The Gendered Ties That Bind the 'New Global Governance' to the 'New Information Economy'

Thursday 20 April
Assoc Professor Lisa McLaughlin, Mass Communication & Women's Studies, Miami University-Ohio
2.00pm-3.30pm
CCCS Seminar Room, Forgan Smith Tower, Level 4

Lisa McLaughlin is a CCCS Visiting Fellow, and recipient of a University of Queensland Travel Award for International Collaborative Research.

Subject

As the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) illustrates, the 'new multi-stakeholderism' and public-private partnerships work in concert to advance the 'corporatization' of international development initiatives. In this presentation, Assoc Professor McLaughlin maintains that the gender mainstreaming advocated by the UN and various gender-oriented organizations necessitates that summits such as the WSIS actively include gender advocates who adhere to formal, governmental modalities while passively excluding those who actively oppose market-led approaches to development, and she will link this to an agenda in which women of the Global South are offered the potential for emancipation and mobility through access to technology but instead are apt to become place-based informational labor.

Abstract

As a model of global governance, ‘multi-stakeholderism’ has been reinvented most recently through the proceedings of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), based in the sanguine assumption that a neoliberal context will allow civil society actors to participate on an equal basis with governments, intergovernmental organizations, and corporations in working to overcome the ‘digital divide’.

Assoc Professor McLaughlin will  begin with the WSIS in order to illustrate how approaches to ‘cosmopolitan democracy’, which take as evidence the influence of civil society actors in United Nations-sponsored meetings, tend to become ‘operationalized’ in the form of global neo-corporatist policy concertation among so-called ‘post-industrial groups’ including coalitions of feminists, indigenous persons, and persons from the ‘Global South’. Unlike traditional corporatist schemes in which the state remains the head of the body politic, the private sector has taken on that role today. While the WSIS seemed to have unfolded as a process oriented to creating a Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, at the same time, numerous public-private partnerships were being forged amongst UN agencies, governments, businesses, and some civil society organizations. Several of these partnerships—and notably those involving Cisco Systems—have taken the form of gender initiatives in ‘least developed countries’. 

Iin this presentation she hopes to establish, both the WSIS multi-stakeholder process and the public-private partnerships made during the event of the summit are fraught with a disturbing lack of transparency and accountability. However, she wishes to move further in order to suggest that there are much stronger ties that bind the ‘new global governance’ to ‘the new information economy’ than is usually thought and that these ties are profoundly gendered. Specifically, Assoc Professor McLaughlin will maintain that the ‘new multi-stakeholderism’ and public-private partnerships work in concert to advance the ‘corporatization’ of international development initiatives. Even more precisely, she maintains that the gender mainstreaming advocated by the UN and various gender-oriented organizations necessitates that summits such as the WSIS actively include gender advocates who adhere to formal, governmental modalities while passively excluding those who actively oppose market-led approaches to development,.  She will link this to an agenda in which women of the Global South are offered the potential for emancipation and mobility through access to technology but instead are apt to become place-based informational labor.

Biography

Lisa McLaughlin is an Associate Professor at Miami University-Ohio, USA, where she holds a joint appointment in Mass Communication and Women's Studies. She is also Director of Graduate Studies for the Master of Arts in Mass Communication Program. McLaughlin is editor of Feminist Media Studies, an international peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge. She has published a number of articles and chapters on feminism, media, and the public sphere, and, more recently, on feminism and the political economy of transnational public space. She teaches courses in international communications, global media governance, and feminist media theory and practice.

Her recent work focuses on ICTs and the corporatization of development as it has emerged under the auspices of the United Nations.  At present, McLaughlin's research concentrates on Cisco Systems' Networking Academy Programs and the corporation's Gender Initiatives that have originated as public-private partnerships brokered through the UN. She was the representative to the World Summit on the Information Society on behalf of the Union for Democratic Communications. During the first phase of the WSIS, she was a member of the sub-committee on civil society participation and the civil society content and themes group.

In the post-WSIS context, she (along with Professor Soenke Zehle of the University of Saarland, Germany) has created and maintained the virtual organization PPP-in-ICT Watch (Public-Private Partnerships in Information and Communication Technology Watch: http://www.pppwatch.org), which is a project following from the Incommunicado 05 conference sponsored by the Institute of Network Cultures, University of Amsterdam, and Kein.org.

For more details, contact Rebecca Ralph, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies.
Phone (07) 3346 9764, or email admin.cccs@uq.edu.au