Panel Statement
Chair Person: Seeta Peña Gangadharan
Presenters: Jon Leidecker, Joshua Kit Clayton, John Kim, Anthony Tran & Vasily Trubetskoy
Working across the arts, music, and politics, this panel considers the dynamics of power in mediated participation. Borrowing its title from the work of Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, who questioned the legitimacy of participatory development projects led by the World Bank and other inter-governmental bodies, this panel addresses the unintended consequences of, and the power struggles in, collaborative music platforms, social networks, wireless infrastructures and open government initiatives. The purpose is to explore the construction and valuation of participatory discourses, designs, or experiences and challenge received wisdom of participation’s power. When does the discourse of participation mask power? Who has actual versus perceived authority? How do bottom-up, collaborative-based, leveled social, cultural, and political experiments create new inequalities?
- Seeta Peña Gangadharan recently completed a Ph.D in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, US. She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her dissertation interrogates conventional theories and designs for public participation in communication policymaking. She has secondary research interests in the cultural history of communication technologies. She has also worked with advocacy and activist groups, including Center for Media Justice, Public Knowledge, Media Alliance, and Prometheus Radio Project.