The Union for Democratic Communications 2007 Conference:

Emancipatory Communication and the Global City
October 25-28, Vancouver BC

This year's UDC conference is hosted by Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication, and will be held at SFU’s downtown Vancouver campus.

The Conference theme is 'Enclosure, Emancipatory Communication and the Global City'. The keynote address will be delivered by Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and, most recently, Planet of Slums. Other featured speakers include Dan Schiller, Nick Dyer-Witheford and DeeDee Halleck.

The field of culture and communication manifests struggles between contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, pressures from capital and state sometimes promote various forms of enclosure — the private appropriation, suppression or marginalization of socially-produced public expression. Enclosure comes in many guises: the commodification of information; concentration and hyper-commercialism in media industries; the corporatization of universities; restrictive "intellectual property" regimes; or market authoritarianism as a mode of governance.

On the other hand, progressive forces, from artists and academics to broad social movements, are not only resisting such enclosure, but developing practices and policies that prefigure emancipation — new ways of re-organizing culture and communication democratically. These include struggles over alternative media, state cultural policies, communication rights, reform of media and cultural institutions, audience empowerment, urban public space, and much else.

These forces of enclosure and emancipation increasingly come together in the global city, a site which stands at the nexus of changing national cultures and policies, of transnational migrations and markets, of media flows and audiences, and of consumption and surveillance.

We invite you to join us in discussing these themes at the 2007 conference of the Union for Democratic Communication. The conference opens with a Thursday evening reception on October 25, will feature two full days of presentation, discussion and interaction with local activist and artistic groups concerned with democratizing communication. A keynote address by Mike Davis will be delivered on Friday evening and the conference wraps up with a dinner/dance on Saturday, October 27. The conference also coincides with Vancouver's annual Media Democracy Day, featuring an Independent Media Fair at the city's public library.