Arts and Humanities Colloquium Series -- "I Was Never Here: Stories of Media and Belonging" by Ravindra Mohabeer, Media Studies Department

add to outlook add to google calendar remind me

Friday, March 15th, 2019
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Our lives are increasingly digitized. If you Googled yourself, what would you find? How did it get there and what does it say about you? More and more, media are everywhere, and we leave traces of ourselves as we use the various media that intersect our lives. Yet a wise elementary principal once told a gym full of parents, “for those whose focus is on recording the event, do not get in the way of those who want to actually be here.” Media often provide what Joshua Meyerowitz (1986) described as ‘no sense of place;’ where we are physically present but carried away through our imaginations and asked to believe that we are somewhere else or someone else entirely. However, even when that belief tends to linger, it is not always restricted to acts of fantasy. With the use of things like ‘social media,’ we are constantly encouraged to groom how others experience us through media, and we are regularly asked to create a type of presence that is at once ‘real’ and imagined.

Dr. Ravindra Mohabeer has been a professor at VIU since 2009. He has taught courses on digital media and communication; game theory; television; and propaganda, persuasion and promotion. His intellectual interest is in how people use media in everyday life and how this becomes a major basis of culture. After receiving an M.A. from Simon Fraser University, Dr. Mohabeer went on to earn a Ph.D. from York University in 2006. He has published a number of refereed articles and made many conference presentations based on his research.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities presents the Arts and Humanities Colloquium Series six times between September and April. Our talks are free and open to the public. Please join us at 9:30 in the theatre lobby for coffee, tea, cookies, and conversation.

https://ah.viu.ca/colloquium-series