Greetings!
I'm happy to announce that the registration to attend the Discerning Diverse Voices Symposium on March 1st is now open. This event is FREE to attend and HYBRID (offered both online and in person) to promote inclusive opportunities for attendance. If you plan to attend in either modality, please register here, or follow the link on our website where you can find more information about the conference, including registration information.
Theme: Under Observation: The Conditions of "Being Seen"
This year's theme invites participants to engage with the politics, mechanisms, and modalities of visibility/invisibility as they relate to diversity (broadly defined) in the modern information, communication and media landscapes. We have an exciting mix of papers and pre-constituted panels that explore different aspects of this theme and broadly connect across disciplines related to information, communication, library science, media studies, and advertising/public relations.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Melissa Villa-Nicholas
We are excited to announce Dr. Melissa Villa-Nicholas (University of Rhode Island) as our esteemed keynote speaker. Her talk, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry to "Know" Immigrants investigates the emerging state of borderland technology that brings all people into an intimate place of surveillance where data resides and defines inclusion and exclusion to citizenship. Dr. Villa-Nicholas is the author of Latinas On the Line: Invisible Labor in Telecommunications (2022) and Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building and Industry Around Immigrant Data (2023). The keynote will take place from 11:00am- 12:30pm CST.
A hybrid event!
As mentioned, the symposium is a hybrid event this year. This means that all paper and panel sessions, including the keynote, will be meeting face-to-face at in the UA Student Center Meeting rooms, and will simultaneously be streamed online for participation remotely. You may attend these events in either modality (or mix and match!), but you will need to register online for the symposium to receive the your virtual login information and instructions to access the event site.
Poster Session:
For those folks on campus, we will be exhibiting research posters all day at the symposium with a poster session held to provide an opportunity for mingling with the presenters. This is the only fully face-to-face part of the activities, and I hope that folks on campus can fully take advantage of this.
Please refer to the website for details of the conference, information about accessibility, and the full program schedule (to be shared soon).
Please share this announcement widely! We look forward to seeing you all there!
Sincerely,
Miriam Sweeney (Symposium Co-chair, with Alyx Vesey)
*Students interested in making an advising appointment, please use this link to schedule: https://calendly.com/mesweeney1/officehours