Student Moderator: Alexei Angelides
Faculty Respondent: Paolo Carpignano
(Doctor in Letters, University of Rome); Core Faculty, Media Studies
Mr. Carpignano is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology of The Graduate Faculty and the author of Crisis and Workers' Organization and The Formation of the Mass Worker in the USA, as well as numerous articles on international communications.

PANEL:

Sean Jacobs
Mediating Manenberg in the Post-Apartheid Public Sphere
(Click here to download paper)

Abstract: Through examining media coverage of a severe windstorm in Manenberg, Cape Town in August 1999, this paper explores the relation between changing notions of power in the public sphere, citizenship and the defining role of media in a post-apartheid South African city. Manenberg has become synonymous with township life in South Africa. This paper suggests that a focus on this event, known popularly as the "Manenberg Tornado," provides a helpful entry point for studying the social construction of township residents as mediated through the imaginary of Manenberg. It will also show how this process impacts public policy and changes the nature of politics, in both the grassroots movement within the township itself and on a national scale. Taking a look at some of the ways in which both the city and the public sphere are being reinvented, this analysis reflects how Manenberg has been conceptualized through mass media, paying particular attention to coverage of the windstorm as a case study of this process.

Hatice Naz Sarman
Mediated Spaces: An Inquiry into the Transformation of Public Space and its Effects on Public Debate and Participation
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Abstract: Past discussions on media and public opinion have targeted the distracting effects of the world of images on public debate and participation. However, few efforts have focused on exploring how people's public participation may have continued and transformed in conjunction to the changing nature of politics. This paper suggests that the relationship between media and space, and its effects on individuals' perceptions of the public may be one useful way of exploring the changing nature of public participation. The presenter will reflect on how the modern architectural and technological forms that construct spectatorial environments in social space have resulted in an individualized, fragmented type in perceiving public issues. Furthermore, this paper will explore how the hypermediated type of presentation in cyberspace has expanded this form of perception while at the same time creating a potential for different forms of participation.

Joseph Varga
Rational Texts and Public Space: Reform Presentation in Progressive Era New York, 1905-1914
(Click here to download paper)

Abstract: This paper examines the efforts of Progressive Era reformers in New York City to create a rationalized public sphere through the use of statistical information. It looks at the relationship between New York's financial and social elites and the new class of professional experts (e.g., social workers, social scientists, rational reformers), and the ways in which this coalition attempted to use the compilation of "objective" information to form an idealized public sphere. The presenter will examine in detail the work of the Bureau of Municipal Research (BMR), an urban reform organization, that utilized a variety of media to promote their ideas concerning rational citizenship through the use of statistical compilation in order to promote their ideas of abundance, consumption and rational political participation. In an urban environment where physical space was fiercely contested terrain, the BMR sought to create a textual space where ideas of reform, professionalism and middle class expertise would create an idealized public sphere based on scientific rationality.