‘Transparency’ From Transgression to Common Sense -With Notes on the Role of Technology

Description

Free and open to all but ONLINE REGISTRATION is required.

Apologies for the last minute changes but this Lecture will start at 12.00pm (instead of 10.am) and the new venue will be Seminar room B4 in Criminology (find location here)

 

Public Lecture: 
'Michael Schudson (University of Columbia)
 

Abstract

A broad set of reforms in the US to make political and social life more transparent came to fruition between 1966 and 1975 — but each for different reasons. Why did greater openness seem at that time the best solution to such disparate concerns as the legislature's effort to rein in the executive, the desire of liberal members of Congress to get out from under the stranglehold of Southern Democratic committee chairs, or the effort to reduce growing damages to the environment? (Is technology in any way a part of the answer? No. But the absence of technologies that have since become so much a part of our lives may have led to reforms that today seem cumbersome and antiquated.)

 

Biography

Michael Schudson grew up in Milwaukee, Wisc. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1980 and at the University of California, San Diego from 1980 to 2009. From 2005 on, he split his teaching between UCSD and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, becoming a full-time member of the Columbia faculty in 2009.
He is the author of six books and editor of two others concerning the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, Watergate and cultural memory. He is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow. In 2004, he received the Murray Edelman distinguished career award from the political communication section of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association.
Schudson's articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Financial Times, and The San Diego Union.

 

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Part of The Politics and Paradoxes of Transparency, Research Group series
Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk