Leah Lievrouw

Leah A. Lievrouw is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies, part of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her research and writing interests focus on the relationship between media and information technologies and social change, particularly with respect to social differentiation, oppositional social and cultural movements, and intellectual freedom in pervasively mediated social settings.

With Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics, she is co-editor of The Handbook of New Media (updated student edition; Sage, 2006),  and of a forthcoming collection, Major Works in Communication: New Media (Sage, in press).

Lievrouw is also the author of Understanding Alternative and Activist New Media (Polity Press, in preparation) and Media and Meaning: Communication Technology and Society (Oxford University Press, in preparation).  Her other books include Competing Visions, Complex Realities: Social Aspects of the Information Society (co-edited with Jorge Reina Schement, Ablex, 1987), and Mediation, Information and Communication: Information and Behavior, vol. 3 (co-edited with Brent Ruben, Transaction, 1990). From 2001-2005 she was co-editor of the journal New Media & Society.

Here's an excerpt from the project wiki for our "Designing for Forgetting and Exclusion" project at UCLA:

Designing for Forgetting and Exclusion

The Designing for Forgetting and Exclusion workshop was held April 13-15, 2007 at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, and was supported by the National Science Foundation's Human and Social Dynamics program. The goal of the workshop was to create a network of researchers, scholars, artists, and designers interested in exploring frameworks where “collective needs for forgetting are explicitly balanced against collective needs for accountability...an understanding of forgetting as a positive social good" (Forgetting & Exclusion NSF Proposal, 2006).

The investigators (Jean-François Blanchette and Leah Lievrouw of the Department of Information Studies, and Michael Curry of the Department of Geography at UCLA) convened a diverse, multidisciplinary, and international group of participants, and asked them to consider the following key questions:

• In what social contexts and disciplinary literatures has forgetting been explicitly recognized as a social good? Where has it been implicitly valued or practiced but not recognized or affirmed?
• What useful concepts may inform research, scholarship, or creative work with regard to the technological, social, and institutional uses and consequences of forgetting as a positive phenomenon, rather than a deficiency or failure?
• What are appropriate and useful methods for conducting such research, scholarship, and creative work? How can investigators deal with the intrinsic difficulty of exploring a subject that by definition involves absense or inattention?

Workshop participants submitted short position papers addressing these questions, which were read by all participants in advance of the meeting. Links to these position papers, notes and other materials from all workshop sessions, a  bibliography of relevant literature and a mediagraphy have been compiled into a wiki.

In February 2008 the investigators submitted a new proposal to the NSF for a 3-year project of empirical studies based on the outcomes of the 2007 workshop.