Informatics Conference to Tackle Global ICT Challenges

A noted Colombian anthropologist is among several specialists who will share their views about the globalization of information and communications technologies (ICT) at an upcoming U.S. conference hosted by the Indiana University School of Informatics (IU; Bloomington, IN, USA).

Dr. Arturo Escobar, distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (USA), is the keynote speaker at "Informatics Goes Global: Methods at a Crossroads,” held on March 3-5, 2006. Prof. Escobar and IU Interim Provost and professor of informatics Dr. Michael A. McRobbie will speak at the opening plenary session on March 3. "Dr. Escobar will describe specific place-based ICT practices of difference which, via politics, embrace the virtuality of current social and ecological life and also foster different approaches to globality,” said informatics professor and conference organizer Dr. David Hakken. "Aiming at more desirable worlds, such practices can show us how informatics can escape the limits of its history, while they also help us separate more from less intelligent ways to talk about globalization.”

Among the other topics and issues to be covered in the conference's scientific program are rights and property in the digital era, funding global informatics research, and the global transfer of computing technology.

"This conference reflects the school's desire and goal to place itself at the forefront of international research in the new informatics approach to broadening the uses of information technology,” said Dr. Hakken, a cultural anthropologist who recently returned from Malaysia where he studied open-source software development and advocacy. Dr. Hakken researches cyberspace issues and leads the School of Informatics' new globalization committee.



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