Northeastern Voice

Conference gathers on "common ground"

Faculty from around the globe have come together to think about a "set of ideas ... which demand to be understood in a cross-disciplinary way."

The charge to an interdisciplinary conference audience came from University of Illinois professor Bill Cope, director of Common Ground, an organization dedicated to creating "new forms of knowledge community" and a more open peer-review process.

"You will be referees of each other's work" coming out of the fourth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society, Cope promised conference-goers.

Northeastern Provost Ahmed Abdelal, who brought the greetings of President Joseph Aoun to the Friday morning opening session in the Curry Student Center ballroom, took up the theme of "common ground."

Academe as well as popular culture too often focuses on "how people differ," Abdelal said. But Northeastern, with its focus on interdisciplinary research, "emphasize(s) common ground."

And, he suggested, if more global factions sought such understanding, "peace could break out."

Jody Berland, associate professor of humanities at York University in Toronto, delivered the opening talk, a study of "small animals, small machines and contemporary consumers." She examined how, often, animals are used to promote communications technology.

"There is no more accessible symbol in the universe than the morphology of animals," she said, "Animals can represent "freedom ... unencumbered by thought," Berland said.

She also discussed the youthful "culture of display" involving new communications technology, and lamented the "two things lost" to such technology: "freedom and silence."

She was followed by David Matheson, philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. The conference was slated to breawk into smaller group discusses and talks over the weekend.

Marcus Breen, associate professor of communication studies and a member of the advisory board for the three-day conference, emceed the event.

Faculty signed up to attend the conference came from Australia, Austria, the British Virgin Islands, Canada, China, Congo, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden Taiwan Thailand, Turkey, the United States and Venezuela.

(In photo: Professor Jody Berland)

For video from the conference opening, see: http://www.neu.edu/voice/evoice/article1-video.html.