I’m Pretty Sure She Doesn’t Read This Blog

…so here goes.  I wanted to show you guys the amazing work that a certain lady of my fancy is doing, in the same department as yours truly.  If this post suddenly disappears, well that means she discovered it (she’s incredibly humble, but I’m incredibly not).  So, while we can, here’s a description of Aleena’s award-winning paper by one of the grand poobahs of our department:

Aleena Chia’s paper, “Revolution, Recursion, and Emergence: A Critical Genealogy of ‘Collective Intelligence,’” has received this year’s Virginia Gunderson Award. Aleena wrote this paper, which is sparkling and smart from start to finish, for a graduate research seminar I led in fall 2009 on the topic of rhetorical genealogies of political myth.

Aleena’s paper serves as a prolegomenon for extended critical analyses of a key cultural formation manifested in the dotcom bust followed by the arrival of Web 2.0 with its promise to generate prosperity and to enrich democracy in a whole new era of interactivity, decentralization, and collaboration. Aleena interrogates the logic of collective intelligence as a troublesome cultural paradigm by returning to its intellectual origin point in the founding of the discipline of cybernetics in the 1940s. She follows the development of the figure of the cyborg both as a symptom of the problem of technophilia and as a potential corrective. In this way, she attempts to open a space for reflection in an otherwise closed rhetoric of collective intelligence that represses its own intellectual lineage. Her grasp of a vast array of thought about cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and new media yields a fresh synthesis from which to begin to address issues of human agency and democratic culture with increased insight.

This critical genealogy is the kind of innovative scholarship, spanning the fields of rhetorical and media criticism, that re-conceptualizes cultural orthodoxies to establish new lines of inquiry.

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