Research Statement

Origins

My intellectual journey is deeply influenced by my parents, Mary Kalantzis and William Cope. Their approach to research instilled in me three core principles: the importance of translating theory into practice, empowering communities, and creating sustainable infrastructures for cultural production.

Beginnings

I stumbled into my undergraduate BA (Public Policy) degree at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. During these years, I applied what I learned in the classroom, working at the Victorian Department of Justice, leading a program to re-write the guide for services for Indigenous inmates, and for the Darebin City Council in a program supporting the settlement of refugees in Melbourne. I also ventured into media production by co-hosting a Greek-Australian Youth Hour on ZZZ Radio Melbourne.

After completing my BA, I enrolled in a Masters of International Relations and Diplomacy at The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. While still thinking I would work in public service, I was also drawn to the big ideas in political philosophy and how they shaped global life in the practice of international relations. Looking for the places where theory meets practice, I turned my attention to the global regulation of intellectual property rights. The very historical motivation was how far, in the interests of a few, the regulation of this domain at the international level was going. Also, with the growing use and power of the internet, there was the pressing question of what this attempt at global order would mean for the future of the social order in shared digital communications systems. Under the supervision of Chris Reus-Smit, I grappled with these ideas in my master thesis, “The Formation of Political Community: The Case of Intellectual Property,” to suggest that if the protection of property served as one of the core legitimizing tenants of the formation of the political community, as it manifested in the Westphalian state system, then the contradictions posed by global intellectual property regulation presented a fundamental break in this social contract logic, and as such offered opportunity for alternative orders based on different kinds of social contracts.

Foundation

I took these research questions to the New School for Social Research, New York City, USA. Working under the supervision of Nancy Fraser and committee members McKenzie Wark and Andreas Kalyvas, I re-framed my fundamental questions to how the work and play of the mind (an original position I established) historically became property and the nature of this contract. In this generative act – a theory of property and a legal regime protecting that meaning for a community -  as a cornerstone of the imagination of the making of a just pollical community, I then considered how the work and play of the mind was becoming property in the Information Age—a world of massive data collection and computational synthesis. In a world of practice, legal, and technical infrastructures, I found emergent paradigms that did not neatly fit the old public/private distinction in the traditional theories of property. My PhD, “Whose Property: The Work and Play of the Mind In an Information Age,” aimed to define the dominant emergent paradigms. In doing so, I made the case that each paradigm represented an alternative model of making a just political community—and that these paradigms would shape the struggle for recognition or redistribution in an information age.

Again, it is important to remember the historical context. The accelerating rise of digital communication systems as a centralizing (and de-centralizing) platform for labor, commerce, culture, and politics. And the flash point of the Occupy Wall Street Movement—where the “system” went through a crisis, and digital technologies were used as tools of resistance.  During these years, I also taught causes on international relations and digital society at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School.

I was also a member of the Foundation Contributors Council of The Local East Village (LEV), a partnership between The New York Times and the Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism at New York University. The LEV was an experiment in producing and disseminating “hyper-local” media. In this project, I contributed images that matched stories of happenings in the East Village and participated in the project's overall direction. In my time with the LEV, I was exposed to an emerging political economy of new media, providing an insider’s view to interpret the precarious nature of creative labor in a post-industrial age.

Current

After completing my PhD, I became what’s sometimes called a “pracademic.” I applied these research questions to the practice of publishing and building academic communities. I chair the Information, Medium, and Society: The Publishing Studies Research Network and am the Editor of Information, Medium, and Society: Journal of Publishing Studies. In these roles, I seek to offer a framework to examine what makes publishing a unique domain of social practice. On the one hand, to consider historical-conceptual frames—the social theories of publishing. On the other hand, I consider practice—how professional communities live in and shape cultures and societies.

Via the Common Ground Media Lab, with Tamsyn Gilbert, we research the nature of and build technologies for scholarly communication. Our premise has been that media platforms—pre-digital and now also digital—have often not been designed to structure and facilitate a rigorous, democratic, and sustainable knowledge economy. We seek to leverage our own platform – CGScholar – to explore alternatives based on extended dialogue, reflexive feedback, and formal knowledge ontologies. The CGScholar platform is being used today by knowledge workers as diverse as university faculty to deliver e-learning experiences; innovative schools wishing to challenge the ways learning and assessment have traditionally worked; and government and non-government organizations connecting local knowledge and experience to wider policy objectives and measurable outcomes. Each of these use cases illustrates the differing of knowledge that CGScholar serves while also opening spaces for new and emerging voices in the world of scholarly communication. We aim to synthesize these use cases to build a platform that can become a trusted marketplace for knowledge work, one that rigorously democratizes the process of knowledge-making, rewards participants and offers a secure basis for the sustainable creation and distribution of digital knowledge artifacts. As a not-for-profit, we are fundamentally guided by our mission: to support the building of better societies and informed citizenries through rigorous and inclusive social knowledge practices, offering in-person and online scholarly communication spaces.

I am also deeply engaged with research communities as the Chief Social Scientist of Common Ground Research Networks (Not-for-Profit). I work with local host committees, journal editors, research network chairs, and advisory boards to craft themes, select speakers, and collaboratively lead the overall program and strategic development.