Problematics with Required Use of Intercultural Email Between Faculty and Students in Canadian Universities

13 October 2005

11:30am – 1:00pm
MacCorry B313
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario

Valerie Ashford

Students and faculty in Canadian universities are required to use the Internet in the course of their academic work, which can include registration, research, documentation, conference proposals, and submission of papers. Individual email use is often a component of such work; epistolary, voice-to-voice, and face-to-face communications between students and faculty are discouraged. Students are not permitted to exempt themselves from email, regardless of their first language. In Canada, however, the ideology of multiculturalism has not yet remotely inflected the way we approach email. Tim Jordan (1999) points out that embedded in cyberspaces technology is a bias towards English [which has] led to the cultural domination of cyberspace by English languages...". At this point there is simply no research into the ways in which faculty 'read' email from second language students and colleagues, although much anecdotal evidence suggests that L2 emailers are disadvantaged in a myriad number of ways by the interpretations of their L1 audiences. The question is, are the now-embedded practices of email exchange in any way discriminatory to students and faculty whose first language is not English?

Surveillance and Resistance on blogosphere in China

17 November 2005

11:30am – 1:00pm
MacCorry B313

Wei Liu
M.A. candidate, Department of Sociology
Queen's University

This project would look at how bloggers, State, and other actants construct the power relationship of surveillance and resistance on blogoshpere in China. Blogging has become a popular online activity in the world wide. By April 2005, there had been 2 million blogs in existence in China. Compared to traditional media, it is spontaneous, independent, and much more individualized. Thus it has been empowering individuals in the sense that the voices from individuals get to be heard by the public in countries where
the freedom of speech is limited. Thus the antagonism between bloggers and the State is created. The censorship over weblogs and their bloggers becomes a significant part of
internet control in China. Bloggers are also taking actions to defend themselves from the censorship. Because internet and blogging is without boundaries, the efforts of either the censorship or the resistance are also situated in the context of globalization.