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January 20, 2005
Leslie Regan Shade
LRS is an Associate Professor at Concordia University’s Department of Communication Studies. Her research focus since the mid-1990’s has been on the social, policy, and ethical aspects of information and communication technologies (ICTs), with particular concerns towards issues of gender, globalization, and political economy. Her book Gender and Community in the Social Construction of the Internet (Peter Lang, 2002), looked at how corporate interests have attempted to shape a ‘women’s net’, in contrast to the use of the internet by diverse women and women’s groups for purposes of activism and social justice. Other book chapters and journal articles have also drawn on a political economic focus, including critiques of media concentration in Canada, trade and culture debates exacerbated by the WTO, the revised discourse of modernization in the G-8 led ‘Dot Force’ debates, communication rights and the role of civil society groups in shaping a human- rights agenda, gender and technological design, the insertion of gender analyses into Canadian ICT policies and programs, and the commodification of children’s online communities. The focus of her current and proposed research deals broadly in the social and policy implications of ICTs. Children, Youth and New Media in the Home (2002 -05) aims to provide an ethnographic perspective on how children and young people are using the new media in their everyday domestic lives, while the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN, 2003-06) project is an ambitious collaborative partnership amongst academic researchers in Canada, international researchers in community informatics, the three principal federal government departments promoting the “Connecting Canadians” agenda, and community networking practitioners in Canada whose substantive goal is to review the progress of community-based ICT development in the context of Canadian government programs promoting the development and public accessibility of internet services. She is the current President of the Canadian Communication Association and the book review editor for the Canadian Journal of Communication.
Posted by shade at January 20, 2005 01:48 PM