Fields of Communication: Nature, Culture and Technology

MPhil/PhD students from the School of Communication invite you to Fields of Communication: Nature, Culture and Technology — a PhD postgraduate one-day research symposium focused on the diversity and interconnectivity of communication. Through our research, we find overlapping discussions not only about the processes of cross-cultural dialogues, but also debates in which the centrality of language to the modeling of the world is being displaced. As our personal intentions reach a broader community of researchers, in environments where the impregnation of media and technological change is commonplace, questions about the means and materials of telling, writing, and translating, are hard to ignore. We ask: Are these activities a chain of competences, or abilities, that enable communication? Or are they the product of media technology? Furthermore, our inquiries also raise questions about the very nature of communication: How has the essence of what is being communicated changed, if at all? What effect does language and media have upon information as it is being shared through a variety of modalities? At what point and how, does a story, a place, a person, an object, become something other? These and other questions provide a basis for what promises to be an insightful and lively discussion on research in the broader field of communication.