Brian Lamb School of Communication

This study explored the relationships and effects on levels of grit and academic and non-academic skill sets, when students with high-incidence exceptionalities experienced character-based interventions. The interventions used in this study dealt primarily with developing the characteristic of grit. Over ten weeks, students took pre and post-assessments of grit utilizing a Likert-type, online survey. Between the pre and post-assessments, the students’ general education teachers were interviewed to determine what they viewed as indicative of grit in their students, and the students received eight, character-driven lessons in one-hour sessions at one per week. Four, formal classroom observations of the students in the general education setting were also conducted to determine the observable effects of the interventions.
Students demonstrated lower levels of self-perceived grit on the post assessment than on the pre-assessment. However, their demonstrated levels of grit rose from the beginning to the end of the study. I found character-based interventions have a positive effect on the academic and non-academic skills sets of students with high-incidence exceptionalities. Despite lower self-perceptions of grit indicated by the post-assessment, I concluded the students’ demonstrative levels of grit also increased.

From the Government of Canada's (GC) exalted position as leader of the refugee working group from 1992-2000 through their pendulum swing toward nationalism under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government to the rapid actions of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal coalition today, this brief paper explores Canada's relationship to the Middle East - with specific regard to the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis. The GC's international and internal communication campaigns are viewed through the light of Sriramesh and Vercic's (2009) socio-cultural dimensions of public relations.

The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) was the first true philosopher of information, yet he remains relatively unknown outside of his native France. This situation is curious, given the warm reception his work has received from a small group of internationally renowned thinkers. Simondon’s lifelong project was to expound the appearance of what I call an “informational ontology,” a subject that deserves to be addresses at length. This article limits itself by focusing on three aspects of Simondon’s philosophy of information. First, it situates Simondon within the French intellectual scene in post-World War II Europe to get sense of his cultural milieu. Second, it positions Simondon’s work in the context of the American cybernetic tradition from which it emerged. Finally, it offers an exegesis of Simondon’s informational ontology, a radically new materialism that stands to change contemporary debates surrounding issues related to information, communication, and technology.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) wrote monographs on the philosophers whose work greatly influenced his own, with one glaring exception: he did not write one on his contemporary Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989). Simondon is cited only a few times in the Deleuzean corpus yet his influence is everywhere, from ideas concerning the virtual to the concept of individuation. The following paper provides a much needed survey of Simondon’s influence on Deleuze in two steps. First, I show how Simondon’s ontology emerged from a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of substance (hylomorphism). Second, I elaborate on the few passages where Deleuze explicitly appropriates this new ontology, particularly Simondon’s concept of individuation. In this way, I show how Simondon foresaw our new modes of existence and argued for a new philosophy for them well before any of his contemporaries (Deleuze included) in a way that carries great import for philosophies of information and communication.

This paper provides two examples of concretization, an important concept in philosophy of technology that can also be applied to the study of media more broadly construed. It begins with a short summary of the preexisting literature on concretization, followed by a survey of the uses of concretization in the work of its primary theorist,the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The paper proceeds with a brief analysis of a famous example of concretization offered by Simondon (the Guimbal turbine) before engaging a new analysis of concretization in the context of contemporary information and communication technologies (planar transistors). The argument is made that Simondon provided an early (and simple) philosophical explanation of concretization, one that is useful for tracking (analog and digital) technological evolution over time.

A number of French philosophies of technology appeared in the middle of the twentieth century—specifically between the years 1932-1958. They began with the hope of establishing a new field in France that was to be called mechanology (the study and science of machines). The first person to start this project was Jacques Lafitte (1884-1966). Lafitte published Réflexions sur la science des machines in 1932, Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) published La cybernétique et l'origine de l'information in 1954, and Gilbert Simondon published Du mode d'existence des objets technique in 1958. In this article, I provide a brief survey of the mechanological theories presented in these works by focusing on their machine typologies (Lafitte’s levels of function, Ruyer‘s levels of information, and Simondon‘s levels of organization). The overall point is to show that French mechanology deserves further study.

This article argues  for the right  to nonparticipation for Global  Digital Citizenship  (GDC).  It recuperates the notion of political nonparticipation in the context of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and GDC in order to show that nonparticipation can operate effectively in non-State spheres, particularly online. The paper begins with a discussion of nonparticipation in the context of Nation States and non-Statal Organizations before offering a brief survey of the terms Global Citizenship (GC), Digital Citizenship (DC), and GDC. Nonparticipation in an online context is then explained, followed by a discussion of practical concerns, such as who might enforce GDC rights among global digital citizens.