Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations, by researchers and practitioners.

Marcus Breen Victoria Vesna
Henry Jenkins
Christiane Paul
Veronica Sanz

Garden Conversations

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.


The Speakers

Marcus Breen
Breen-MarcusMarcus Breen is an Associate Dean and Head of the School of Communications and Media at Bond University, Queensland, Australia. He has worked as a researcher, an academic, a consultant and a journalist. He moved from Melbourne, Australia where he was teaching at The University of Melbourne, to teach in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996. Since then, he has also taught in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, Boston. His academic specialization is political economy and policy in the Information and Communication Technology industries.

Dr. Breen’s work background includes consulting and advisory experience with Gartner, Multimedia Victoria -State Government of Victoria, Austrade – Federal Government of Australia, Center for International Research on Communication and Information Technologies and numerous clients. As a journalist he worked for Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Music Business International, News Corporation. His most recent book is Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences, Common Ground Publishing (2011)


Henry Jenkins
Jenkins-Henry1.jpgHenry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than a dozen books on media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy. As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics, and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking Web sites, networked computer games, online fan communities, and other advocacy organizations, as well as emerging news media outlets. Prior to joining USC, Jenkins spent nearly two decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. While there, he directed MIT’s Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1999-2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism, and entertainment.

Christiane Paul
Paul-Christiane.jpgChristiane Paul is the Director of Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Prof. of Media Studies at The New School, NY, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. Her recent books are Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011), co-edited with Margot Lovejoy and Victoria Vesna; New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008); and Digital Art (Thames and Hudson 2003; expanded new edition 2008). At the Whitney Museum, she curated the shows “Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools” (May 2011), “Profiling” (2007), and “Data Dynamics” (2001); the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial; the online exhibition “CODeDOC” (2002) for artport, the Whitney Museum’s online portal to Internet art for which she is responsible; as well as “Follow Through” by Scott Paterson and Jennifer Crowe (2005). Other recent curatorial work includes “Eduardo Kac: Biotopes, Lagoglyphs and Transgenic Works” (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010); Biennale Quadrilaterale (Rijeka, Croatia, 2009-10); “Feedforward – The Angel of History” (co-curated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Asturias, Spain, 2009-2010) and INDAF Digital Art Festival (Incheon, Korea, Aug. 2009). Dr. Paul haspreviously taught in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York (1999-2008); the Digital+Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design (2005-08); the San Francisco Art Institute and the Center of New Media at the University of California at Berkeley (2008).

Veronica Sanz
Sanz-Veronica.jpgVeronica Sanz is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Science, Technology, and Society Center (STSC) in the University of California, Berkeley and is jointly affiliated with Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG) in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. She got her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain) with a dissertation titled “Contextual Values in Science and Technology: the case of Computer Technologies”. During the past years she has been Assistant Researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society in the Spanish National Council of Scientific Research (CSIC), Fellow Researcher at the Institute of Advances Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS) in Graz (Austria), and Visiting Graduate Student at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Mieres (Asturias), Spain. Her research work is rooted in the fields of Philosophy of Technology, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Gender Studies of Technology, particularly focusing on Computing Technologies and new paradigms in Artificial Intelligence.

Victoria Vesna
Vesna-Victoria.jpgVictoria Vesna is a media artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). She is currently a Visiting Professor and Director of Research at Parsons Art, Media + Technology, the New School for Design in New York and a senior researcher at IMéRA – Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille, France and Artist in Residence at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bristol. Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Victoria has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions, more than seventy group shows, has been published in excess of twenty papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow, Minnesota Press. In Press is Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. Edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy. Intellect Press, 2011.