Faculty

Bernd Frohmann
Associate Professor

North Campus Building Room 217 Phone: 519-661-2111 x88510 University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7 Fax: 519-661-3506 Email: frohmann@uwo.ca

For my cv and selected courses and publications go to my homepage

Teaching Areas     I have taught courses in the Faculty's undergraduate program, Media, Information and Technoculture (MIT), and in masters and doctoral programs in Media Studies (MS) and in Library and Information Science (LIS). In the MIT program, I have taught the Political Economy of Information and two special topics courses: The World Brain, which investigated utopian schemes for the organization and interconnection of all the world’s knowledge, and Mind Machines, which investigated the entanglements of cognition and intellectual technologies. Recent courses in LIS include the master's courses Perspectives on Library and Information Science, Subject Analysis and Thesaurus Construction, Philosophy of Library and Information Science, and Informations Ethics (which was offered to both LIS masters and doctoral students). My Writing Science was offered to LIS masters and doctoral students, to MS graduate students, and in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. My Media Philosophies was offered in the MS graduate programs, and a course on documentation, called Antelopes, Dead Woodpeckers and Other Documents: How the World Gets Written, was available to graduate students in the LIS and MS graduate programs.

Research Interests     My early research sought to apply Foucaultian discourse analysis to analyze how information, its users, and its uses are constructed as objects of disciplinary knowledge. My current research interests are in documentation, which seeks to rethink the importance of the concepts of the document and documentation for information studies. I am especially interested in the concepts of documentary agency and, following Deleuze, in the affective powers of documents and documentation. Foucault and Latour are also important for this project, the former because of his insistence on documentary and writing regimes, from his studies of the disciplinary society to his later work on care of the self, and the latter not only because of his explicit studies of documentation, but also because of his deployments of the concept of assemblages. Documentation shifts information studies away from the concepts of information and communication to the constructive and constitutive effects of documentary processes and technologies. My book Deflating Information: From Science Studies to Documentation was published in the fall of 2004 by the University of Toronto Press; there, I applied recent work in science studies to raise the question of the role of documentation in fact production.     More recently, I have tried to apply the work of Deleuze and Foucault to information ethics, especially to shift the focus of information ethics away from the concept of the information-seeking, ethical subject, to take into account information processes and technologies that bypass consciousness but that raise important ethical questions.

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