Event overview
In order to critically interrogate the historical relationship between human need and 'resource-first' ideologies, modes, and models of social development, this paper seeks to mobilise the seemingly obscure project that was the Grenfell Mission of Newfoundland and Labrador, located on the easternmost coast of the North American continent. The Grenfell Mission is a particularly engaging example of the ways in which a site of human need can be made open to outside intervention and adaptation. What the stakes are of thinking about the practice of communication, the state of need, and their constitutive relationship to mediating technologies, revolve around assessing the mediations to which such resource-rich regions are subject, from the just to the unjust and the exploitative to the cooperative.
Drawing on the work of Canadian political economist and communications theorist Harold Innis, I will ultimately bring to bear a wide conception of ‘media’ on the politics of living in this rural community in Newfoundland and Labrador. Based on field research undertaken in St. Anthony, my study of these new forms of industry and labour will also be a position taking in what could be thought of as the field-in-process of mediation studies. Thinking at length on what can constitute an unconventional medium, especially in increasingly marginal rural settings that support larger systems of economic power, resource exploitation and monopolies of centralized information, it will constitute an attempt to draw attention to the temporal and relational mediations that the fight over natural resources can reveal. Icebergs, as experiments in form, tourist commodities, circulating natural resources, and the harbingers of a new local economic sustainability, are precisely a contemporary example of those contested new media. The town of St. Anthony is at the forefront of the potable water debate and its attendant forms of labour, and reveals the next frontier in the race for the world’s no longer renewable resources. The fate of these remote and increasingly marginal regions of the world is bound up with the pressing relationships we can begin to build between the extraction of natural resources, environmental concerns, and physical and social infrastructures as active forms of media that can intervene into the ideological and material shapes these regions can take.
Rafico Ruiz is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies and the History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Cultural Studies from McGill University, and a Masters degree in French Cultural Studies from Columbia University. His dissertation examines the Grenfell Mission of Newfoundland and Labrador as a project of social reform, with a particular focus on its relevance for the historical and cultural relations between space, time, and technologies that helps us to situate and site contemporary problems of mediation. He is also the co-editor and co-founder of SEACHANGE, a journal of Art, Communication, and Technology (http://www.seachangejournal.ca).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 May 2012 | 5:30pm - 6:30pm |
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