Object Ethnography Project & Stewardship Treaties for Barren Island

Stewardship Treaties for Barren Island
http://tradeschool.coop/newyork/class/#237
Sunday, May 6, 3:00-4:30pm

From the 1850s until its last inhabitants were forcibly evicted in 1936, Barren Island was a community built on trash. It housed both the stinking rendering plants and disenfranchised inhabitants who processed waste from Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Today, the detritus of what was once Barren Island litters the shores of Deadhorse Bay in south Brooklyn. The area has been designated a protected historical site, but without financial support to secure the area, thousands of New Yorkers flock to scavenge its shores every year.

I will entrust the art-artifacts of Barren Island to stewards of the history and culture of Barren Island. Any member of the public can become a steward by co-writing a stewardship contract, or Treaty, that designates the terms of care. The terms of these Treaties are open, but they must include plans to care for the artifact for the next two hundred years, and they must maintain some sort of public access given that the artifacts are part of the heritage of many New Yorkers and belong to the commons.

This project is being supported by Trade School, and is limited to 15 participants. Sign up to participate here:http://tradeschool.coop/newyork/class/#237

The Object Ethnography Project
http://objectethnography.wordpress.com/
Online, anytime

Each of the objects in the Object Ethnography Project have been donated by ordinary people. Each object has a story attached.
All these objects are available for exchange. You, or anyone else, can trade for any object by offering a new story about it. What attracts you to the object? What will you do with it? How will the object spend its time in your possession?
Once a story has been offered for exchange via email or post, the object will be mailed to its new owner. These objects and their stories will become the basis of a research project to see how narrative influence worth, economies, and circulation. Participate in an exchange here: http://objectethnography.wordpress.com

Summer Grad Courses in Media, Culture, and Communication

The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) in Steinhardt asked us to circulate the following summer course descriptions to our students. If you have questions about the classes, please contact Jillian Sullivan (jillian.sullivan@nyu.edu) in MCC directly.

Remember that courses in MCC are outside of GSAS. Draper students can only transfer a *maximum of eight credits* from outside GSAS to their degrees, so please contact Robert Dimit (robert.dimit@nyu.edu) if you plan to enroll in one of the classes below this summer. 

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   DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA, CULTURE, AND COMMUNICATION   

SUMMER 2012 COURSES

MCC-GE 2147 Reality and Documentary TV

Professor Susan Murray

May 21 - June 8, 2012

Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu 10.00 AM - 12.45 PM

Class#: 4395 (4 credits)

This course will survey the historical development and shifting definitions of documentary and reality television. We will explore the ways in which television has understood and utilized non-fiction formats at particular historical moments; trace the formations and deployment of realist aesthetics; explore the ethical obligations/problematics of these forms and their practitioners; examine the implications and meanings of documentary/reality hybrids; and consider the reception of and cultural meanings derived from particular documentary and reality texts and subgenres.

MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies

Sample Syllabus

MCC-GE 2166 The Global City and Media Ethnography

Professor Allen Feldman

May 21 - June 8, 2012

Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu 4.55 PM - 7.40 PM

Class#: 1969 (4 credits)

This courses focuses on the theories and methods of media/sensory ethnography, visual culture, performance studies, through the linked topics of transcultural and trans-local processes, diaspora identities, the post colonial and human rights. The curriculum is aimed at graduate students from diverse disciplines who want to explore creative media practice as a research methodology. Through social historical and trans-cultural ethnographic perspectives practice-led pedagogy promotes a self-reflexive contextual and critical understanding of the use of media for the conduct and dissemination of research and the creation of social knowledge through participatory cultural production.

MA Area of Study: Global and Transcultural Communication; MA Research Course

Sample Syllabus 

MCC-GE 2137 Visual Cult/Politics of Memory: Global Perspective

Professor Marita Sturken

Buenos Aires, Argentina

June 4 - June 22, 2012

Class#: 2148 (4 credits)

*Requires Department Consent & Application

This course examines the intersections of visual culture, commemorative politics, social movements, and nationalism in an analysis of the politics of memory in the global context.  We will examine the debates and contestations over memorialization and artistic engagements with the memory of traumatic events in several key sites around the world, including Argentina, the United States, Chile, Germany, and South Africa.  The course will have a particular focus on the politics of memory at work in Argentina over the memory of its “dirty war” from 1976-1983, with visits to particular sites and projects in Buenos Aires in which artists, architects, and activists are engaging with questions of memory and the aftermath of trauma.  It will put these local sites into comparative dialogue with examples of artistic and architectural memorialization in other contexts such as the memorialization of 9/11 in the United States, of the Holocaust in Germany, of Apartheid in South Africa, and of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

We will examine the key role of visual culture in the politics of remembrance and the relationship of commemorative politics to social movements.  The realization of memory through architecture, design, art, photography, digital media, and museums has been central to the politics of the memory of violence and trauma over the last few decades.  Through explorations of how art, photography, and design have played a key role in shaping cultural memory in these contexts, we will investigate the aesthetics of memory, the role of pedagogy in remembrance, the spatialization of memory, and the deployment of memory through these forms into political action.  The course will draw on the scholarship in visual culture and memory studies to examine the politics of memory from a global perspective.

The course will take place over a three week period in Buenos Aires, meeting regularly at the NYU-Buenos Aires site and with field trips to relevant sites in the city, including the Parque de la Memoria, ESMA (a former military school and site of torture that is now a museum and cultural center), the Plaza de Mayo, and Memoria Abierta, a nonprofit organization that has produced a Topografia de la Memoria through the work of designers and architects. We will take one trip to Rosario, 180 miles away, where the country’s first national Museum of Memory was recently opened and where grassroots memory art is visible in streets throughout the city.

Guest speakers in Buenos Aires will include architects, designers, and activists involved in memorial projects in the city. 

The course will be conducted in English, with additional recommended readings in Spanish for bilingual speakers.

Sample Syllabus

Apply here!

MCC-GE 2383 Topics Global: Censorship/Social Movements and Alternative Media

Professor Brett Gary

June 27 - August 14, 2012

Paris, France

Class#: 4177 (4 credits)

*Requires Department Consent & Application

This course will explore concepts of media censorship, cultural and political anxieties and instability, and social movement media, primarily in the United States and France. It will center on understanding how cultural hegemony is attained, but how established norms are  subverted and challenged through the formation of political and cultural counter-publics and resistance movements.

Examples will be drawn from the past fifty years in France and the US. The course will include walking tours that track the student uprisings in Paris in May '68, Algerian and Vietnamese contestations of French colonialism, and the neighborhoods of self-exiled African American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Other sites will also be visited, such as the church of Saint Bernard de la Chapelle (a symbolic focus of the contemporary movement for immigrants' rights), and one of the locations of the altermondialiste (global social justice) movement ATTAC.  For the U.S. we will consider the Berkeley-based Free Speech movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements, and more recently, police management of the anti-war marches in 2003 and suppression of protests at the GOP conventions in 2004 and 2008, and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

While considering mainstream journalistic coverage of resistance movements, along with various forms of censorship in French and US media, we will also explore how resistance movements have developed their own communications strategies involving various media, including print, film, and social media, along with staging sit-ins, protests, marches, strikes, occupations and other techniques of mobilization and communication.   A variety of media formats will be reviewed, from tv, film and print media, to social media.  Please contact jillian.sullivan@nyu.edu for a sample syllabus.  

Apply here!

Two Upcoming Talks: Latin American Media Today / Building American Indian Studies Inside and Outside of Academia

Two Upcoming Talks of Interest at NYU:

Latin American Media Today

NYU Steinhardt professor Juan Pinon, visiting scholars, and journalists will examine the nature and ongoing global configuration of Latin American media today. The panel will analyze new developments in traditional media and discuss issues of representation, diversity, and democracy. The event will be held on Thursday, Feb. 16, 5:30 pm at 20 Cooper Square, 4^th floor. For details, click here.

Building American Indian Studies Inside and Outside of Academia

Join us for a presentation by Dr. Ned Blackhawk, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale, and Dr. Theodore Van Alst, Assistant Dean of Yale College and Director of Yale’s Native American Cultural Center. All are welcome. Thursday, Feb. 23, 12:00 noon at the NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Hall, Room 201. Please RSVP at cmep@nyu.edu.

via the NYU Minute e-newsletter

Religion as Media: Spring 2012 Course Open for Enrollment

The following non-crosslisted course that has opened for enrollment. If interested, please contact Janine Paolucci at janine.paolucci@nyu.edu. Again, please note that this is not a Draper course.

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Religion as Media RELST-GA.3397 ANTH-GA.3393
Spring 2012/ Tues 2:00—4:45

Angela Zito
726 Broadway room 560
phone 992-9656
angela.zito@nyu.edu

This course will introduce you to the longstanding and complex connection between religious practices and various media, based upon the premise that, like all social practice, religion is always mediated in some form or other. Yet, religion does not function simply as unchanging content, while media names the ways that content is formed. Instead shifts in media technique, from ritual innovations to the invention of printing, through TV, to the internet, also shape religious practice which has, in turn, influenced its media. We are interested in gathering theoretical tools for understanding the form and politics of this mutual dialectic.

We will analyze how human hearing, vision and the performing body have been used historically to express and maintain religious life through music, voice, images, words and rituals. Then we will spend time on more recent electronic media such as cassette, film, television, video, and the internet. We will consider, among other things: religious memory, both embodied and out-sourced in other media; the role of print and reading; the role of TV in the rise of the Hindu Right; the material culture of Buddhism (icons, relics, sutras); religion and commodification; film as religious experience; Christian Evangelical media; indigenous and digital media.


Books for the course:
The following *books are required in their entirety—find them at Shakespeare’s, Broadway at Washington Place:

*Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: elements of a sociological theory of religion (well, 100 pages)
*Connerton, Paul. How Societies remember
*Dorsky, Nathaniel. Devotional Cinema
*Graham, William A. Beyond the written word: oral aspects of scripture in the history of religion
*Hendershot, Heather. Shaking the world for Jesus: Media and conservative evangelical culture
*Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons And Islamic Counterpublics
*Lyden, John. Film as religion: myths, morals and rituals
*Morgan, David. Visual Piety: a history and theory of popular religious images
*Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the technologizing of the word
*Rachel Wagner. Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtuality

Two recommended collections (we’ll read at least 3 pieces from each):
DeVries, Hent and Samuel Weber, eds. Religion and Media. Stanford University Press, 2001.
Hoover, Stewart and Knut Lundby, eds. Rethinking media, religion and culture. Sage

Publications, 1997

Xeroxed readings will be placed on: Blackboard. The books will be on reserve at Bobst.

Evaluation: Discussion: 25% : Students will be expected to read everything for each week and be prepared for discussion: students will sign up to facilitate one week’s discussion
Responses: 25%: Students will post a response to the reading on our online forum each week—and please attend as many of the events mentioned below, posting a short-short response: 50%
Final conference paper/presentation: Depending upon how many we are, the last day of class (and one other scheduled meeting) will be devoted to a “Show&Tell” paper presentation that should read aloud in 20 minutes, including your media. We’ll group them into “conference panels”. We’ll time them! (To be handed in to me at that time.)

Lecture: Islamic Philosophy & Manners of Unfolding in Documentary Cinema

The Center for Religion and Media & The Center for Media, Culture and History present:

Islamic Philosophy and Manners of

Unfolding in Documentary Cinema

a distinguished lecture

by LAURA MARKS (Simon Fraser University)

Introduced by FAYE GINSBURG (NYU)

Friday, October 14th, 4-6PM

NYU Hagop Kevorkian Screening Room

50 Washington Square South at 255 Sullivan Street

Dr. Laura U. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University. A scholar, theorist, and curator of independent and experimental media arts, she is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002), and many essays. Several years of research in Islamic art history and philosophy gave rise to her new book Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, 2010). She has curated programs of experimental media for venues around the world. Her current research interests are the media arts of the Arab and Muslim world, intercultural perspectives on new media art, and philosophical approaches to materiality and information culture. www.sfu.ca/~lmarks

This event is sponsored by The Center for Religion and Media and The Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU, and is co-sponsored by the NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
All events are free and open to the public. Wheelchair accessible.
For further information, visit www.crmnyu.org, or please call (212) 998-3759.

Interdisciplinary Project Seeks Contributors

Prometheus Mediated: Exploring Audience Perception Through an Evolution of Forms

Funded by the Lucrece Project: Creative Experiments in Critical Practice www.thelucreceproject.com

In his widely known 1964 book, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, media theorist Marshall McLuhan asserts “the medium is the message.” He theorizes that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Using the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus as content, we will express the story through three different mediums: a short theater performance, a short film piece and a new media piece that incorporates a variety of digital forms and social media tools to enhance the audience’s experience. Bringing together a dynamic group of scholars, artists and media makers interested in exploring form’s effect, not just on content but on the audience experience of content, the project will rely on a collaborative interdisciplinary process to shed new light on an old question. We are particularly interested in examining how the evolution of the mediated audience experience from a massive social gathering to an individual, human-computer interaction changes the implications and understanding of content. The project will be realized in a site-specific installation that allows audience members to experience each of the three pieces as individual forms and as a continuous media event.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Prometheus Mediated is an ambitious project calling on academic scholarship as well as a wide range of creative skills. We are looking for participants at all levels – those who want to be involved in a specific area of interest and those who want to take on a major creative role in realizing the piece. We are specifically looking for the following collaborators, listed below. Anyone interested please e-mail Joyce Mishaan at jhm347@nyu.edu by Monday, October 3rd.

Media Theory Scholars – Anyone with a background and/or interest in Media Theory.

Dramatic Writers – We will be adapting the Prometheus myth into three working scripts. This will include workshops exploring the themes and context of the story as well as the ways in which we can carry those themes across our different media platforms. Anyone with a specific interest in adaptation, classical stories and/or writing for new media especially encouraged to join the project!

Creative Producers – Anyone interested in getting involved at the producer level. We will be producing a site-specific installation including live theater, film projection and interactive media. Producers will be heavily involved in the project from start to finish, with a more intensive schedule in the spring semester. We are especially looking for highly organized, tech-savvy individuals who can help stretch a budget creatively.

Installation Artists – Participating artists will be heavily involved in the creative realization of the project, specifically in the spring semester. We’re looking for anyone with an interest in installation art or site-specific performance art.

Digital Media Producers – This is a major creative role in the project and as of yet very loosely defined. We will be creating a digital media piece as part of the installation and looking for anyone with a creative interest in new media art and the technical know-how to bring a project to life.

Tech Assistant – Looking for a tech savvy individual to help install and manage all echnical aspects of the project including audio, video and online media.

Director of Photography - Looking for a DP for a short film piece, approximately 2 – 3 day shoot during the Spring semester. We’d like the DP to be involved in the creative planning for the film, and would encourage participation during pre-production meetings in the Fall semester. Have a camera? Even better!

Sound Designer/Audio Mixer – Ideally looking for someone who can sound design for the installation piece and mix audio for the film shoot. 2 – 3 days of shooting in the spring semester plus pre-production meetings in the fall.

AD/Production Manager/Production Assistants – Anyone interested in being involved in the short film production. This can include crew support, script supervision and logistical support. 2 – 3 day commitment, on set. Happy to teach/train anyone looking to gain more set experience.

Performers – Looking for actors both for live performance and short film shoot. Roles TBD. Especially those interested in classical adaptations, site-specific performance art and new media projects.

Production Designer/Art Department – Looking for a production designer who is comfortable working across a variety of mediums, including live performance, film and digital media. We will be working with limited resources and are especially looking for someone who is adept at stretching a budget creatively. Participation will require some pre-production meetings in the fall semester and a heavier commitment during production in the spring. Also looking for art department support for those who would like to be involved with a lesser commitment.

Spring Courses of Interest in Steinhardt's Media, Culture, and Communication Dept.

Dear Students-

Professors in Steinhardt's department of Media, Culture, and Communication have asked for the following spring course offerings to be shared with Draper students. If you are interested in enrolling in one of the courses below, you can contact the department directly. Please keep in mind, however, that credits earned in Steinhardt courses will count as transfer credits towards your Draper degree, and that GSAS will only allow a maximum of eight credits to be transferred. Before you enroll in one of the courses below, please contact Robert Dimit for approval at robert.dimit@nyu.edu.


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Media, Culture, and Communication
Spring 2011 Graduate Courses

See the department’s website for sample syllabi. Contact mcc.graduate@nyu.edu with questions.

E58.2030 Architecture as Media
Erica Robles
Wednesday 7:15 - 9:25 pm
Call number: 43154

This class reads architecture and the built environment through the lenses of media, communication, and culture. Through analyses of a range of spaces - from Gothic Cathedrals to suburban shopping malls to homes, factories, skyscrapers and digital cities - students will acquire a vocabulary for relating representations and practices, symbols and structures, and for identifying the ideological and aesthetic positions that produce settings for everyday life. 4 credits.

E58.2100 Seminar in Media Criticism I
Mark Crispin Miller
Monday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43155

Analysis of the media environment from a variety of critical perspectives. Emphasis on writing as well as reading media criticism. 4 credits.

E58.2129 New Media Research Studio
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Tuesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43471

This course is devoted to the research of new communication channels that evolved with the rise of information technology and digital connectivity. These new tools develop new practices, ethics and power relations and require us to approach them from a different angle. Since the pace of digital media adoption is constantly increasing we will try to develop a more experimental research practice, in which we will act as participating agents within the explored new media environments. In that sense students should expect to be ‘embedded' and ‘report from' deep within social networking sites, multi-player online immersive environments, the blogosphere, the open source movement, internet based media art, cell phone networks, and more. The practice would resemble field journalism and will encounter the similar anthropological conflicts of the researcher's role in its subject of research. Projects will be executed both in groups and individually and will be using an assortment of collaborative web tools to conduct and document the research online. In addition to the individual researches each week will feature a theme and will be discussed through assigned reading, listening and viewing materials. 4 credits.

E58.2140 Issues in Organizational Communication
Deborah Borisoff
Wednesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43156

Students examine major concepts and issues related to organizational communication including: 1) types of organizational cultures; 2) dimensions of organizational entry (e.g. the interview process); assimilation (e.g., fitting in); and factors that influence this process (e.g., gender, culture, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation; 3) examination of how employees and work are valued; 4) transformations in leadership (e.g., how it is defined; enacted); 5) diverse channels of communication (e.g., face-to-face; working in teams; the impact of technology; 6) effective strategies for dealing with conflict in organizational settings (e.g., communication strategies; work/life challenges). 4 credits

E58.2165 Transnational Communities and Media Cultures
Radha Hegde
Monday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43472

This course examines the emergence of transnational communities, recent patterns of migration, and the role of media forms and practices in redefining culture and national belonging. We will explore how media practices define culture and identity for diasporic groups within the landscape of global cities. What role do media play in the (re)imagining of cultural politics, nationalism, and everyday life in the context of global relocations? How do technology and media enable new configurations of cultural resistance and identification within (and between) different immigrant groups? What does this mean in terms of negotiating the global and local in various aspects of immigrant lives? 4 credits.

E58.2184 Comparative Media Systems
Rodney Benson
Tuesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 40827

How are news media similar or different around the world? Beyond the personal idiosyncrasies of individual journalists and media owners, which factors play the greatest role in shaping "national news cultures": professional values and traditions, level and type of commercialism, government regulations, bureaucratic pressures or organizational dynamics, and/or audiences? Too much of our media criticism proceeds from hunches and assumptions, rather than real evidence, for the simple reason that it limits itself to a single national context (and often a single time period). International comparative research allows us to "see" in new ways, test existing theories, and develop new ones. This course offers a conceptual and methodological guide (drawing on theories of Habermas, Bourdieu, Castells, and the latest work in the sociologies of culture, news, and globalization) to mapping the world's increasingly complex and inter-connected media environments. After a general consideration of the factors that structure news media systems and the roles that media play in democratic societies, the course incorporates (1) a survey of comparative methodologies: ethnography, in-depth interviewing, surveys, discourse and image analyses, etc., and (2) national, trans-national, and comparative case studies, representing the major types of Western European journalistic "models" as well as some important non-European variants. 4 credits.

E58.2200 Media Events and Spectacle
Salvatore Fallica
Wednesday 7:15 - 9:25 pm
Call number: 40828

The focus of this course is the analysis of our contemporary image- based mass culture. The mass mind is a metaphor that describes the various sources that have produced these artifacts of contemporary culture. So, the "what" of the mass mind is located in and around the culture industries that develop, produce and distribute the images, narratives, sounds and events that create the fabric of everyday life. Two major questions dominate the semester: How have we tried to understand this mass culture in the past? And, how do modern scholars try to explain this culture today? In past versions of this course we have studied the sitcom and the various sub-genres of television including advertising. We have studied the Superbowl and other forms of media events, standup comedy, talk show culture, nineteenth and twentieth century minstrelsy, men's and women's magazine culture, Shakespeare in popular culture, and, of course, contemporary music - from Bing Crosby to Ludacris.

Some possible texts include: Philip Auslander, 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge; Nick Couldry, 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. New York: Routledge; Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Joli Jensen, 2002. Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs About High Culture in American Life. New York, Rowman & Littlefield; McNair, Brian. 2002. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire. New York, Routledge; Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, 2004. Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York, New York University Press. 4 credits.

E58.2201 Mediating the Biopolitical Body
Allen Feldman
Monday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43157

This seminar will engage the political philosophy and media ethnography of human and nonhuman bodies. We will explore the body and animality as political media through Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, Esposito, Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger, Arendt and Merleau-Ponty. Today's wars on terror, refugees, migrant labor, minorities and the immune compromised are campaigns of inhumanization that condition what counts and does not count as human through inoculating images of humanity's alters, and antagonists; all those bodies which lack humanity and signify the human in that lack. Emblematic visions of the monstrous, grotesque and disfigured do not mask and distort a determining political reality lying behind such images but are in themselves formative and structuring forces by which an order of bodies-human and unhuman-- is crafted in acts of political speciation. The political is today poised between a sovereign humanitas and a bestial, monstrous and creaturely inhumanitas comprised of communicating, excommunicated and communicable bodies. Is animality the negated and yet necessary staging ground of the political? Is the creaturely the inadequate name for what cannot be mastered by the anthropological machine? Is biopower condemned to visualizing its exception and what exceeds it as bestial life? The animal/ human faultline in Western metaphysical thought and practice can be remapped as zoopolitics where animality as political species navigates times and spaces of violent exposure, disappearance and abandonment but where animal embodiment is also a zoo-anarchism that trespasses across the thresholds of anthropologizing biopower. 4 credits.

E58.2286 Young People and Media Cultures
Joellen Fisherkeller
Tuesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 40833

What roles do popular media play in society and culture, and in particular the experiences, thinking and values of young people? How should we address the issues raised by the contemporary communication environment, and by the reality of young people's interactions with popular media? In this course, we will consider these questions. We will focus on debates and issues raised by various media environments that now characterize contemporary existence and young people's growth and experiences. Most importantly, we will investigate how young people actually use, value, and find meaning in multiple media in different social contexts, and discuss the social, cultural, and political implications of these situations. Finally, we will propose some ways to deal with the issues raised by the course.

Readings include: Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media (Polity Press, 2000); Fisherkeller, JoEllen Growing Up with Television: Everyday Learning among Young Adolescents (Temple University Press, 2002); Packet of Readings that focus on children and youth in media cultures. 4 credits.

E58.2304 Global Media and International Law
Ted Magder
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43329

This course examines the history and role of international law and international regulatory instruments as they pertain to global media governance. It provides an historical overview of the various institutions and actors involved in global media governance, and assesses the various principles and practices that constitute the regime of global media governance, including the regulation of broadcasting, telecommunications, the Internet, and trade in media products. Students will undertake original research in a selected area of global media governance with careful attention to original documents in the field. 4 credits.

E58.2310 Sound Studies
Martin Scherzinger
Tuesday 7:15 - 9:25 pm
Call number: 43160

This course examines central themes in the emerging field of "Sound Studies". We explore a range of histories, archaeologies and ethnographies of sound and listening, as it intersects with topics in media studies, metaphysics, science and technology studies, political economy and musicology. How has our experience of sound changed as we move from the piano to the personal computer, from the phonoautograph to the mp3? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we are able to listen to, and how we listen to it? Finally, how have performers, physiologists, architects, acousticians, engineers and philosophers worked to understand this radical transformation of the senses? 4 credits.

E58.2382 Topics in Globalization: International Development
Helga Tawil-Souri
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43202

This course introduces students to theoretical foundations in historical and contemporary issues in communication and international development. Topics include state-building, modernization, dependency and globalization, as they concern the ‘Third World.'

Part One of the course focuses on mainstream development, its proponents (such as the UN, the World Bank and international non-profit organizations) and its application and practice. Part Two will delve into the critiques of development and its connections to longer historical, political and economic inequalities, such as imperialism, colonialism and globalization. In Part Three, each class will be devoted to a particular topic or problem and relevant case studies from they key regions (Latin America/Carribean; Africa; Middle East; Asia; "The Fourth World") that students will present on.

This is an inter-disciplinary course that draws on readings in political science, economics, history, sociology, communications and media research, and public policy. Topics of discussion are international in scope, and encourage cross-linkages between different theoretical concepts and geographical locations. Keeping up with global affairs, gaining familiarity with economic terms, looking up historical events, etc. are of utmost importance. 4 credits.

E58.2405 Topics in Visual and Cultural Studies: Communism and the Cold War
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Thursday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43410

In the era of the permanent memorial, it is noticeable that Communism and the Cold War are being increasingly marginalized in accounts of present-day crises. This class offers a counterpoint by examining the legacies of these experiences in visual and cultural studies. It suggests a different history of the present than is usually told, with particular regard to visuality in film, art and performance. Each participant will undertake a research project using materials in the Tamiment Library (and elsewhere if needed) and will present the results in a mini-conference at the end of the semester. 4 credits.

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Larissa Kyzer
Program Administrator
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John W. Draper Master's Program
New York University
Graduate School of Arts and Science
14 University Place
New York, NY  10003
ph: (212) 998-8678
fax: (212) 995-4691
http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/page/home

Guest entry by Nina Hien, Art Worlds

SEMINARRATING
Serial Memories of Seminars
[part 1]

The word seminar comes from the term seminarium or “seed plot”. Add a “y” and you have “seminary”, which attaches a religious institutional connotation to it. Discipline, dissemination, and devotion are clearly written into the success of this process of the germination and cultivation of knowledge. Like gardening, it is a hands-on pursuit that ideally relies on communal efforts. Someone lays out the plot with the intention of inseminating and reproducing his ideas. I say “his” because this is the role of the professor, who, by no small note, has commonly been gendered as male through these seminal terms. But the growth of the patch also falls into the dutiful hands of the group, the students, who are supposed to reap the greatest amount of fruits from the harvest. Beyond the roots of patriarchy and agriculturing found at the bottom of the concept of the seminar, a utopian strain seems also to be grafted onto it. (But perhaps I am reading these qualities into the practice because I spent so many years at Cornell University—a land-grant institution in a rural upstate farming community that had been founded by a former Quaker.)

With all that in mind, even with all of the variations that a seminar can take due to diverse subject matter, disciplinary modes, institutional contexts, and individual pedagogical styles and professorial personalities, it seems that perhaps some tiny seedlings of insight about them can be culled from a private conservatory filled with snaps and shoots of memories from the more than two decades in which I was a participant and witness in university seminars (both as a student and as a teacher). With the following recollections, I have no intention of asserting any grand, generalized or scientific claims about the current state of “the seminar”. However, from these seminal fragments (and their contexts) perhaps this rarefied form of language and interaction and academic construct can be demystified a speck, which could then be particularly relevant to us here at the Draper, a program based on seminar learning and positioned on the ground and in the air between the more square plots of traditional disciplines.

The Seminar of the Confusion of Tongues (tied or babbling), circa late 1980s at The University of Missouri Journalism School—Columbia, MO

During this period, two earth-shattering shifts that would change our perception of the world as we knew it were underway. The first could be spotted through what turned out to be the tragic fate of an innovative professor at the J-School who had been formulating ideas about what he called, “The Knowledge Tablet”. Conceiving this to be the ultimate tool in which anyone could punch in a question and get spit out an answer, his research was likely blown to bits as soon as the World Wide Web and Google—the ultimate knowledge tablet—exploded onto the scene a few years later. The second shift could be marked when the multi-cultural management program at the school published its "Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases"—a list of politically incorrect words. The student reporters working at the J-School newspaper—one of the two daily papers in the city—could no longer use terms like “Dutch-treat”, “illegal aliens” and “third-world countries” in their articles. “Black”, once an acceptable word to identify an “African-American” person, was also to be avoided for that objective. Needless to say, these constrictions resulted in much convoluted and repressed thought within an enterprise in which clarity and concision are major goals. They were also the cause of many daily practical blunders. But at play as well at this point when racial and ethnic categories were being reconfigured through a strong wave of identity politics, were the J-School’s own black-and-white categorical binaries and hierarchies that transcended skin color. People were either pegged as innate “word people” or “picture people”. I believed that the basic word-image distinction was ludicrous because in my experience as a writer, sights and visual senses informed the images that were used to produce good writing.

So in this technologically transforming, racially charged and dichotomizing environment, I enrolled in a seminar on cross-cultural mass media. The teacher, who had a doctorate in communication studies, was a new professor (and was, if not the first “black” female professor in the history of the program, definitely the first “African-American” woman faculty member). The course content included press systems in “developing countries” and interrogated the strategic power maneuvers and values that determine what becomes newsworthy in the United States. This was a loaded focus because it directly considered “racial” and “minority” injustices as well as “ethnic” and “cultural” “issues”. The discussions throughout the semester were pretty stilted and stifled with only certain students speaking up, and others remaining silent. Attempting to explain this awkward imbalance, the professor remarked that the class was comprised of two kinds of people—adding to the order a new set of binaries, which resonated with the word/picture one.

The broadcast journalists (the image people) were articulate, chatty, expressive, and could work magic with surfaces. The print journalists (the text people)—and I was in this print-concentration camp—were reticent, but better at writing papers and achieving depth. As much as I hated tags, there did seem to be some truth to these. I then started to think that what may have actually been squelching the speech of some students had a lot to do with their anxiety about using the wrong terms and language, especially when discussing these sensitive topics with an African-American professor in this awkward environment of political correctness. And perhaps the text folks were more easily susceptible because of their attachment to word craft, which clearly affected newspapers more than televisions. The broadcasters were not only more comfortable with different modes of self-presentation, but they were taught to speak in sound bytes and be led by the lines of teleprompters. They also dealt with a much more glossy and general form of news, much of which they hadn’t written themselves. Beyond that, some of them had been instructed in public speaking and had developed stellar verbal gate-keeping skills so they were more adept at thinking appropriately in public spheres.

But through these apparent differences, I began also to contemplate the diverse ways and speeds at which individual people acquire knowledge, process information and then articulate it. And also, how aptitude is largely conditioned by professional background and training, as well as the circulating political ideologies, the media technologies already on the table, and the new media impulses coursing throughout the air. At that point, I imagined being a teacher who would bring forms of visual media into active play in the seminar—on the one hand to create engaged discussions, and on the other, to observe the relationships between visual, verbal and textual content and communication. (I knew there would never be an answer to these questions on any old Knowledge Tablet.)

So, in this land located on the edge of the fertile Missouri River bottoms, the seeds of experimentation with vision, visuality, virtuality, textuality, verbality and verbosity were implanted. Here at the Draper Program, they have started to sprout as I plot my seminars, prod the students to really toil the soil, and cultivate courses, always with many more seeds in hand (and pocket).

[More to come…Part 2: “The Seminars of Striking Poses, Seminar Vogue-ing and Blush Exchanges". Part 3: "The Seminars of Artificial Insemination & Artificial Intelligence"]

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NYU Media, Culture, and Communication Program: Neil Postman Graduate Conference, 10/30

Event Date & Time

Friday, October 30, 2009
9:00 AM - 6:00 PM

Location

Helen Mills Theater
(137 West 26th Street)

This conference is free and open to all those interested as seating allows. Please RSVP so we have an accurate count for catering. Thank you!

Schedule of Presentations

9:00 Doors open | Coffee served

9:15 Welcome

* Marita Sturken, Chair
* Rod Benson, Director of Graduate Studies

9:30 Panel I – Vision, Sound and/as Commodity

* Jamie Berthe, “Deconstructing Tarzan or Reconstructing Racial Hierarchies?”
* Melissa De Witte, “Memory and the Spectacle: Phantom and fantasy in a new economy of the image”
* Jennifer Heuson, “Soundscapes of the Black Hills: An acoustemology of the American West”
* Faculty moderator: Martin Scherzinger

11:00 Panel II – Politics of Memory

* Lisa Gitelman, "Daniel Ellsberg and the lost idea of the photocopy"
* Hatim El-Hibri, “Sectarianism, Maps and Beirut: From the French Mandate through the end of the civil war (1920-1991)”
* Christine Weible, “How the creation of museums and memorials at the site of the ex-ESMA is impacting collective memory of the Dirty War in Argentina”
* Scott Selberg, "Cognitive Fever: Remembering Alzheimer's at the National Library of Medicine"
* Faculty moderator: Nicholas Mirzoeff

12:45 Lunch served

1:30 Brian Larkin, Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University

2:45 Break

3:00 Panel III – Media Activism

* Victor Pickard, "Crises and Opportunities in the Ongoing Struggle for Public Service Media"
* Evan Brody, “(De)scribing Disease: Capitalist HIV imagery and cultural memory”
* Dwaipayan Banerjee, “Media Activism in its Local Place: Lessons from Bhopal”
* Marco Deseriis, “The Faker as Producer: Politics of fabrication and the three orders of the fake”
* Faculty moderator: Allen Feldman

4:45 Reception | Drinks served

Call for Papers: The Cultural Visualization of Hurricane Katrina

Invisible Culture: A Journal For Visual Culture

Deadline for Papers: October 15, 2009

Guest Editors: Nicola Mann and Victoria Pass, University of Rochester

The Cultural Visualization of Hurricane Katrina

Over the past four years, various forms of visual media have focused their lenses on the swathes of watery land that make up the Mississippi delta. Since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in summer of 2005, the region and its residents have been subject to intense televisual, filmic, artistic, and media-based scrutiny. From Geraldo Rivera’s tearful live reports from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, to Kanye West’s frustrated declaration at the NBC Concert for Hurricane Relief that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” to the widely acclaimed documentary film Trouble the Water (2008), images of the hurricane, the people it affected (and continues to affect), and the land it ravaged have been projected into our living rooms through a series of visual representations.

Much of the scholarship on this topic has focused on socio-cultural issues including rebuilding strategies, the failure of homeland security, and testimonial accounts of “survivors” or “witnesses.” This issue aims to analyze representations of Katrina and its aftermath using the methodologies of visual and cultural studies. We are interested in the ways that analyses of the politics of representation, as exemplified in the case of Katrina, opens up into a discussion the evolution of visual and cultural studies in the last ten or twenty years.

We seek papers that consider visual representations of Hurricane Katrina in a ways unimaginable at earlier points in the intersection between visual studies and cultural studies. From CNN.com’s award winning “Voices from the Gulf Coast” podcasts, to the various discussion blogs that have emerged in the wake of the event, to Google Earth’s satellite imagery overlays of the devastation in the affected region, to the television show “Extreme Makeover: Hurricane Katrina Home Edition,” we have seen in Katrina’s aftermath a plethora of new modes of visual diffusion. Furthermore, the intensification of mass media, both in terms of the sheer quantity of media outlets and in the reach of its dissemination, has given rise to a new experience of historical time and geographic proximity, in which we experience historical events through media representations almost immediately as they happen and regardless of where they occur.

Additionally, the interactivity of new media has reoriented the producer/consumer binary of traditional media. We are interested in the representational politics of these new visual rhetorics and in the new and often hybrid apparatuses through which we experience them. For example, a critical alternative to the mainstream news media’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina arose across multiple platforms. When compared to more “traditional” documentary forms of disaster representation such the Associated Press’ controversial global dissemination of “looting” photographs, does the immediacy and interactive nature of new media responses render their vision more absolute, real, and perhaps most importantly, “true”?

Is the semiotic approach of, for example, Roland Barthes on photography—which arose in relation to a very different mode of cultural production—still relevant? Can the even earlier model of Frankfurt School-style ideology critique help us to understand popular culture and its capacity for social change? How might these now-familiar methodologies be refashioned for the current culture? Or what methods have eclipsed them? One key concern of this issue is whether technological shifts and advancements in the dissemination of media over the past twenty years have changed the way we see beyond the recognition of our interpretive paradigms. If the object of visual studies has changed, how might we adapt the discipline to engage with the current mode(s) of cultural production?

Accepted essays will accompany the transcript of an upcoming roundtable discussion between the founders of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester’s co-founders, on the occasion of the program’s twentieth anniversary (Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Kaja Silverman, Constance Penley, and Janet Wolff; moderated by Douglas Crimp).

Possible avenues for the exploration include, but are not limited to:


Films:
-The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
- Trouble the Water (2008)
-When the Levees Broke (2008), Spike Lee
-Hellp, Darren Martinez

Blogs:
New Orleans Ladder
The Survival of New Orleans weblog
Nola blog

Televisual depictions of the hurricane and responses to it, for example:
-news coverage of “looting”
-Comic Relief (2006)
-House (May 16, 2006), FOX
-Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, “The Christmas Show,” (Dec. 4, 2006)
-The Daily Show

Artistic responses to Hurricane Katrina:
Prospect 1: New Orleans (international biennial)
News photographs
“Remembering Katrina,” the official Hurricane Katrina souvenir program.

Mainstream news journalism
Urban renewal efforts
Personal photographs

NOLA:
NOLA tourism
The disappearance of “authentic” indigenous NOLA culture
NOLA outside of Bourbon Street
Representations of local culture in New Orleans

Please send inquiries and completed papers (MLA style) of 2,500 – 5,000 words to Nicola Mann (nmann2[at]mail[dot]rochester[dot]edu) and Victoria Pass (vpass[at]mail[dot]rochester[dot]edu) by October 15, 2009.

In Visible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book and exhibition
reviews (600-1000 words). To submit book or exhibition review proposals please email ivcbookreviews[at]gmail[dot]com. For a list of reviewable titles, see:
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Reviews/review_copies.html

***********
Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture is a peer-reviewed
journal dedicated to explorations of the material and political dimensions of
cultural practices: the means by which cultural objects and communities are
produced, the historical contexts in which they emerge, and the regimes of
knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute.

http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/