Public lecture by Prof. Sandra Braman

The CMCS presents a public lecture by Professor Sandra Braman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee):

On the Horizon: Emerging Information and Communication Law and Policy Issues

Date: October 22nd (Thursday), 5:30 pm
Place: CEU, Monument Building, Gellner Room

Abstract:

Many of today's pressing legal and regulatory problems involving information and communication, such as intellectual property rights and privacy, have very long histories even if they present new faces in the digital network environment.  Other issues, such as viruses and denial of service attacks, apply only to digital network technologies.  A third category of legal and policy issues arise out of changes in the nature of the economy and of law-state-society relations brought about in large part (though not exclusively) by technological innovation.

We can refer to emerging issues in this third category as "horizon policy issues" because they have only recently become visible but are rising in salience -- coming closer, if you will.  This lecture will introduce horizon policy issues of particular importance to those concerned about interactions between this domain of law and policy and our ability to cope with other matters such as environmental sustainability, war, and the global financial crisis in coming decades.  These include harmonization of laws and regulations across states; criminalization of modes of inference; the transformation of information about such matters as health and the environment into security issues; accounting standards and financial disclosure requirements as information and communication policy issues; and technology design and network architecture as social policy.

Biography:

Sandra Braman has been studying the macro-level effects of the use of digital technologies and their policy implications since the mid-1980s. Braman is currently conducting research on legal globalization and on the ways in which technical decision-makers for the Internet have been dealing with legal and policy issues.  Recent books include Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (2007/2009, MIT Press) and the edited volumes Communication Researchers and Policy-makers (2003, MIT Press), The Emergent Global Information Policy Regime (2004, Palgrave Macmillan) and Biotechnology and Communication: The Meta-technologies of Information (2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). 

Braman's research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Soros Foundation.  She is currently Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  She has held visiting professorships in South Africa (where she designed and implemented the first graduate-level program in telecommunications and information policy on the African continent, for the University of South Africa, in 1997-1998), Norway (where she served as the Freedom of Expression Professor at the University of Bergen in 2008), and Brazil (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2009).

Find more information on the UWM website.