Reinventing East Asia

Electronic Waste and the imperative of building an ethnic from the ground up
Melba Velez, an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale
 
Fri, 09/24/2010 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm  
Location: 160 English Building
 
Abstract: When it comes to communication scholarship in the age of environmental crisis, addressing issues of justice is important but not enough. I argue that while our field as a whole admirably strives to explore and promote issues of justice (i.e., [re]distribution, and democratization), we increasingly neglect questions of ethics. Such questions ought to address the time, effort, and labor that go into producing toxic waste that is dumped globally. I'll use the contemporary example of e-waste to problematize how advocating equal access to technology, for example, can spell disaster for all of us.
 
Speaker Bio: Melba Velez (B.A., Purdue University-Calumet; Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI. Velez's areas of research are communication ethics and environmental communication in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Her work examines the ways in which the long-term success of conservation efforts depend upon fundamental shifts in cultural values, in aesthetic and moral communication, and in shared understandings of how the individual fits into social and ecological communities. She presently serves as secretary/treasurer of the National Communication Association Ethics Division and is a three-year member of the Long Term Ecological Research Network, a collaborative effort involving more than 1,100 scientists and students investigating ecological processes over long temporal and broad spatial scales. This speaker series is funded by a Focal Point Grant from the Graduate College and co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies China Workshop, Center for Global Studies; Information in Society in Library and Information Science, and Institute of Communications Research.