The nature of media has significantly altered, with repeated calls to look beyond narrow accounts of nineteenth and twentieth century media, to recognize the complexity, breadth, depth, divergent social functions of media environments, infrastructures, social practices, formats, and technologies. In particular, the area of mobile communication offers a wealth of examples that prompt us to engage in such fundamental rethinking of media. In this talk, Professor Gerard Goggin provides a perspective on mobile communication and contemporary media, the ferment in the research field and its theories, its politics and policy coordinates, via the emerging area of disability media studies. He argues that the social and cultural movements of disability and critical disability research (as they intersect with other categories and movements) offer new ways of understanding societies and media. To illustrate his talk, Professor Goggin will draw on two case studies in the area of emergent mobile communication and media: the mobile phone as haptic media; and driverless cars as communication.
Professor Gerard Goggin is Professor of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, studying disability, digital technology, and human rights, and with a longstanding interest in Internet histories. He is currently working on two related books from this project, Reimagining Mobile Communicationand Communication Rights after Disability: Global Media Policy, Human Rights, and Digital Technology. Other publications include Digital Disability(2003; with Christopher Newell) and Disability and the Media(2015; with Katie Ellis).