SIS Talk Stacy Allison-Cassin

We come to know and understand the world through information structures. They tell us who we are and how we fit or don’t fit, into the world around us. In the context of the digital realm, these structures are increasingly crucial as information structures can be deployed in ways that can be problematic and oppressive where information is a site of power, control, and contestation. At the same time, information structures can be restorative and connect us to love and justice.

In the first section of this talk, I will discuss my doctoral work which asserts that passionate love is not a feeling, but a process of acculturation to a complete information processing system. I will put Niklas Luhmann’s work on love as a system of communication in dialogue with the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek to demonstrate that symbolic media such as music plays a vital role in the construction of amorous subjectivity. Working through a series of case studies, I use the music of Canadian rock band Arcade Fire, with its concern with ideas of emotion and authenticity, as a vehicle for revealing the process of becoming an amorous subject. For love to exist, subjects must seem to breach what is unbreachable, to know the unknowable—the core of another’s being and structures of information create the pathways which enable this connection.

In the second section of the talk, I will discuss my research on knowledge organization, power, and meaning, particularly as it relates to knowledge equity, and social justice. I will discuss ongoing research using Linked Open Data, with a particular focus on current work related to Indigenous issues such as mechanisms to assert Indigenous identity and land sovereignty. There is a pressing urgency to restore traditional names, and contend with colonial naming practices, and recognize the connection between documentation and identity as cultural heritage holdings are crucial for the work of cultural revitalization. Documenting relevant materials in a culturally sensitive way creates the infrastructure to support respectful naming practice, and establish hospitable environments for Indigenous communities.