The Department of Communication Arts invites faculty, staff, and students to the Fall Communication Speaks! colloquium, featuring Dr. Sarah Klein and Dr. Anders Bergstrom.
Sarah Klein
Play It Again: Methods of Repetition in the Laboratory
This project brings together performance studies and STS (science and technolgy studies) to consider the replication crisis in psychology and cognitive science. Well-publicized effects like the “power pose” and stereotype threat seem to be falling left and right, and so-called open science and credibility revolutions are picking up institutional and infrastructural steam. Examining reproducibility rhetoric clarifies the risks and opportunities of this moment for the humanities and qualitative social sciences. This talk begins by analyzing criticisms of the recently debunked Stanford Prison Experiment - criticisms which characterize the SPE as theatre or as performance art in opposition to true science. I argue that opposing theatre to science is misguided. Drawing on examples of methods of repetition in history of science and in everyday lab practices in cognitive science, I argue that we should think about science in general and replication in particular through performance and theatricality, not against them.
Anders Bergstrom
The Californian Ideology in Contemporary Media
In a 1996 essay, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron described “The Californian Ideology”: “a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.” However, the ethos of the Californian Ideology predates the Silicon Valley boom and its trace can be seen in earlier movements like the Human Potential Movement and the Esalen Institute. Self-improvement forms the core of this faith that has driven the transformations of society in the late-twentieth and into the early-twenty-first century. This project aims to articulate the role that Californian Ideology has played in the making of our contemporary political moment through images and media texts, revealing how broad the scope of the Californian Ideology’s impact is through the normalization of its particular vision of social and individual transformation.