Fifth Annual Emerging Scholars Conference Programme

INNOVATION AND ITS CONTESTANTS

Keynote Address

Keith Moxey, Barbara Novak Professor of Art History and Department Chair at Barnard College (Columbia University): “Imagining Time: The Temporality of Art’s History”

Innovation is a buzzword with remarkable contemporary currency, one frequently instrumentalized in the constant search for new technologies, means of production, market adaptations, scientific discoveries and social changes. With its more insidious applications in mind, a number of recent academic discussions – from visual culture studies and the global art history to the history of science and media archaeology – have come to treat the paradigm with caution, even scepticism. Yet at the same time, for better or for worse, it remains implicit within the bulk of humanistic academic production. This one-day interdisciplinary symposium thus confronts innovation at a crossroads. It interrogates its place within theory and praxis by asking: How are we best to approach and define innovation in contemporary academic discourses? Is the paradigm purely a means of disarming social pressure for an all-inclusive equalized prosperity; or might it be recuperated to provide a stimulus for sustainable growth? Can we understand innovation in a broader global spectrum without falling into the trap of cultural essentialism; or does this concept perpetuate Western-centric views and mores? Can the concept of innovation be used for the analysis of historical periods; or does it figure too easily in teleological narratives?

PROGRAMME:
9:00 – 9:30 am
Coffee and refreshments

9:30 – 9:40 am
Welcome and opening remarks

9:40 – 11:00 am
Panel 1: Innovation and Resistive Technologies – Chair: Molly Sauter

Joshua A. Braun (Assistant Professor of Interactive Media, Quinnipiac University), “'Bypassing the Web:' Shell Users and Alternative Experiences of the Internet"

Daniel Browne (PhD Candidate, York and Ryerson Universities), "'The Singularity is Near,' Or Is It? Techno-Gnosticism and the Politics of Eschatology"

Lee Vinsel (Assistant Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology), "Dropping the I-Word: Business Historians and the History of a Concept"

11:00 – 11:20 am
Break

11:20 – 12:40 pm
Panel 2: What’s New? Innovative Art and Design – Chair: Frances Cullen

Jessica Poon (PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia), "Provincial Imitation or Canadian Innovation? Confronting New York’s 'Influence' on Toronto Abstract Painting and the Painters Eleven in the 1950s"

Hugh Govan (PhD Candidate, University of Essex), "Anachronism and Environment: Towards a Concept of the Baroque in Post-Minimal Art"

Cheryl Thompson (PhD Candidate, McGill University), "From the Barbershop to the Front Page: Canada’s Black Beauty Innovators and the Community Newspapers that Made Them"

12:40 – 1:30 pm
Lunch

1:30 – 2:50 pm
Panel 3: Conditions of Innovativeness – Chair: Samine Tabatabaei

Marina Merlo (PhD Candidate, Université de Montréal), “CNN iReport and the Problems with the Rhetoric of Innovation for Citizen Journalism”

Etienne Turpin (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Wollongong), "Open Source City Project (Jakarta Pilot Study): Innovations for Urban Resilience from a GeoSocial Intelligence Perspective"

Basak Durgun (PhD Candidate, George Mason University) and Keil Eggers (BA Student, George Mason University), "Colonizing Curriculum: The Aesthetic of Innovation in Higher Education"

2:50 – 3:10 pm
Break

3:10 – 4:30 pm
Panel 4: Spaces of Change? – Chair: Danijela Zutic

Frederika Eilers (PhD Candidate, McGill University), "Modernism in Miniature: Modern Vernacular Architecture (1915 – 1937) and Kitchen Technologies (1928 – 1937) of Schoenhut Dollhouses"

Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute), "Medievalism as Progress? The Case of 19th Century Cairo"

Noelle Belanger (PhD Candidate, University of Illinois), "American Moon: Picturing Imperialism in Outer Space in the Nineteenth Century"

4:30 – 5:00 pm
Break

5:00 – 6:30 pm
KEYNOTE SPEECH
KEITH MOXEY, “Imagining Time: The Temporality of Art’s History” Closing Remarks

ABSTRACT: In the context of renewed attention to the phenomenological presence of the image and its ability to determine the nature of its reception, this talk focuses on its time. What is the time of the work of art? How does it make time? We will discuss the consequences for the history of art of an approach that acknowledges the anachrony of our relation to the past in the face of a continuing need for chronology.

6:30 – 8:30 pm
Reception

CONTACT:
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