Dr Brendan Luyt is offering a new PhD-level course A9013 Conceptual Foundations of Information in the coming semester. Here’s what Brendan says about the course:

I’m very excited about the new course I am going to teach for the first time this coming term. It’s specifically designed for our doctoral students and so will be run as a seminar rather than a lecture. I hope to spark debate and thinking over a variety of issues of fundamental importance to the field of information science by focusing on a few key authors: Patrick Wilson, Bruno Latour, Geoffrey Bowker, and Pierre Bourdieu. These are all scholars who have addressed issues that lie at the heart of information science: epistemology, classification, and the relation between each of these and social structure. I imagine that many of our more technically oriented students will feel various levels of nervousness when they learn about this, but I hope they can overcome their fear of the unknown and consider the course more of an intellectual adventure. Besides they will soon come to understand that the issues we will address are of direct relevance to their doctoral projects. In fact, one of their assignments will be to explore the linkages between their research interests and the theory we will address in the class!

Afraid the course is open to PhD and research Master’s students only.