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

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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/

Possible E-Mail Scam: "Academic Publishing at LAP"

Several Draper alumni have received emails from "LAP Lambert Academic Publishing AG & Co." indicating that their theses have been selected for possible publication. While some small publishing companies do exist to publish student theses (particularly abroad) Draper cannot vouch for the validity of the offers contained in emails from LAP. Moreover, even if the emails are making valid offers, it is unlikely that such a company would offer peer-review services or any significant distribution, rendering this type of publication relatively useless.

Draper encourages students to exercise caution before pursuing any publishing agreement such as the ones outlined in the emails from LAP.

Daniel Thurs: Debunking Myths in Galileo Goes to Jail

Daniel Thurs, Draper's Faculty Fellow in Science Studies, recently contributed to a collection of essays entitled Galileo Goes to Jail. In the collection, 25 scholars debunk commonly held myths about the relationship of science and religion. Below, Daniel writes in more detail about the collection, mythologies, and the idea that scholars should spend time 'debunking' myths at all.

I frequently think about a book I once read in a seminar on the American Revolution. It was written by a historian named Edmund Morgan and called Inventing the People. In the introduction, Morgan claimed that all political systems require certain fictions to work, and he went on to show how the founding fathers constructed the notion that an “American people” existed and could guarantee the legitimacy of democratic government. But it’s not just political systems that need fictions. Mythologies—sometimes even patently false ones—are common in almost all areas of human endeavor. In that sense, lots of truths are inconvenient.

There are few topics that have attracted so many myths as the relationship between science and religion (most typically Christianity, though not solely). This is especially true here-in the US—and now—in the early twenty-first century—when claims about science and religion frequently become entangled in political arguments between right and left. But such myths are also a part of popular culture. I was recently watching an episode of Torchwood—for those of you who don’t know, it’s a Dr. Who spin-off—in which one character reflected on the (fictional) growing awareness of extraterrestrials among the general population and the consequent increase in suicides. This was, he noted, especially among religious people who thought that the existence of aliens meant science had “won.” In fact, Christian theologians made peace with the possibility of life on other worlds several centuries ago.

A new collection of essays called Galileo Goes to Jail aims to debunk 25 myths about science and religion, including that the Medieval Christians believed that the earth was flat (no educated Christian believed this, and those that did didn’t do so because of their religious convictions), that Medieval Islam was unfriendly to science (there were some mixed feelings, but also significant official support for the study of nature), that the Church prohibited human dissection during the middle ages (they didn’t in any robust way, though norms discouraged it from pre-Christian times), that Copernicanism demoted humans from the center of the universe (it did not in any meaningful sense), that Galileo was tortured for advocating heliocentrism (he wasn’t), that Rene Descartes originated the mind-body distinction (he didn’t), and that science has secularized modern western culture (it hasn’t).

The overarching myth that many of these essays deal with is that science and religion are (and have always been) necessarily in conflict. Several of the faculty members of the graduate program I went to were major figures in the history of science and religion—-one, Ron Numbers, was both my advisor and editor of Galileo Goes to Jail (you’d have to ask him which was more of an honor)—and I learned from them that the two main culprits in creating this master-myth during the late 1800s were Andrew Dickson White (who co-founded Cornell) and John William Draper (for whom the Draper Program is named). Both wrote and spoke extensively about the “warfare” between science and religion. It’s an ironic aside that my two major post-Ph.D. jobs were at Cornell and here at Draper.

My own contribution to Galileo was not directly about what is often called “the warfare thesis.” Rather, like a handful of other essays in the book, it’s more concerned with the alternative belief in a deep-seated harmony between scientific and religious conceptions. I wrote about the claim that quantum mechanics supported the notion of human free will in particular, and, in general, what might be called mysticism, typically derived from western interpretations of Buddhism (though it’s worth pointing out that the current Dalai Lama is a big fan of QM). Taking that claim apart turns out to be a complicated task, actually, and less about debunking a myth than taking an opportunity to tell an interesting story about the subtle interactions between scientific ideas (such as the mathematical nature of wave equations) and mystical ones (such as the interconnectedness of all things or the ability of the human mind to determine reality). I leave the legitimacy of such interactions to other people to hash out.

Of course, while the relationship of science and religion has attracted more than its share of myths, it’s not the only science-related topic that has done so. Over the past couple of years, my own interests have shifted toward the misunderstandings that cluster around the interface between another pair of categories: science and the public. There are some similarities with the case of science and religion, including a frequent sense of conflict in the past and the present. The upcoming special topics seminar in Science Studies this fall will look in particular at the idea of public fear of science and technology, which is itself sometimes supposedly rooted in traditional religious beliefs. It’s a truism now that the masses will panic if extraterrestrial life is ever discovered—something like the dark side of “the people.” Part II of the Science Studies Intro in the spring will look more generally at ways in which science and the public have been in harmony, in conflict, and even ignored one another.

One final thought that I think about as much as Morgan’s claim. Debunking myths is a particularly attractive exercise for scholars insofar as it draws on their expertise, but there may also be a certain note of arrogance in it. I haven’t as yet figured out the best way of dealing with this quandary or the larger questions it raises about what sort of role experts and intellectuals ought to play in the world. I suspect the answer is ultimately about approach—using one’s scholarly training as a resource rather than a weapon. Whether the authors of Galileo Goes to Jail managed to do that, you’ll have to judge for yourself. I think we did.

Daniel Thurs

NYPL Student Event: 9.15.09

Student reception & introduction to the world's premiere performing arts library!

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

6:30-8:30pm


The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts cordially invites you to join us for an evening of drinks, hors d'oeuvres, entertainment, and the opportunity to learn about the unique collections, scholarly opportunities, programs, and services at your local world class performing arts library. Meet and reconnect with other students and faculty from the New York City area.

RSVP required (see below).

When: Tuesday, September 15th, 2009. 6:30-8:30pm

Where: Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, Plaza level entrance

Please RSVP by September 9th to: pagepaa@nypl.org

Directions: To reach the Lincoln Center Plaza entrance, enter the plaza, which is located west of Broadway and Columbus Avenue from W. 62nd to W. 65th Street. The Library is between the Metropolitan Opera House and the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Due to construction, look for directional signs along the way to the Library.

For MTA and further info, go here.

July Workshops: Tamiment Library 101

Tamiment Library 101

A series of informal workshops introducing researchers to the printed, archival, and visual collections of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives will be offered in July.

Workshops are one hour long and will take place in the Tamiment Library on the 10th Floor of Bobst Library. No advance sign-up is required.

Printed Collections Workshop, Wed, 7/22/09, 3-4
Archival Collections Workshop, Thurs, 7/30/09, 2-3 pm
Visual Collections Workshop, Fri, 7/31/09, 2-3 pm

Please see the program flyer for full details.