Dearman, Philip | Australia | IFZ | Interdisziplinäres Forschungszentrum für Technik, Arbeit und Kultur

Fellow at IAS-STS 2008/2009

Philip Dearman is a lecturer in Communication & Writing, in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. He teaches media policy, theories and histories of communication, and literary history. He researches the historical and contemporary uses of communications technologies in regulating the limits of workplace relations. He is interested in how communications technologies - particularly the digital forms we now call ‘information technologies’ - are appropriated and used in the regulation of power relations in the workplace, how they are used to structure the limits and forms of thought and action that are and might be possible.

His undergraduate studies were completed at the University of South Australia, in Adelaide. He completed a PhD in 2005, at Monash University, on the impact of the implementation of information systems on the regulation of professional social work. In his most recent research Philip has reviewed the introduction of computerised student report writing systems into Victorian schools, and studied the implementation of videoconferencing softwares now in use by schools in the Far East Gippsland region of Victoria.

Philip is a member of the editorial board of the journal Communication, Politics & Culture CPC) - formerly known as Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture.

Project at IAS-STS: A comparative genealogy of computer technologies in the classroom: Australia and Austria

At the IAS-STS my central objective is to study the historical development of policies and practices governing the uses made of computer technologies in the contemporary Austrian school, in teaching and learning as well as administration.

I am currently compiling material for a book (to be co-written with colleagues in Australia), tentatively titled Communication Revolutions: Culture, Technology and Practice. This will take the form of a series of case studies of the ‘bedding down’ of communications technologies in specific contexts. One of those case studies will be a comparative analysis of political, economic and cultural factors shaping the introduction and use of computers in schools, in Australia and Austria.

Two theoretical perspectives frame my analysis of communications technologies. I use Foucault’s concept of discourse to analyse the historical development of conceptual framing devices, including the languages and practices that have helped to shape the limits of shared understandings of ICTs in the classroom. I also draw on a diverse range of concepts from the sociology of technology in order to follow the variable and contingent ways in which students, teachers, parents and administrators are respectively ‘configured’ as interested users of computers, and therefore as interested actors in the ongoing negotiation of the meaning of ‘computers in the classroom’.

A number of key questions will guide me while at the IAS-STS. What are the contexts of policy making? What have decision makers, at different levels, sought to achieve? How have they framed objectives? To what extent has the imperative to join the ‘international knowledge economy’ operated as a mechanism for inclusion and exclusion? To what extent is there scope for local variability in decision making about infrastructure, skills training and applications? What impact does this have on schools’ to meet state and/or national goals? What are the relations between ‘technology’ and ‘practice’? How have teachers responded in the classroom, in reframing their own pedagogical aims and objectives? To what extent has the use of computers in administration and classroom teaching enabled new ways of framing and managing relations between teacher and student, and between institution and student? What kinds of learning and teaching subjects have been formed, and to what ends?

Selected Publications

Dearman, Philip (2007) ‘Testing times: A-E report cards, teacher scrutiny and the politics of choice’, in Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture, 40(2), 34-58.

Dearman, Philip & Galloway, Chris (2005) ‘Putting podcasting into perspective’, in Radio in the World (papers from the International Radio Conference 2005), published at http://search.informit.com.au.

Dearman, Philip (2005) ‘Computerised social casework recording: Autonomy and control in Australia’s income support agency, in Labor Studies Journal, 30(1), 47-65.

Dearman, Philip (2003) ‘The online university as managerial investment in transforming spaces for autonomous judgement’, in Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture, 36(2), 25-39.