature film, Twin Peaks has become a cult classic, even credited with ushering in the “golden age” of multilayered, longform audiovisual narrative that currently plays out in many drama series on the small screen. Its fanbase is responsible for the upcoming 2017 revival of the TV series, but in the interim, Mark Frost has written a book entitled The Secret History of Twin Peaks, both to (re)contextualise the series’ prior manifestations and to prepare for its return. This paper explores the almost unprecedented intertextuality and intermediality of Frost’s printed text and the corresponding audiobook version, delineating the space that these works occupy in the Twin Peaks universe and their possible implications both for the upcoming TV series and for the boundaries of narrative fiction itself.
Pushing European Boundaries Towards East and West: Gulliver in Japan and America
Partner Presentation: Professor Ljiljana Markovic & Professor Biljana Djoric Francuski
Worldwide, in the East as well as in the West, one character has become a part of everybody’s childhood, regardless of ethnicity, national or cultural belongings, age and status. The fame of Lemuel Gulliver has survived from the early eighteenth century until today, outlasting many other fictitious protagonists in world literature, making Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels a real classic. At the mention of Gulliver’s name, it is immediately and inseparably associated in everyone’s mind with his travels to Lilliput, an imaginary land. However, two out of four of his journeys are destined for landscapes that are not at all imagined or imaginary. This is a lesser-known fact, just like certain details concerning the life of Gulliver’s creator, Swift, above all that he was born in Dublin, though of English origin, and was even ordained in the Church of Ireland. This factor is very significant, since being the Other in his own life certainly helped Swift supply such extreme examples of the Other in his magnificent work. The meaning of otherness in Gulliver’s Travels does not refer only to the size of the people he encounters, but also to the fact that they belong to other races and ethnicities. It is the purpose of this paper to shed light on otherness in environments at the opposite ends of the world from Europe – Japan in the farthest East and America in the farthest West – in order to prove that this absolute openness to the Other has greatly contributed to Swift’s supreme value that persists to this very day.
IDFA Conference Screening
As part of The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication (MediAsia), each year IAFOR hosts the IAFOR Documentary Film Award & Festival (IDFA).
The quality of submissions to our annual competition and the power behind these documentaries has been extremely impressive. The IDFA’s mission is to recognize and support documentarians in their efforts to expose truths and bring attention to the world’s untold stories.
IAFOR would like to honor the winners of the IDFA open competition with a series of screenings to be featured at our academic conferences throughout the year. Registered Delegates are invited to attend these screenings at no additional charge. IDFA screenings feature some of the most interesting and compelling documentaries relevant to the theme and spirit of our conferences. Please join us in celebrating the masterful work these documentarians have produced.
IDFA Screening Schedule:
(Screening Time(s) & Date(s) TBD)
The IAFOR Documentary Photography Award – 2016 Winners Screening
The IAFOR Documentary Photography Award is an international photography award which seeks to promote and assist in the professional development of emerging documentary photographers and photojournalists.
The Award is supported by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) and builds off of the strength of the IAFOR Documentary Film Award, now in its fifth year. Documentary has a rich history of exposing truths, telling stories, raising awareness and creating discussion — all practices valued at IAFOR.
Our 2016 award was judged by a panel of leading professionals in the field of documentary photography and photojournalism, including Paul Lowe, Simon Roberts and Ed Kashi.
Winners were announced at The European Conference on Arts & Humanities in Brighton, England. The Award followed the theme of the conference, with 2016’s theme being “Justice”
In supporting upcoming talent, the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award is free to enter.
All delegates receive free entry to the award screening.
Special Screening
The Greatest Gift
A shared ambition for change, transformation and social justice was the catalyst for IAFOR Media and HOPE International Development Agency, Japan to document the lives and stories of the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines and their struggle to achieve equity in education.
The Greatest Gift was made as part of a fundraising effort to create scholarships for the Pamulaan Center for Indigenous Peoples Education in Davao, Philippines. Hance Pugales is a first year student at the Pamulaan Center and The Greatest Gift follows her story as we learn of the ambitions and challenges of the IP youth.
A full-length documentary which further expands upon the lives of the IPs and the Pamulaan Center is currently in production.
Conference Outline
The final draft of the conference schedule is now available.
Click to download as a PDF
Please Check & Confirm
Please check that all information pertaining to you is correct
and notify us at north_american_conferences@iafor.org if there is any error.
Please notify us of any corrections by Wednesday, December 14, 09:00 (Hawaii Standard Time)
Final Schedule
After minor changes have been made to the schedule we will send you a link to the full programme.
The full programme will contain session information and a detailed day-to-day presentation schedule (including room allocations and session chairs).
This will be available on Wednesday, December 21.
Abstracts will also be available online at this time.
Thursday, January 5, 2017
09:15-09:30 Announcements and Welcome Address
09:30-10:00 Featured Presentation
Methodologies for the Collection of Comparative Community Level Public Health Data: Obtaining Powerful and Statistically Meaningful Findings for Small Populations
James W. McNally, University of Michigan & National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), United States
10:00-10:45 Featured Presentation
Statistics in the Cognitive/Risk Era: Bridging Knowledge, Solutions and Pathways to a Sustainable World
Nathaniel Newlands, University of Victoria, Canada
10:45-11:15 Coffee Break
11:15-12:00 Keynote Presentation
Liquid Archives
Jaimey Hamilton Faris, University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States
12:00-12:15 IAFOR Documentary Film Award
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-14:15 Keynote Presentation
Student Information Systems: Infrastructures of Communication, Accountability, and Surveillance
William Staples, University of Kansas, United States
Argun Saatcioglu Saatcioglu, University of Kansas, United States
14:30-15:30 Conference Poster Session
15:45-16:45 Lecture Recital on Works of George Rochberg
Stephanie Meyers, University of Texas – El Paso, United States
18:00-19:30: Conference Welcome Reception
Friday, January 6, 2017
09:00-10:30: Parallel Sessions
10:30-10:45: Break
10:45-12:45: Parallel Sessions
12:45-13:45: Lunch Break
13:45-15:15: Parallel Sessions
15:15-15:30: Break
15:30-17:00: Parallel Sessions
17:10-17:15: Break
17:15-18:15: Featured Workshop Presentation
Eco-Diplomacy – Water Conservation/Protection at Us Embassies Demonstrating Best Practices for a Sustainable Built Environment
Donna McIntire-Byrd, United States Department of State, United States
19:00-21:00: Conference Dinner (Optional Extra)
Saturday, January 7, 2017
09:00-10:30: Parallel Sessions
10:30-10:45: Break
10:45-12:45: Parallel Sessions
12:45-13:45: Lunch Break
13:45-15:15: Parallel Sessions
15:15-15:30: Break
15:30-16:00: Conference Closing Address