Conference Overview

Conference Welcome

For the first time, the UDC conference will be held in Vancouver, Canada, hosted by Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication; co-sponsors include SFU’s Institute for the Humanities and Faculty of Applied Sciences, the British Columbia Library Association and the Union for Democratic Communications.

The conference will be held at SFU’s downtown campus, with easy access to various activities throughout the city.

Conference Themes

The theme for this year's meeting is 'Enclosure, Emancipatory Communication and the Global City'. The keynote address will be delivered by Professor Saskia Sassen. Prof. Sassen is the Lynd professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a member of The Committee on Global Thought, after a decade at the University of Chicago and London School of Economics. She is the author of The Global City (1991, second edition 2001). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006) and A Sociology of Globalization. (Norton 2007). She has now completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [http://www.eolss.net ]. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, and The Financial Times, among others.

Other featured speakers include Dan Schiller, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Dorothy Kidd and Dee Dee Halleck.

The field of culture and communication manifests struggles between contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, pressures from capital and state sometimes promote various forms of enclosure — the private appropriation, suppression or marginalization of socially-produced public expression. Enclosure comes in many guises: the commodification of information; concentration and hyper-commercialism in media industries; the corporatization of universities; restrictive "intellectual property" regimes; or market authoritarianism as a mode of governance.

On the other hand, progressive forces, from artists and academics to broad social movements, are not only resisting such enclosure, but developing practices and policies that prefigure emancipation — new ways of re-organizing culture and communication democratically. These include struggles over alternative media, state cultural policies, communication rights, reform of media and cultural institutions, audience empowerment, urban public space, and much else.

These forces of enclosure and emancipation increasingly come together in the global city, a site which stands at the nexus of changing national cultures and policies, of transnational migrations and markets, of media flows and audiences, and of consumption and surveillance.

We invite you to join us in discussing these themes at the 2007 conference of the Union for Democratic Communication. The conference opens with a Thursday evening reception on October 25, will feature two full days of presentation, discussion and interaction with local activist and artistic groups concerned with democratizing communication. A keynote address by Saskia Sassen will be delivered on Friday evening and the conference wraps up with a dinner/dance on Saturday, October 27. The conference also coincides with Vancouver's annual Media Democracy Day, featuring an Independent Media Fair at the city's public library.

Location

Promoted as a world-class city since the late 1970s, Vancouver has become one of Canada's top vacation, trade and real estate centres. The subject of intense urban regeneration through the past two decades, the downtown area now boasts a population density higher than Manhattan and an urban lifestyle known by municipal planners internationally as 'Vancouverism'. With its coastal locations between the mountains and ocean, the city is valued for its beautiful setting and ease of access to an array of outdoor activities. It hosts a significant media industry, including the multi-billion dollar 'Hollywood North', various domestic firms and video game programming facilities.

But the region's 2.1 million residents constitute a diverse population, often at odds with the city's glamorous international image. Vancouver houses Canada's poorest postal code, making the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood a testing ground for new policy and planning initiatives as well as a site of social contestation. The city has witnessed intense debate over issues ranging from safe drug injection sites to media concentration, environmental policy and aboriginal rights to the successful bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Vancouver was the birthplace of Greenpeace in 1970, held North America's largest annual Walk for Peace through the 1980s, is home to a strong trade union movement and has developed an exciting alternative media movement, ranging from community based initiatives to international publications.

All of this makes Vancouver a fitting place in which to examine key questions around democracy, communication and the global city, from the corporate enclosure of public space to the movements that contest it, developing alternative practices and institutions of democratic communication.

SFU’s Local Organizing Committee

  • Alison Beale (co-chair)
  • Chris Bodnar
  • Shane Gunster
  • Bob Hackett (co-chair)
  • Dal Yong Jin
  • Yuezhi Zhao

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