Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
28
2015

Natives and Newbies in Digital Africa -Wendy Griswold (Sociology, Northwestern)

When: Wednesday, October 28, 2015
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, Conference Room, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Abstract: In a digital world, scholars and the general public have assumed the death of reading for pleasure, especially reading print media. My research on young, highly educated digital natives from the developing and the developed world (Botswana, China, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Malawi, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Spain, and the United States) suggests that, on the contrary, the "reading class" is reproducing itself. Moreover, digital natives, to the surprise of their elders, are retaining a preference for print over screens. This pattern is particularly striking in Africa, where digital natives may come from families of print newbies. This paper reviews these findings, concentrating on the African cases, and considers their implications for the future African mediascape.

Bio: Wendy Griswold, Professor of Sociology and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard and a Master’s Degree in English from Duke. She has previously taught at Harvard and at the University of Chicago. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Oslo, Norway, and at IMT Lucca, Italy, and she is on the academic boards for the cultural sociology programs at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Cattolica University, Milan, Italy. She has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. At Northwestern she is affiliated with Comparative Literary Studies, English, the Program of African Studies, and Media, Technology and Society in the School of Communications.


Professor Griswold’s research and teaching interests include: cultural sociology; sociological approaches to literature, art and religion; regionalism, urban representations, and the culture of place; and the sociology of reading. She is currently finishing a book on the Federal Writers' Project, writing the third book in a trilogy on the culture of place, and conducting comparative research on reading practices and media use.

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