Talk

Eric Craven is Project Coordinator of the Digital Literacy Project at Atwater Library in Montreal, where he also did his graduate studies in Information Science at McGill University. Eric is in Portugal this week to present his work as part of a large scale Canadian (SSHRC) funded project with international partners called ACT (Ageing Communications Technologies) at ECREA 2014, a conference on communications that is being held this year in Lisbon with the theme 'Communication for Empowerment: Citizens, Markets, Innovations’.

Eric’s work focuses specifically on using digital media to disrupt normative expectations and perceptions in the community. His panel in Lisbon on digital culture and communication is titled ‘New Media and Older People: Age, Narratives, and Normativities’. The emphasis on storytelling makes his work particularly relevant to Creative Writing and Digital Media at M-ITI, but the larger themes in his work - digital technology and ageing populations, education, and identity - link to a wide spectrum of research being done by our researchers.

As well as working with communities and digital culture, Eric is also a musician and composer who has been a central figure in the Montreal music scene for the past two decades. He has played numerous European festivals in recent years, including All Tomorrow’s Parties in England, as well as composing extensively for modern dance. You can see him featured in the 2013 documentary And We Made the Room Shine, which follows the adventurous Constellation Records label to the 50th Vienna International Film Festival, and which was part of this year’s Viennale (http://www.viennale.at/en/films/and-we-made-room-shine).