From the email:
The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture is pleased to host a lunch-time talk on
Islands of Privacy:
Selective Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life
Christena Nippert-Eng
Illinois Institute of Technology
Department of Sociology
Friday, January 15
Classics 110
12:00-1:20pm
Lunch will be served.
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This talk presents an overview of Christena Nippert-Eng's forthcoming University of Chicago book. Starting with the ways mostly middle and upper middle class Chicagoans conceive of privacy, it focuses primarily on the micro level, detailed interactions and objects through which people try to do privacy. What is the work of privacy, in other words? What is involved as we try to make, keep, and reveal and find out secrets, for instance, about our most private of private things? What do we carry in our wallets and purses and how do we use it to manage identity - where others but also the self serves as primary audience? How do Americans use our often hodge-podge systems of communication technologies to manage our accessibility to others and their increasingly relentless demands for our attention? What do we do face-to-face to acquire privacy, too, from the perimeter of our homes outward and into our urban neighborhoods? What do people do when the doorbell rings, w
hen it's time to throw our the trash or when the people upstairs turn out to be the Neighbors From Hell? As we look at the daily mundane activities that now constitute the individual's burden of privacy we will also examine what, precisely, constitutes a violation of one's privacy and the overlapping structures that exist between and among individuals' privacy fears.
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Christena Nippert-Eng teaches film-, project-, field-, and lecture-based courses at IIT, where she is Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology. Dr. Nippert-Eng's book Islands of Privacy: Selective Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. She conducts industrial research on people's behavior and relationships with objects and spaces, including information and communication technologies, and her work has been featured extensively in the media, including radio, television, and newspaper interviews ranging from NPR's "Talk of the Nation" to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fast Company.
