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Contemporary Communication Issues. Part B

Thursday, 14 July 2016: 09:00-10:30
Location: Hörsaal 23 (Main Building)
RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture (host committee)

Language: English

When the war on terror (WOT) was declared after Al Qaeda’s spectacular 2001 attacks some predicted that it would lead to several dystopian effects. This session is devoted to paper presentations that assess these predictions and the possibilities of more favorable outcomes. 
Potential topics: 

• Critique of the WOT as a mode of power and domination, as Western hegemony, as US dominance; 
• Cultural analysis of the WOT as biopolitics, neoliberalism, and elite political communication; 
• Outcomes such as endless war, more frequent interventions around the world, more frequent campaigns of high-tech homicide bombings and drone warfare; 
• More cycles of “terror” and “counter-terrorism” and the emergence of police-states; an intensification of surveillance and securitization, of individuals and populations, oppositional groups, domestic threats to democracy; 
• Perversion of the social and psychological sciences and the abandonment of its critical function, the reduction of social scientists to an adjunctive, auxiliary role in the WOT as “terrorism” or “counterterrorism” experts, narrowing the objects of knowledge, stigmatizing the enemies of Empire; 
• More utopian consequences; a radical intensification of democracy, a new birth of emancipatory politics, a reduction in political violence, new forms of democracy, etc.
Session Organizer:
Michael BLAIN, Boise State University, Sociology, USA
Posters:
Accountability, the War on Terror, and U.S. Police Criminal Intelligence Units
Joseph DEANGELIS, University of Idaho, USA; Brian WOLF, University of Idaho, USA
Emerging Communication Technologies: Cutting Across Nation-State Boundaries
Joane SERRANO, UP Open University, Philippines; Sherry MARASIGAN, University of the Philippines Los Banos, Philippines
The POWER of Knowledge: A Threat in Making a Better WORLD
Abhas GANDA, Central University of Gujarat, India