Funferal

UICC ’06 in review

Ericka Menchen mentioned, at her blog, the UICC conference she was due to present at on Friday. I was presenting there too, and it really was an interesting and fun day.
UICC, now in its third year, is the brainchild of Sabryna Cornish, sometime funferal contributor and a fellow student at the ICR. It’s an opportunity for communications graduate students from the various campuses of the University of Illinois to meet and present their research in a relatively informal atmosphere. We haven’t managed to pull UIS students in yet – we came close this year I think – but hopefully that will happen next year.
This year I do believe we had more presenters than at any of the previous conferences, with 16 presentations in total, along with a keynote address by Ellen Wartella, who gave a rather comprehensive overview of her work on the effects of media/television on children. (Previous keynotes have been by James Carey and Larry Grossberg – the tradition is for a keynote by a distinguished former faculty member at the Institute of Communications Research at Urbana.) Apart from students from the Dept. of Communication at UIC and the Institute of Communications Research at Urbana we also had, as is by now a tradition, some other UIUC grad students engaged in critical work relating to communications, including one from Speech Communication and one from Anthropology.
New this year – and facilitated by the rather wonderful wifi facilities in place – was a ‘back-channel’ IRC conversation simultaneous with the presentations, which got quite a bit of traffic (and introduced interesting debates about the desirability of such side-conversations). There’s also a conference wiki, hosted by UIC grad students, where contributors can post details (and discussions) of their presentations. And of course the usual post-conference ‘Happy Hour’ at a local watering hole.
For myself, I gave a rather extemporaneous overview of my work on digital radio, outlining some of the opportunities and threats for community radio-style services as we enter the ‘digital age.’ As usual, many of the presentations were provocative and thought-provoking, and I had some good conversations with various students, including some at UIC engaged in research similar to mine. My one regret was that the conference was so short, and many conversations had to be briefer than one would like – there’s already talk of next year’s conference, with some suggesting it should run for two days to allow more participants and more space for informal interaction between sessions.