Virtual Lecture Series Archive
On this page you will find the abstracts of the past Virtual Lecture Series talks and the links to the recordings.
The talks, with speakers’ permission, are archived on the Internet Archive.
List of past talks (click on the title to scroll down to the abstract):
The Care Collective, ‘Repairing Care’ →
Xiaofei YANG, ‘Hidden voices: researching women in Chinese queer fandom with affects’ →
Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer, ‘Translating Cultural Studies’ →
Nedine Moonsamy, ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Methods of Speculation in African Popular Culture’ →
Timothy Laurie, ‘The Boys Who Look: Previewing Masculinities through Boyhoods on Screen’ →
Natalija Majsova, ‘Remembering (at) Will, Minus the Nostalgia: Toward a Post-Socialist Space Age’ →
João Florêncio, ‘Pig Masculinities: Reflections on a Contemporary Gay Sex Subculture’ →
Angela Okune, ‘Postcolonial Objectivity: Reaching for Decolonial Knowledge Making in Nairobi’ →
Mark Anthony Neal, ‘‘Promise That You Will [Tweet] about Me’: Black Death in the Digital Era’ →
Danai Mupotsa, ‘Sovereignty/ Freedom’ →
Megan Wood, ‘Our Personhood, Ourselves: Political Identity After Citizens United & Hobby Lobby‘ →
Fan Yang, ‘Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South?’ →
Jaron Rowan, ‘Weird Ecologies. Towards a more than human idea of culture’ →
James Thurgill, ‘Literary Geographies of Folklore’ →
Mark Maletska, ‘Approaching gender identity through video games’ →
Deborah Rebello Lima, ‘Brazilian Policies of Culture – a panorama of the last 20 years’ →
Nomusa Makhubu, ‘Radical Solidarity in a Quiet Crisis’ →
Diana Adesola Mafe, ‘Haunted Houses of the Black Atlantic‘ →
Holly Randell-Moon, ‘Environments of Power: Protectionism, Race, and Biopower in Australia’ →
Poppy Wilde, ‘Posthumanism and play: Embodying avatar-gamer entanglements’ →
Mengyu Luo, ‘Power Dynamics in Shanghai’s Cultural Production: Music, Heritage, and Institutions’ →
The Care Collective – Repairing Care
May 21st 2021
5-6PM BST (GMT +1)
Abstract: What would it mean to put care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis? We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way. In this talk the Care Collective, drawing on their work The Care Manifesto, discuss how we might reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, by making it the organising principle in every dimension and scale of life: from intimate care — childcare, healthcare, elder care — to care for the natural world. Discussing corporate ‘carewashing’ during the pandemic and co-operative alternatives, and making the case for promiscuous care beyond borders, they argue that we need to ‘repair care’ in theory and practice: because we are all dependent on each other and it is only by nurturing these interdependencies that we can cultivate a world in which we can all live and thrive.
The Care Collective is Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg and Lynne Segal.
Andreas Chatzidakis is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Ethics at the School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway University of London. His works include Contemporary Issues in Marketing and Consumer Behaviour (2017) and Ethics and Morality in Consumption (2016). @Chatzidakis_A.
Dr Jamie Hakim worked at Attitude magazine from 2003 and is now Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at Kings College London, UK. He is Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project ‘Digital Intimacies’, partnered with the Terrance Higgins Trust, and author of Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture (2019). @hakimjamie
Jo Littler is Professor in the Sociology Department and the Gender and Sexualities Research Centre at City, University of London, UK. Her books include Against Meritocracy (2018) Radical Consumption? (2008) and with Roshi Naidoo The Politics of Heritage: The legacies of ‘race’’ (2005). @littler_jo
Dr Catherine Rottenberg is Associate Professor in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her books include The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018) and Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side (2014)
Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her many books include Beyond the Fragments (1980) What is to be done about the family? (1983) Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics (1999) Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (2007) Straight Sex (1994) Making Trouble (2007) and Out of Time (2013) @lynne_segal
Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer (University of Heidelberg) – Translating Cultural Studies
July 29th 2021
3-4PM CEST (GMT +2)
Abstract: In this talk I engage with the transculturalization of Cultural Studies as a “traveling” intellectual project by focusing on the theoretical and political implications of translating it. Here I mean translation not so much in its literal sense, or as an automatic process – you bring something from A to B and it gets translated – but as the result of cultural choices which are political because they are embedded in the politics of culture, independent of the translator.
The talk picks up on a still topical debate which emerged during the internationalization of Cultural Studies in the early 90s, which questioned the very use of labels such as “internationalization” or “globalization” with respect to Cultural Studies, and expressed concerns about whether its expansion from Britain to the rest of the world would happen at the expense of its political commitment. I aim to reframe this problem in light of:
a. more recent trends in language and translation studies which attempt to overcome the very concept of language (English, Arabic, etc.) by focusing on processes of languaging, understood as intrinsically heterogeneous;
b. some personal reflections deriving from my experience of doing Cultural Studies in German academia in the context of the so-called “Foreign Language Philologies” (Fremdsprachenphilologien).
Against this background, I conceive of Cultural Studies not as something embedded in a linear process of translation (A is translated into B), but as the political context in which translation processes happen. The question thus becomes how to translate Cultural Studies according to its political commitment. Building on Umberto Eco’s definition of translation as “saying almost the same thing”, I will discuss some concrete examples of languaging Cultural Studies with respect to building intellectual networks, theorizing, and teaching.
Bio: Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer is a senior lecturer for Cultural Studies in the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Heidelberg (Germany). She studied Italian Studies and History in Rome and completed a Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. Her research and teaching focus on linguistic diversity and intersectionality in the context of the transculturalization and mediatization of communication. Giulia is a founding member of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, where she serves as Co-chair of the “Transcultural Life-Worlds” Section, and Co-editor of the book series Studien der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft. She is a former fellow of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”) and has engaged in several projects on multilingualism and media pedagogy relating to her activism at a free radio station. A full list of publications can be found here.
Nedine Moonsamy (University of Pretoria) – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Methods of Speculation in African Popular Culture<
August 26th 2021
3-4PM SAST (GMT +2)
Abstract: Gaining recognition from mega-brands like Marvel through the success of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), Afrofuturism is a well-established field for black speculation in popular culture in the West. Yet as an increasing number of artists and theorists take to this field, there is a discernible grappling with the influence and interruption of global forms that bifurcates the practice and the experience of African speculative imaginaries. In an attempt to provide a methodological form for addressing these nuanced positionalities and differences, this presentation deploys the three main categorical distinctions used by the Waste Hierarchy – reduce, reuse and recycle.
In line with Stephanie Newell’s observation that Africa has served as a material and discursive dumping ground for the Western world (Histories of Dirt), I also make use of the interpretative logic of waste in order to explore how African popular culture approaches this virtual wasteland with creative vigour through the configuration of speculative imaginaries whose strategies and styles are analogous to the three main categories of the waste hierarchy while also escaping the logic of a hierarchy per se. Instead, this undertaking is more suggestive of strategic variations that co-exist and amalgamate as part of a richer and more comprehensive account of African speculative imaginaries that actively reinscribe the inheritances of waste and its attendant methodologies.
– Please see the trailer for the presentation here –
Bio: Nedine Moonsamy is a Senior Lecturer in the English department at the University of Pretoria. She is currently writing a monograph on contemporary South African Fiction and otherwise conducts research on science fiction in Africa and is part of the Urban Cultures and Popular Imaginaries in Africa (UCAPI) project . Her debut novel, The Unfamous Five (Modjaji Books) was shortlisted for the HSS Fiction Award (2021), and her poetry was shortlisted for the inaugural New Contrast National Poetry Award (2021).
Timothy Laurie (University of Technology Sydney) – The Boys Who Look: Previewing Masculinities through Boyhoods on Screen
September 23rd 2021
5-6PM AEST (GMT +10)
Abstract: Contemporary boys studies has sought to navigate paths between multiple competing figures of the boyhood, including the boy “at risk” of failure or delinquency, especially within educational and policy discourses; the expressive or creative boy, who promises to departure from inherited gendered roles and expectations; and the boy as precursor to the man-to-come, viewed from the perspective of diverse adult masculinities. Between these figures, an exclusive focus on creative boys can risk neglecting the patterned social dynamics that reproduce gendered hierarchies and inequalities, while the over-emphasis on boys as men-to-come can risk dissolving the specificities of childhood and youth altogether.
This paper examines these issues through another kind of boy produced most often through cinema: the boy as witness. In particular, Australian cinema contains a multitude of stories in which boys learn lessons about gender through looking. From Australian Rules (2002) and Romulus, My Father (2007) to recent historical dramas The True History of the Kelly Gang (2019) and High Ground (2020), boys acquire privileged knowledge about gendered embodiment, and often gendered violence, through secretive watching. In this way, boyhood can assume two interrelated functions in cinema: the boy as the figure of innocence against the spectacle of men gone bad; and the boy as a proxy eye for the viewer, offering a point-of-view easily coloured by naivete, curiosity, and play. This double-function allows cinema to engage critically with scenes of violence that may otherwise have been considered overly voyeuristic.
However, these boys who look are not all the same, and these films make very different choices about what boys can see and know. In this paper, I argue that the looking relations sustained by these cinematic boys provide important opportunities to reflect on the role of feminist theory, and especially frameworks developed in feminist film studies, to inform the emerging priorities of boys studies. In doing so, I want to provide a novel viewpoint on problems of perceived boyhood innocence that persist within – and perhaps, remain endemic to – the development of boys studies as a scholarly project.
Bio: Timothy Laurie is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. Timothy’s current research is focused on Australian boys and cinema, as part of his role as a Chief Investigator on the Australia Research Council grant “Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem” (2021-2023). Timothy has recently co-authored The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures (Palgrave, 2021) with Hannah Stark, and co-edited Unsettled Voices: Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era (Routledge, 2021) with Tanja Dreher and Michael Griffiths. Timothy is also a Managing Editor for Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and the Graduate Research Coordinator in the School of Communication at UTS.
Natalija Majsova (University of Ljubljana) – Remembering (at) Will, Minus the Nostalgia: Toward a Post-Socialist Space Age
October 29th 2021
4-5PM CEST/ Central European Summer Time (GMT +2)
Abstract: In the context of Soviet film production, the genre of science fiction was a tool for articulating visions of the future: for visualizing them, clarifying and contesting their axiological underpinnings, mapping out their infrastructures and even fantasizing about their legacies. Three decades after the disintegration of the USSR, Soviet science fiction cinema belongs to a set of markedly different registers. Diverse memory practices have transformed it from a site of the future (lieu de l’avenir, Geppert 2012) into a site of memory (lieu de mémoire, Nora 1984) often labelled as an attribute of post-Soviet nostalgia. Taking a step back from the hegemonic nostalgic discourse, this lecture presents some of the implications of thinking with Soviet science fiction as both futurist and heritage; as prescriptive, commemorative, reflexive and modern at the same time, activating and accelerating its world-building impetus. I draw on select – iconic, and less-so, even offbeat, and somewhat obscure – productions and their multidirectional contributions to the post-socialist imaginary of the space age and space futures, with a particular focus on the nexus between the human and the technological. I explore the processes of semiotic condensation that take place in popular culture and interested communities of practice (e.g. online fan communities), pointing to the entanglements between narrativization, visualization, and technological transformations, and to the significance of these entanglements for the imaginary of the past and future in the post-transitional, post-socialist context.
Bio: Natalija Majsova is an assistant professor and research associate at the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Ljubljana, and an occasional film critic and essayist. Her research interests include memory studies, science fiction, (post)Soviet film and space age aesthetics. Her monograph Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age: Memorable Futures was published with Lexington Books in 2021.
Lisa Daily (New York University) – The ‘Empathy Arms Race’: Humanitarian Immersive Technologies & the Implications of Empathy from Afar
November 18th, 2021
12-1 PM EST/ Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5)
Abstract: During the 2015 United Nations General Assembly meeting, the UN opened its first “wormhole,” a “gateway to an entirely different world” made accessible through virtual reality, and enabling spectators to glimpse the reality of the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan “through the eyes of a little girl.” What is commonly called the “empathy machine” signals the possibilities of immersive technologies to allow spectators to “step into the shoes” of another. This empathy has become big business for humanitarian organizations and the private sector alike to such a point that a UN official acknowledges an “empathy arms race,” meaning that nongovernmental organizations are competing to produce “experience after experience meant to tug at our heartstrings.” In this talk, I am especially concerned with the techno-utopian promise of virtual reality to garner empathy and its purported individual embodiments, which I argue fail to actualize the complexity of particular crises, their connections to regimes of power, racialization, gender inequalities, and histories of systemic oppression. Further, I analyze the ethical and political risks of supposed embodiment–when a privileged spectator attempts to step into the shoes (or see through the eyes) of marginalized populations. Humanitarian immersive technologies thus far abide by crucial visual conventions which were a part of a broader shift in imagery, away from suffering and towards the joy brought to those in need due to western aid and intervention. While these visual shifts may be understood as a result of compassion fatigue, I further argue that they parallel economic shifts towards the private sector, neoliberal subjectivity, and the power of the entrepreneurial individual to stymie systemic, historical, and structural crises. Such agency is not given to the subject within VR—the young refugee girl, for example—but rather operates within the realm of the empowered, embodied, and empathetic spectator, but towards what end?
Bio: Lisa Daily works and teaches at New York University as Director of Community Engagement and Associate Faculty at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Daily’s research interests center on visual culture, capitalist formations, humanitarianism, and consumer/commodity cultures with a focus on issues of inequality and power regarding race, gender, class politics, and geopolitical divides. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University and currently serves on the Governing Board for the Cultural Studies Association. She has previously managed several grant-funded creative writing and cultural exchange programs at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and taught Global Affairs, Cultural Studies, and humanities courses at George Mason University and the University of South Florida.
João Florêncio (University of Exeter) – ‘Pig Masculinities: Reflections on a Contemporary Gay Sex Subculture’
December 10th, 2021
5-6 PM GMT
(Attention: The presentation contains sexually explicit content)
Abstract: “Pig” has grown in visibility in the last two decades as a form of self-identification of gay men into more “extreme” kinds of sexual behaviour that often involve exchanges of bodily fluids and repeated multiple penetrations and dilations of the anal sphincter. Yet, the term “pig” has a longer history in the gay male scene, being traceable at least to pornographic print media of the 1970s, where it stood for “hungry” gay men into uninhibited kinds of sexual play. In this lecture, I will draw from that longer history of the gay “pig” and introduce some theoretical considerations on its latest manifestations as they have intersected with developments in the affordances of pornographic media and the introduction of antiretroviral drugs for the successful management and prophylaxis of HIV. Ultimately I contend that, by rejecting the Oedipal structures and body schemas that have sustained the development of the modern Western autonomous subject, gay “pig” sex and its 21st-century mediations can help us imagine new, more capacious, collective formations sustained by an ethics of sacrificial communion, one in which we cum into being through the unconditional opening of our bodies to the foreignness of strangers.
Bio: João Florêncio is Senior Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. A queer cultural theorist of sexuality, the body, and their visual cultures, his research navigates the ways in which the desiring-body has been produced, policed, mediated and contested as a site of creative world -making in modern and contemporary cultures. João’s work has appeared in Porn Studies, Sexualities, Performance Research, and Somatechnics, among other journals and edited collections. He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge,2020). His upcoming essay “Sexing the Archive: Queer Porn and Subcultural Histories,” co-written with Ben Miller (Graduate School of Global Intellectual History, Freie Universität Berlin), will be published next year in Radical History Review 142.]
Angela Okune (University of California) – ‘Postcolonial Objectivity: Reaching for Decolonial Knowledge Making in Nairobi’
January 20th, 2022
9:30-10:30 AM PST/ Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8)
Abstract: Based on work over the last decade within Nairobi’s tech-for-good sector, followed by a year of ethnographic research within organizations in Kenya’s research landscapes, I trace shifting contours and edges of what is considered to be good knowledge in scientific representation in Kenya. I scale between analyses of the political economy and geopolitics of translocal knowledge production to ethnographically rich descriptions of Kenyan histories of imperialism, publishing, and post-war Development. The asymmetrical knowledge infrastructures established have created conditions where everyday research amongst particular communities in Nairobi is often experienced as extractive, externally-driven, and extroverted for a Western audience. Some social scientists in Kenya are responding by pursuing knowledge that gains its validity through recognition of and grounding in its location. I call this emergent regime of scientific representation in Kenya “postcolonial objectivity” and suggest that a recurrent argument and goal of postcolonial objectivity is robust contextualization of knowledge. I close by discussing my own attempts towards postcolonial objectivity, working to build supporting technical infrastructure as an experimental space for collaborative effort to figure out what kinds of questions can be asked under postcolonial objectivity going forward.
Bio: Angela Okune studies data practices and infrastructures of research groups working in and on Nairobi, Kenya in order to explore broader questions of equity, knowledge production and socio-economic development in Africa. Angela received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine and has been awarded research fellowships by the National Science Foundation, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, and University of California Berkeley Center for Technology, Society and Policy. From 2010 – 2015, as co-founder of the research department at iHub, Nairobi’s innovation hub for the tech community, Angela provided strategic guidance for the growth of tech research in Kenya. She was a Network Coordinator for the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (2014 – 2018) and co-editor for open-access book Contextualizing Openness (University of Ottawa Press). She currently works as a Senior Program Manager at Code for Science and Society. Angela also serves on the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Council and as a Design Team member of the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE). Angela is an Associate Editor on a collective editorial team for the Open Access journal, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society and is a founding member of the experimental, open ethnographic data portal called Research Data Share (www.researchdatashare.org).
Mehdi Semati (Northern Illinois University) and Hadi Aghajanzadeh (University of Tehran) – Reading Stuart Hall in Iran: Mapping the Trajectories of Iranian Cultural Studies
February 23rd, 2022
1-2 PM CST/ Central Standard Time (GMT -6)
Abstract: Despite the circulation and institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Iran, a context where intellectuals of Stuart Hall’s stature are canonized, Hall was never fully embraced by various strands of critical thought. Moreover, in the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Iran some of Hall’s critical interventions (e.g., the “turn to Gramsci”) are either misappropriated or curiously left out of the story of Cultural Studies. In this paper we map the trajectories of the reading of Hall’s work in Iran, an effort that we argue best reveals the challenges Cultural Studies faces in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In order to do that this paper provides a critical reading of Hall’s reception in Iran in the context of local leftist intellectual traditions and debates, post-colonial revolutionary state and theology, and the entanglements of Cultural Studies with the state’s projects in cultural policy, and the critics of neoliberalism.
Bios: Mehdi Semati is Professor in Communication at Northern Illinois University. His writings on Iranian culture and media and cultural globalization have appeared in various scholarly journals including Cultural Studies. His books include an edited volume, entitled Media, Culture and Society in Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State (2008). He is the co-author of Iran and the American Media (2021).
Hadi Aghajanzadeh is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Tehran, Iran. He has published on Iranian Cultural Studies in various scholarly venues in Persian. His book (in Persian), Cultural Studies in Iran: Conjunctures of Politics of Knowledge, is in press.
Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) – ‘Promise That You Will [Tweet] about Me’: Black Death in the Digital Era
March 17th, 2022
6-7 PM EST/ Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5)
Abstract: The presentation examines contemporary Black culture, looking at the ways in which collective Black mourning has been produced, curated, and archived in the digital era, via the music of Kendrick Lamar and Pharoahe Monch, and visual texts such as the music video for Flying Lotus’s song “Never Catch Me” (2014) and Ryan Coogler’s film Fruitvale Station (2013).
Bio: Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University where he offers courses on Black Masculinity, Popular Culture, and Digital Humanities, including signature courses on Michael Jackson & the Black Performance Tradition, and The History of Hip-Hop, which he co-teaches with Grammy Award Winning producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit). He is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). The 10th Anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man was published in February of 2015 by Routledge. Neal is co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. Additionally Neal host of the video webcast Left of Black, which is produced in collaboration with the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
Mark Anthony Neal’s website https://www.newblackmaninexile.net/
Danai Mupotsa (University of the Witwatersrand) – Sovereignty/ Freedom
April 25th, 2022
6-7 pm SAST/ South Africa Standard Time (GMT +2)
Abstract: The talk focuses on a set of framing questions related to Danai Mupotsa’s upcoming book titled Sovereignty/ Freedom. She offers a discussion of the variety of ways in which freedom has been understood, in the mode of ‘commonsense’ in the ways it normalises technologies of racism, capitalism and sexism as simply ‘as is’, and how this is connected to the same commonsense epistemologies that support a view of the sovereign subject, tied to and regulated to the singular, secular monohumanist as form. In an article in progress, Mupotsa offers ‘Black common Sense’ as a different form, or relation of making sense, or sensible, the world in manners often constructed in contradistinction from the commonsense relation to sovereignty itself, ruled by forms of relationality and related to key questions in discussions of ‘the customary’ that depart from previous assumptive logics of premises of that law. When relational forms of sovereignty or freedom appear to us, they appear as juxtapositions to the assumptive logics of the liberal subject. In her book, Danai intends to explore this through various forms, performances, rituals and figures related to the positions that black women (as juxtapolitical figures to both the notions of sovereignty and freedom in the ways they are often understood or presented), engulf these conceptual territories outside of how they tend to be enforced into unbearable commonsense assumptions.
Bio: Danai S. Mupotsa is a Senior Lecturer in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a BA in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies (Luther College), a B. Soc. Sc. (Hons, First Class, UCT) in Gender and Transformation, an M. Soc. Sci in Gender Studies (UCT) , and a PhD in African Literature and Cultural Studies (PhD). She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect and feminist pedagogies. She has extensive experience and expertise in feminist and gender research and mainstreaming. Danai is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda Feminist Media, sits on the editorial board of the Brill series in youth cultures and serves on the executive board of the International Girlhood Studies Association. Danai has edited several volumes, most recently a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa” with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck. In 2018, she published her first collection of poetry entitled feeling and ugly. The Portuguese translation, feio e ugly, was published in 2020 by Editora Trinta Zero (Maputo). Danai is a 2020 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equality.
Gisela Canepa Koch (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) – Between the archive and the internet: Brüning´s historic photographic collection, digital archivist and digital return in the northern coast in Perú
June 9th, 2022
12-1 PM PET/ Peru Time (GMT -5)
Abstract: During the 50 years the German Heinrich Brüning lived in Lambayeque in the northern coast of Peru (1875-1925), he gathered an important collection of archaeological, historical and ethnographic objects, among which his photographs of landscapes, uses and customs, types, and technology stand out. Brüning’s concern was to collect ethnographic evidence that would support his argument about the continuity of pre-Hispanic Muchik culture in the Lambayecan society at his time.
Today his photographs are housed in the German Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin and the Museum am Rothenbaum der Kulturen und Künste der Welt in Hamburg. Until recently they have had a restricted access, mainly through catalogs and academic publications, supported by the expert work of archivists, curators, archaeologists and anthropologists. However, nowadays they have begun to circulate through Facebook pages such as Antiguas Fotos de Lambayeque (Old Photos of Lambayeque) from where local narratives of Muchik regional identity are enunciated.
Drawing on this specific case study, I propose to discuss the new uses and valuations of these historical photographs by new actors and audiences, focusing on their transits between the regimes of archiving, digital technologies and identity politics. I want to answer questions regarding the archival agencies that emerge within these processes, and examine the ways they might be redefine the terms of access of these materials to the people of the region from where they once came from? Relying on the figure of the digital archivist and the concept of digital return, I seek to contribute to the debates about the decolonization of the archive and the democratization of knowledge production in the context of digital transformation.
Bio: Gisela Cánepa Koch is Full Professor in the Department of Social Sciences of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and co-director with Ingrid Kummels of the binational anthropological project “Shared Soundscapes: Music Revivals and Identity Politics in Peru”(FU-Berlin and PUCP). She is founder of the Master in Visual Anthropology, a leading program in Latin America and author of pioneering works that investigate from the perspective of performance theories and visual anthropology on the fluidity of collective identities, and the formation of nation and citizenship. Long-term ethnographic research in Peru and Germany allowed for the research of audiovisual ethnographic collections that circulate between Europe and America in the context of post-colonial debates and digital transformation. She has published Photography in Latin America. Images and Identities Across Time and Space. Cánepa, G. & Kummels, I. (Eds.). Bielefeld: Transcript.(2016) and The overflow of Peru´s Country Brand. National narratives, recognition, and moral brandedness in Neoliberal Peru. In Theodoropoulou, I. & Tovar, J. (Eds.), Research Companion to Language and Country Branding. London: Routledge. (2020)
Megan Wood (Ohio Northern University) – Our Personhood, Ourselves: Political Identity After Citizens United & Hobby Lobby
July 21st, 2022
2-3 PM EDT/ Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4)
Abstract: ‘‘Something strange has happened to citizenship,’’ Lauren Berlant begins The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, her 1997 study of the coupling of suffering and citizenship in the United States since the rise of the Reaganite right in the 1970s. ‘‘In the process of collapsing the political and the personal into a world of public intimacy, a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses.”[1] Twenty-five years later, as we witness the official retraction of a human right to reproductive autonomy only tenuously secured by Roe v. Wade a lifetime ago, it is time to say for sure that Berlant was on to something.
In June 2022, in a 6-3 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court repealed the constitutional right to abortion. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was appallingly straightforward: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” While the first two clauses are the headlines, buried in the last one is a story of how we got here, despite a Democratic majority in Congress and strong majoritarian support for federally-protected reproductive rights. As the reproductive agency of disqualified “citizens” in Red States appears to subsist not in voting but in their proximity to a corporate benefactor promising to “pay travel costs” and allow time off work should they require out-of-state reproductive care, Alito’s allusion to popular sovereignty begs the question: who exactly are “the people” whose authority this ruling affirmed?
This talk draws from a study of political culture in the contemporary United States that looks at a set of transformations in the meaning and practice of citizenship in the first decades of the 21st century. It asks how the political identity and the domain of civic practice historically sutured to the fiction of legal personhood has been transformed in the contexts of corporate empowerment typically glossed as neoliberal. Exploring the judicial coinage of the term “corporate identity” in two earlier U.S. Supreme Court cases that granted the constitutional rights of speech and religious exercise to corporations—Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee (2010) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014)—alongside the messianic popularity of Donald Trump and the proliferation of parapolitical relationships with corporate brands, this talk circuits through Berlant’s theorization of infantile citizenship and Eva Cherniavsky’s work on the contemporary functionality of identity politics to reflect on what the erosion of the terrain on which we have historically understood the “citizen” to operate might mean for the exercise of political agency as it has been historically and normatively understood within U.S. political culture.
[1] Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1.
Bio: Megan Wood is an assistant professor of Communication and Culture at Ohio Northern University. In her research and teaching, Megan explores transformations in political economy through the lens of popular culture. She also writes regularly on the history and practice of cultural studies. Her published work can be found in leading journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Cultural Economy, Lateral, Cultural Studies, as well as in anthologies like Feminist Surveillance Studies and Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond. Her current book-length project probes the implications of corporate empowerment for political identity and the domain of civic practice in the United States. Megan serves on the editorial team of the Journal of Cultural Economy, on the board of the Cultural Studies Association, and as a founding member of Off-Centre—a digital working group for emerging cultural studies practitioners.
Jamie J. Zhao (NingboTech University, PRC) and Hongwei Bao (University of Nottingham, UK) – Queer/ing China: An Emerging Field in the Study of Global Queer Culture
July 30th, 2022
12-1 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)
Abstract: This talk will explore “queer/ing China” as an innovative, critical method in global queer cultural studies by introducing several ongoing scholarly projects. These projects include books entitled Queer/ing TV China, Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance, and Contemporary Queer Chinese Art, as well as a forthcoming special issue with the Journal of Chinese Cinemas on the topic of queering Chinese screen cultures. The projects share a commitment to documenting and theorizing various queer cultures in a transnational context, challenging conventional understandings of China and Chineseness, and internationalizing and decolonizing queer studies. In this talk, the speakers will map out the development and the main strands of queer Chinese media, popular culture, as well as visual and performing arts. The theorization and discussion of “queer/ing China” will point to promising directions for future research and open up critical conversations concerning how to mobilize cultural studies in globalized, digitized contexts and beyond disciplinary and methodological boundaries.
Bios: Jamie J. Zhao (PhD in Film and TV Studies, University of Warwick, UK; PhD in Gender Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HKSAR) is a global queer media scholar and currently Honorary Professor and Director of the Center for Gender and Media Studies in the Department of Journalism and Communication at NingboTech University, PRC. Her research spans female gender and sexuality in East Asian and Chinese-language entertainment and pop culture in a globalist, digital age. She is the editor/co-editor of four anthologies and seven special issues on the topics of global queer cinema, TV, and fan cultures. She is the editorial board member of Communication, Culture & Critique and the International Journal of East Asian Studies, as well as Routledge’s “Transdisciplinary Souths” book series and Bloomsbury’s “Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies” book series. Since 2022, she has served as the founding co-editor of the “Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities” book series published by Bloomsbury.
Hongwei Bao (PhD in Gender Studies and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia) is currently Associate Professor in Media Studies and Director of the Center for Contemporary East Asian Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of four research monographs in Chinese queer studies: Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (NIAS, 2018), Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), Queer Media in China (Routledge, 2021) and Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance (Routledge, 2022). He serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Chinese Independent Cinema Observer and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He is a founding co-editor of the “Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities” book series published by Bloomsbury.
Bloomsbury, Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities book series: How to propose a book.
Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao, “‘Queer/ing China’: Theorizing Chinese Genders and Sexualities Through a Transnational Lens,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, April 6, 2022.
Jamie J. Zhao, ed., Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness, Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming.
Jamie J. Zhao, ed., 2020. Special issue on “Queer Pop in Post-2000 China,” Feminist Media Studies 20 (4). Introduction to the special issue.
Jamie J. Zhao, and Alvin K. Wong , eds., 2020. Special issue on “Making a Queer Turn in Chinese-Language Media Studies,” Continuum 34 (4). Introduction to the special issue.
Hongwei Bao, Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance, Routledge, 2022.
Hongwei Bao, Queer Comrades, NIAS Press, 2018.
Hongwei Bao, Queer China, Routledge, 2020.
Hongwei Bao, Queer Media in China, Routledge, 2021.
Hongwei Bao’s staff profile
Hongwei Bao’s online profile
Hongwei Bao’s column: Queer Lens
Fan Yang (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) – Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South?
August 18th, 2022
9-10 AM EDT/ Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4)
Abstract: Shenzhen, China’s first Special Economic Zone established in 1979 in the southern province of Guangdong, has transformed from a global electronics manufacturing hub and counterfeiting capital into a UNESCO City of Design within the span of four decades. Often depicted as China’s “Silicon Valley,” Shenzhen is a key site for implementing “Made in China 2025,” a national strategy to upgrade China’s industries with a distinctive emphasis on information technologies. Sometimes dubbed “Made in China Intelligently,” the strategy signals a deeper commitment to adapting Shenzhen’s ecosystem of technological making often known as shanzhai, or “knockoff,” into one of “mass innovation and mass entrepreneurship.”
This presentation examines Shenzhen as a media-infrastructural complex that generates competing visions for technological innovation in the age of Artificial Intelligence. I analyze a series of objects and sites that enact the city’s dynamic culture of media making, particularly as it connects to the Global South, such as the Shenzhen startup Transsion, which has roots in shanzhai and now produces some of the most popular mobile phone brands in Africa. Situating Shenzhen at the nexus of “globalization from above” and “globalization from below” reveals the conditions and challenges of both First and Third Worlds that a “rising” China has had to continuously grapple with.
Bio: Fan Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). Yang’s scholarship lies at the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonial studies, and contemporary China. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, positions: asia critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Communication+1, Environmental Humanities, among others. Yang’s current book manuscript, Disorienting Politics: China, Media, and Transpacific Entanglements, examines a series of media artifacts and processes that enact the entanglements of China and America, or Chimerica. She has been an ACS Board member since 2017, representing North America and the English- and French-speaking Caribbean.
Sean Johnson Andrews (Columbia College Chicago) – The Rearticulation of Hegemonic Safe Space: Emotional Subjects, Hashtag Activism, and The Revolt of the Disinterpellated
September 22nd, 2022
1-2 PM CDT/ Central Daylight Time (GMT -5)
Abstract: This talk draws from a longer work in progress, which develops a theoretical framework of subjectivity in an attempt to better conceptualize the waves of online social movements that have transformed U.S. cultural politics over the last decade: #BLM, #MeToo, #MarchForOurLives, not to mention the rise of the #altright and others. By putting James Martell’s recent work on “misinterpellation,” which builds off of Althusser’s original notion of “interpellation,” in conversation with Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Karen and Barbara Fields, and Stuart Hall, this framework synthesizes key elements of Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Cultural Studies, to better highlight the function of trauma and repression in the contemporary social formation, the way our “denotative casting” implies the subjectivities and identities we are forced to perform, and the way that contemporary social movements are attempting to rearticulate what I am calling “hegemonic safe space.” Hegemonic safe space captures the emotional and affective dimensions of the very political and social fact that a straight, white, cis-gendered male like the speaker is not only especially insulated from the everyday triggers and traumas of this society, but that insulation effectively relies upon the unearned labors of deference on the part of those “disinterpellated” into non-preferred categories of subjectivity. On the other hand, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò points out, the “Elite Capture” of identity politics – and their sometimes superficial weaponization on social media – make simply inverting this deference a strategic error. The talk will end by considering several emergent strategies in light of this framework. As we rearticulate hegemonic safe space we must support the care to repair the traumas that have been central to its operation, but also find the elements of shared oppression and solidarity that will make these efforts sustainable.
Bio: Sean Johnson Andrews, PhD, is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago. He is the coordinator for the newly relaunched Cultural Studies BA program, and teaches courses on cultural theories, digital media literacy, and globalization. He is currently serving as President of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.) His writing has appeared in Cultural Studies, The Journal of Historical Sociology, Lateral, The Review of Radical Political Economy, and Jacobin. His most recent co-edited collection Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond: Critical Pedagogies and Classroom Strategies concerns the ability of the politically committed, interdisciplinary, self-reflexive methodology of Cultural Studies to better conceptualize, critique and better produce “useful knowledge.” He has written on the political and economic implications of media piracy, the importance of contextual intellectual history in understanding the development and deployment of theories (in economics, media studies, and history itself), the changing relationship between the law and culture in the neoliberal age, and Cultural Studies methodology more generally. His co-edited volume on Cultural Studies and/of the Law was published by Routledge, His second and third books, Hegemony, Mass Media, and Cultural Studies: Properties of Meaning, Power, and Value in Cultural Production (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016) and The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights: Law, Labor, and the Persistence of Primitive Accumulation (Temple University Press, 2019) look at theories of media, political economy, and cultural history to better understand the role that Intellectual Property Rights play in our racialized, neoliberal, digital capitalist social formation. He holds PhD and MA degrees in Cultural Studies and English Literature, respectively, both from George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia.
Elena Hristova (Bangor University, Wales) – “A good kid doing a job!” or “my advice to you is to listen more carefully to what is being said to you”: women interviewing men and the formation of professional identity in media research
October 20th, 2022
3-4 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)
Abstract: How do we do research? How do we ask questions of our research subjects? How do we choose our subjects? How much of us, the researcher, is imprinted onto the data we produce? This lecture tackles these questions by looking at the labour practices of female interviewers working for the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University in the summer of 1945.
Around twenty women interviewed 150 white working-class men in the parks, streets, and union halls of New York. They asked them to view anti prejudice cartoons and recorded the men’s responses to interview questions. These responses were coded, tabulated, analysed, and submitted as a report on the effectiveness of antiprejudice visual propaganda; the method of in-depth interviewing used in this study (and others undertaken at the time) became part of standard communication and media research methodology.
Re-reading the interview transcripts, however, spotlights a parallel narrative: young women using their gendered identity to compel men to participate in a study, and managing the men’s behaviour so as to complete the interview; young women recording answers punctuated with commentary to demonstrate to their superiors their expertise on their research subjects (and so make themselves invaluable for future studies); and young women claiming professionalism as social scientific researchers. Being an interviewer was more than just a job – it was a way to form one’s professional identity in relation to ideas about scientific expertise, gender, race, and class.
Bio: Elena Hristova is a Lecturer in Film and Media at Bangor University, Wales, UK. She is a historian of U.S. media and culture and researches the intersection of social movements, media research, visual culture, gender, race, and class. She has published in the International Journal of Communication and has edited several issues of Teaching Media Quarterly, an online open-access peer-reviewed journal. With Carol Stabile and Aimee-Marie Dorsten, Hristova is the editor of The Ghost Reader: Recovering Women’s Contributions to Media Studies (forthcoming, Goldsmiths Press). She lives in Gwynedd with her daughter and husband.
Gregory J. Seigworth (Millersville University, USA)
Mathew Arthur (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada)
Chad Shomura (University of Colorado, Denver, USA)
Boni Wozolek (Penn State University, Abington College, USA)
Threads and entanglements: talking affect studies together, apart
December 19th, 2022
1-3 PM EST/ Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5)
Abstract: This will not be any kind of lecture, but a loosely guided conversation about affect studies and its practices, methods, presuppositions, and more – sometimes in light of cultural studies and sometimes not. Greg will provide a few opening remarks about affect studies and cultural studies as intertwined and divergent in a whole host of ways, so near and so far. This conversation with Boni, Chad, and Mathew will address an array of conceptual vectors and entanglements, among them: ‘textures of theory’ / ‘genres of attention’ ‘composing (and de-composing) practice and methods’ / ‘reckoning with other-than & more-than human’ / ‘the role of creativity and the speculative.’ Spoiler alert: We anticipate that this conversation will raise more questions than offer definitive answers. Thus, time will be left for the virtual audience to jump into the conversation and pick up on certain threads that might serve to entangle or disentangle all of us even more.
Bios:
Mathew Arthur is a SSHRC CGS-D PhD student in gender studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is co-editor-in-chief of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry and Imbricate! Press, an open access affect studies imprint. He chairs the Westar Institute’s semi-annual Seminar on the Human Future. From 2017 to 2022, he organized and taught a weekly feminist science studies seminar for multigenerational, refugee, ESL, and low-income students at the Vancouver Public Library. Mathew’s writing has been published in Capacious, Canadian Theatre Review, Fieldsights, Fordham University Press’ Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia series, and Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. His first book is forthcoming with Punctum in their Advanced Methods: New Research Ontologies series. Mathew is a former graphic, architectural, and UI/UX designer and maintains a freelance practice consulting with artist-run and scholar-led non-profits to design online commons and print publications.
Gregory J. Seigworth is a Professor of Digital Communication and Cultural Studies at Millersville University. He is co-editor, with Melissa Gregg, of The Affect Theory Reader (Duke UP, 2010) and co-editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. Greg has organized two large international conferences and a summer school focused on the lively interdisciplinarity of affect studies at his home institution Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He has published a slew of essays and chapters over the last 20+ years and conducted workshops, served as external examiner for dissertations, and taught courses (mostly affect-related) around the world: Iceland, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Norway, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, England, and more. Greg has recently completed co-editing The Affect Theory Reader II (all new contributors/chapters) with Carolyn Pedwell; it should see light of day in fall 2023.
Chad Shomura is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Denver. His research interests include affect, biopower, new materialism, race, and ecology. His recent publications may be found in American Quarterly, Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific, Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and Contemporary Political Theory. His current book project, A Life Otherwise, explores minor assemblies of life that upset the good life. Chad is on the editorial boards of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry and Journal of Posthumanism. He likes cats.
Boni Wozolek is currently the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Excellence and an Assistant Professor at Penn State University, Abington College. Her work considers questions of social justice, qualitative research methods, and teaching practices that focus on the examination of race, sexual orientations, and gender identities (and their multiple forms of expression) across educational contexts. She recently received the 2021 Early Career Award from the Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies special interest group of the American Educational Research Association, was a 2021 recipient of a Critics Choice Book Award for her first book, Assemblages of Violence in Education: Everyday Trajectories of Oppression (Routledge). Boni’s first edited book, Black Lives Matter in US Schools: Race, Education, and Resistance was released this year. She also has a forthcoming monograph, Educational Necropolitics: A Sonic Ethnography of Everyday Racism in U.S. Schools (Routledge, 2023).
Jaron Rowan (Centro Universitario de Artes y Diseño de Barcelona, Spain) – Weird Ecologies. Towards a more than human idea of culture
February 24th, 2023
3:30-4:30 PM CET/ Central European Time (GMT +1)
Abstract: The following talk will address the question of how we can apply a posthumanist approach to the understanding of a very humanist idea, that of culture. Exploring the way in which idealism helped to define our current notion of culture, this talk will set out how historically culture was conceived as a way to shape the human spirit through an articulation of symbols and ideas. This included the possibility of thinking spirits without bodies. Bodies without context.
Entangling the notion of culture with the infrastructures, technologies and bodies that enable cultural practices to take place, this talk will explore how culture operates simultaneously at a subjective-personal level, a collective-societal level, and at an infrastructural-environmental level. In this sense culture is presented as a mess, as a weird ecology that articulates worldviews and materials, ideals and artifacts, aesthetics and politics.
Bio: Jaron Rowan is a writer, researcher and teacher. He is currently Head of Research at BAU, Design College of Barcelona. His publications include “Emprendizajes en cultura” (2010), “La tragedia del copyright” (2013), “Memes: Inteligencia idiota, política rara y folclore digital” (2015), “Cultura libre de Estado” (2016) or “Investigación en diseño”(2020) co-written with Marta Camps. He also hosts “La letra con sangre entra“.
Sarah Olutola (Lakehead University, Canada) – The Crown: Queen Elizabeth II’s Funeral and the Imperial Shadow of White Womanhood
March 23rd, 2023
11 AM-12 PM EST/ Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4)
Abstract: On Thursday, September 8th, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest reigning monarch, died at age 96. Dr. Uju Anya, a Nigerian linguistics researcher at Carnegie Mellon University took to Twitter to express her unapologetic abject lack of pity for the Queen’s passing. In a tweet inevitably deleted by Twitter, she wrote: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” Her tweets were met with backlash from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his public admonition brought global attention to Dr. Anya’s remarks.
It is not a coincidence that the harassment Dr. Anya and other Black women received following the Queen’s death mirrors the media harassment Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, received throughout the public spectacle of the Queen’s funeral. It is also not a coincidence that with Queen Elizabeth II’s death came renewed fears from British media over predominantly Black countries declaring independence from Britain. Queen Elizabeth’s cultural image as a powerful monarch and matriarch depends upon continued violence against and subjugation of Black communities.
The mainstream media’s narratives about Queen Elizabeth II as matriarch during her funeral reified the ideological workings of white womanhood, which lie at the heart of Britain’s imperial project. By doing so, they also exposed this ‘nurturing’ maternal image as the underside of the anti-Black violence crucial to colonialism and imperialism. That Jeff Bezos, mainstream media, and other detractors choose to ignore this complex context speaks to the enduring cultural power of the kind of conservative patriarchal politics the contemporary British monarchy represents.
Keywords: global motherhood, white motherhood, post-colonialism, Black feminism, humanitarianism
Bio: Dr. Sarah Olutola is the Assistant Professor of Writing at Lakehead University’s English Department. Her current research concerns Black and critical race studies, postcolonialism, African and African diasporic Anglophone literature, popular media culture, and youth literature. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as Popular Music and Society, Safundi, and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice. She has also written for trade publications such as The Washington Post, Zora Magazine, Teen Vogue, and CBC. As an emerging Young Adult (YA) fiction writer, her novels and creative short stories often incorporate her scholarly research.
James Thurgill (University of Tokyo, Japan) — Literary Geographies of Folklore
April 20th, 2023
8-9 PM JST/ Japan Standard Time (GMT +9)
Abstract: Literary geography takes a geographical approach to the study of literature and considers the spatial relationships between people, texts, and places. In a recent article for the interdisciplinary journal Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones initiates ‘interspatiality’ to articulate more precisely the ‘multidirectional textual-social-spatial interconnectivity’ between geographies internal, between, and external to literary narratives (2022: 16). As a traditional form of storytelling, folklore generates geographically specific narratives which intersect with and inform our understanding of place. Using interspatiality as a framework for the literary geographical analysis of folklore, this talk takes Yanagita Kunio’s 1910 work Tōno monogatari, a textual record of 119 traditional folktales from the northeast of Japan, to illustrate how the blending of imagined and actual-world spaces takes place through the production and circulation of folk narratives.
Bio: James Thurgill is a Specially-appointed Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo, Japan, where he teaches cultural and literary geography. His research examines spatial experiences and geographic imaginings of absence, haunting, and folklore. James is Principal Investigator of the four-year JSPS-funded project ‘Literary Geographies of Folklore’ (2020-2024), co-author of A Todai Philosophical Walk (2021), and co-editor of University of Wales Press’ newly established Literary Geography: Theory and Practice book series. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Shakuntala Banaji (London School of Economics and Political Science) — Making our way back towards a liveable society: the significance of history for understanding contemporary hate and disinformation
May 19th, 2023
1-2 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)
Abstract: For the past 22 years my work has examined the varied roles media plays in inflecting or constraining people’s sense of what it means to be human; how we should and can inhabit social structures to enhance our own conceptions of the public good; and who does and does not deserve voice, space and protection therein. From the ideological imaginaries of popular film audiences around questions of class, race, religion, gender and sexuality, to the civic, political, intimate, critical or hateful messages we post for and to each other in online spaces, this lecture argues that individuals and groups form themselves or are called into being as audiences, citizens and humans within specific sociohistorical contexts. The imprint of those histories – of race and colonialism, or misogyny and patriarchy – cannot and should not be disavowed. Alongside colleagues, several of my recent projects have identified a series of textual and discursive features which can be used to understand and predict – and argue for ways of preventing and challenging — not only the kinds of hateful ideas and images that circulate in specific national and local contexts but also to understand their wider significance for democracy and survival of our planet. Using intertextuality and historical analysis as a method to dive deep into social media hate speech and disinformation across multiple countries of the global north and global south, this lecture will point towards some of these patterns and possibilities.
Bio: Shakuntala Banaji is Professor of Media Culture and Social Change, and Programme Director MSc Media, Communication and Development, in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Mark Maletska (Tampere University, Finland) — Approaching gender identity through video games
June 16th, 2023
3-4 PM EEST/ Eastern European Summer Time (GMT +3)
Abstract: Even though video games are gaining popularity among a wider audience in recent years, there are lots of stereotypes still existing around games and gamers, both within and outside gaming communities. A popular image of a ‘nerdy male gamer spending hours in a dark room playing Dota 2’ affects expectations of what a ‘gamer’ is supposed to be and is often applied to many people interested in video games. That is probably why researchers nowadays are trying to deconstruct these stereotypes and show the diversity among players with much research already done on gender expression or stereotypes related to gaming. There is, for example, a separate area studying women in video game communities. Lots of those studies, however, are limited to binaries (male-female) and do not fully cover transgender, agender, gender fluid or non-binary folks. So, in this talk, I want to focus on queer, i.e. not cisgender, identities and their connection with video games by looking at experiences of gender-diverse players.
The idea to look into video games arose from my and my friends’ personal experience of playing video games. I already worked within video game philosophy back in Ukraine, but, sadly, it was not really possible to study topics around LGBTQIA+ there. Meanwhile, being a trans man myself and watching other people playing, I noticed a similar experience among queer players – some video games resonated with their identities, even when there were no queer characters or game story was not related to LGBTQIA+ at all. I first saw this while playing Dark Souls 2 (FromSoftware), the game with the ‘easter egg’ allowing a player to change avatar’s gender; I also had a similar experience while playing Deltarune (Toby Fox), a game which allows a player to create an avatar and then deletes it without player’s permission, saying “No one can choose who they are in this world”. Later, I found that the phenomenon of perceiving a game as a reflection of queer identities was broader than I thought – the full Celeste (Matt Makes Games) game was read as a metaphor to gender transition by its community.
Based on these autoethnographic observations and a detailed literature review, with my current research, I plan to fill in the gap in the research related to queer gender identities and playing video games.
My research consists of the main part, where I am interested in experiences of LGBTQIA+ players around the world, and a smaller project focusing on Ukrainian players. You can read my blog post about my research here. The research project is supported by the MSCA4Ukraine grant.
Bio: Mark Maletska (MPhil) is a Doctoral Researcher and PhD candidate at Tampere University, also affiliated with The Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (CoE GameCult). His dissertation research is focused on relationship between video game mechanics and gender identity self-discovery processes. Prior to current position, M. Maletska was a teacher of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Ukraine; he moved to Finland in November 2022, being invited as a visiting researcher by the University of Jyväskylä.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3123-9500
Deborah Rebello Lima (Federal University of Paraná, Brazil) — Brazilian Policies of Culture – a panorama of the last 20 years
August 31st, 2023
6-7 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)
Abstract: This presentation is an overview of the Brazilian example, as a Latin American experience, in culture public policies. My goal is to analyze the role of the State managing public policies regarding culture and the dialogue within civil society. I defend that it is really relevant considering what has been happening over the last 20 years trying to highlight possible setbacks in our country. Besides the historical approach and the possible links with other countries in Latin America, I am also going to analyze examples of policies and the role of the National Culture Policy Council within a major scenario. This debate should foster discussions on understanding of the concepts of civil society, the role of State and the idea of culture.
Bio: Deborah Rebello Lima is a professor at Federal University of Paraná, in the South of Brazil, and vice-coordinator of Cultural Management Bachelor degrees at the Department of Arts in the same university. She is also a Specialist on public policies of culture, member of a Unesco Chair at Culture Policies and Management at Rui Barbosa Foundation – Ministry of Culture Affairs.
Rachel Lara van der Merwe (University of Groningen, Netherlands) — Listening to the Waters of Camissa: Decolonial ecopolitics and cultural studies in South Africa
September 22nd, 2023
3-4 PM CEST/ Central European Summer Time (GMT +2)
Abstract: Colonial national imaginaries mediate, inform, and interrupt ecological flows such as water. Using the Cape Town Water Crisis of 2017-2018 as my primary context, I examine how humans, through discourse, socio-political structures, and embodied action, have transformed water from a natural entity into a natural resource and then more specifically into a national resource. In response I ask: if more humans shift our orientation towards water as a meaning-maker and a medium of life, how might this orientation transform how we imagine human societies and socio-political structures?
My work draws from media studies, cultural geography, science and technology studies, among several other fields, but decolonial thinking and cultural studies ground the kinds of questions I ask and how I go about trying to answer those questions. In this talk, I will spend part of the time sharing some insights from the above study, but I will also step back and make a few broader reflections. First, what does it look like to engage cultural studies through a decolonial lens? And second, how does decolonial praxis and cultural studies equip us in uniquely powerful ways to confront the rising environmental challenges we face on our planet?
Bio: Rachel Lara van der Merwe is an assistant professor in the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research explores the intersection of digital media, national identity, ecopolitics, and coloniality—particularly within South Africa and the Global South. Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, she received a Ph.D. in Media Research and Practice from the University of Colorado Boulder
Shawna Tang (University of Sydney, Australia) — Chinese racialisation and technologies of mothering: Continuities in straight and queer reproduction in Singapore
October 24th, 2023
4-5 PM AET/ Australian Eastern Time (GMT +11)
Abstract: In this paper, I bring together a set of three disjunctive scenes in Singapore relating to Chinese mothers, straight and lesbian. One, what has been called “the AWARE saga” in 2009; two, graduate mothers in the 1980s; and three, lesbian mothering in contemporary time. In this triangulation, my analysis focuses on educated Chinese women and mothers across the historical contexts as paradigmatic formations of a protected class encouraged to reproduce and pass on their hereditary material, historically, by the technocratic Singaporean state in the 1980s that afforded Chinese mothers various forms of protection, and in contemporary time, via neoliberal circuits of capital that enable the agential, transnationally-mobile Singaporean lesbian to access artificial reproductive technologies to have children. I show how forms of strategic manipulation of these women’s embodiment and “abilities” across the historical contexts demonstrate forms of racial capacitation, that afford security on the one hand, and susceptibility to biopolitical control on the other, through the capaciousness of their bodies figured as endlessly available for reinvigoration (for neoliberalism). Thinking convivially about the relations between straight and lesbian mothers might enable a possibility for politics that cuts across the sexuality divide.
Bio: Dr Shawna Tang is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research lies in the nexus of sexuality, gender and race. Specifically, she studies how queer identities, communities and politics need to take seriously questions of race, nationalism, capitalism and geopolitics. She is the author of Postcolonial Lesbian Identities in Singapore and co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia, and is part of the ARC-funded Boys Studies Research group focusing on transmasculine boyhoods.
Nomusa Makhubu (University of Cape Town, South Africa) — Radical Solidarity in a Quiet Crisis
November 21st, 2023
4-5 PM SAST/ South Africa Standard Time (GMT +2)
Abstract: The arts are notorious for elitism, and highly competitive, exploitative working conditions. In other words, the arts are seen to have unhealthy art ecosystems. Practitioners and organisations compete for dwindling resources where banks and wealthy investors dominate. In many African contexts, there is a marked difference between deficient public resources or institutions and inordinately affluent privately funded institutions on which individual artists depend. This is further compounded by the perpetuation of economic and racial inequality and its fragmentation of “the public”. As a result, solidarity – civic, social, cultural, or political – among organisations and practitioners has become vital, showing the necessity to reconfigure the nature of arts institutions and institutional culture. Focussing on the South African context, I explore how varying notions of solidarity are formulated in a context with fragmented and racially and economically differentiated publics.
Bio: Nomusa Makhubu is an Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Cape Town. She is the founder of Creative Knowledge Resources (CKR) – a open access platform for socially responsive arts. Makhubu was the Deputy Dean for Transformation in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Cape Town (2020-2022). She was the recipient of the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award in 2006 and the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Le Fresnoy in 2014. She received the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) African Humanities Program fellowship award and was selected to be an African Studies Association (ASA) Presidential fellow in 2016. In 2017, she was a UCT-Harvard Mandela fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University. She co-co-curated with Nkule Mabaso the international exhibition, Fantastic, in 2015 and The stronger we become in 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale in Italy.
Diana Adesola Mafe (Denison University, USA) — Haunted Houses of the Black Atlantic
December 21st, 2023
9 AM EST/ Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5)
Abstract: The eerie, the uncanny, and the macabre have long been used by writers of the Black diaspora to critique histories of white supremacy. Gothic iconography, especially the haunted house, carries a different symbolic weight in Black imaginaries. The theorist Paul Gilroy uses the image of “ships in motion” as an organizing symbol for the Black Atlantic. For my book project, it is the haunted house that serves as a central motif in this cultural and geographic setting. I consider the ways in which Black writers and artists across centuries and regions have engaged with this trope, often as a means of subverting expectations of what constitutes a terrifying place. My presentation will focus on just two of the many “haunted house” texts covered in my research: Ottobah Cugoano’s abolitionist treatise, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). I situate these texts as blueprints, which forge a Black Atlantic literary motif that complicates the haunted house in Eurocentric traditions.
Bio: Diana Adesola Mafe is Professor of English at Denison University, where she teaches courses in postcolonial, gender, and Black studies. Her work tracks the literary and cinematic roles of and for women of color in African and diasporic discourses. Her current research focuses on representations of race and gender in speculative fiction with a special emphasis on the gothic. She is the author of two books, Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV (University of Texas Press, 2018). She has also published articles in MELUS, African American Review, Camera Obscura, Journal of Popular Culture, Research in African Literatures, American Drama, English Academy Review, Frontiers, Safundi, and African Women Writing Resistance. She was awarded a 2023 NEH Summer Stipend to work on her new book, Haunted Houses of the Black Atlantic.
Holly Randell-Moon (Charles Sturt University, Australia) – Environments of Power: Protectionism, Race, and Biopower in Australia
January 30th, 2024
11AM AEST/ Australian Eastern Standard Time (GMT +10)
Abstract: The spatial segregation of First Nations peoples through Protection policies has fundamentally shaped the environmental and demographic landscape in the territories now known as Australia. Protection laws were variously implemented in the late nineteenth century by colonial administrators and continued into government policy in the early twentieth century. While each state enacted Protection laws according to their own territoriality and socio-political context, Protectionism was underpinned by the overriding discourse of racial science which posited that First Nations were in biological decline. Based on this premise, First Nations were spatially segregated, in order to be ‘protected’, from non-Indigenous populations on missions and reserves. Drawing on the work of Warwick Anderson and Michel Foucault, this paper outlines how the spatial configurations of race intersected in Protectionism in the environmental and biopolitical construction of First Nations as requiring quarantine and discipline. This occurred through a spatial remove of First Nations peoples into areas environmentally depleted by colonial capitalism. Examining Protectionism through the lens of environmentality, as facilitating environments of power, discloses the inextricability of the race-space nexus in its historical development in the Australian context.
Keywords: Protectionism, environmentality, race, biopower, Australia, First Nations
Bio: Holly Randell-Moon is a non-Indigenous Senior Lecturer in the School of Indigenous Australian Studies at Charles Sturt University, Australia. She uses critical race and whiteness studies theories to situate her Anglo-Celtic family and settler ancestors within the social and built landscapes of settler colonisation. Holly has published on race, religion, and sovereignty in the journals Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Celebrity Studies, and Social Semiotics. Her publications on biopower, cultural geography, and digital infrastructure have appeared in Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture and Policy & Internet. Along with Ryan Tippet, she is the editor of Security, Race, Biopower: Essays on Technology and Corporeality (2016). She is the Editor of the journal Somatechnics.
Julieta Infantino (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) – Circus, from popular to legitimized art. Transformations in the valuations of circus arts in Argentina
February 21st, 2024
6 PM ART/ Argentina Time (GMT -3)
Abstract: Throughout my research career, the study of circus as a popular art has been a tool to analyze and register power relations, critical potentialities of arts and histories of hierarchies in Argentina. The circus has been an art form that passed from being discredited as a minor, popular and marginal art to being legitimized as the cradle of authentic national theater at the end of the nineteenth century, when Argentina established a unique circus form known as Circo Criollo. This circus style was characterized by a first part of circus skills and a second part of theatrical drama based on the criollista-gaucho genre derived from a literary movement that exalted the figure of the Argentine gaucho as an emblem of nationality. This fusion produced an innovative modality and a modification in the evaluative appraisals of the circus. However, this period of transitional appreciation ended, and the circus was again dismissed as a minor art by the middle of the 20th century. This presentation discusses this process and analyses the construction of hierarchies based on the weighting of the spoken drama and high art over the popular bodily based performances and the way these hierarchies become brands that continue to influence contemporary valuations of art in Argentina. It also reflects on the ways in which contemporary circus artists recover this art and rethink its popular character and its critical-political potentialities, focusing on the process of resurgence, redefinition and artification of the circus that took place in Argentina since the post-dictatorial 1980s.
Bio: Julieta Infantino is Professor and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires, and a researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). She is a specialist in the development of circus arts in Argentina and in Latin America, studying its historical and aesthetic characteristics, as well as identity and political aspects. She has integrated several research teams linked to the study of popular culture and cultural policies and has published books, compilations and articles in national and international academic journals. She is also responsible editor of Cuadernos de antropología social. Among her most recent publications are: “A arte do circo na América do Sul. Trajetórias, tradições e inovações na arena contemporânea. Sao Paulo: Ediciones SESC (2023); “Pedagogías circenses. Experiencias, trayectorias y metodologías”. Club Hem editors (2021); “The Criollo Circus (Circus Theatre) in Argentina. The emergence of a unique circus form in connection with the consolidation of the Argentine nation state”. In The Cambridge companion to the Circus (2021); “Working with circus artists: reflections on a process of collaborative research, participation and commitment,” Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation (2018).
Poppy Wilde (Birmingham City University, UK) – Posthumanism and play: Embodying avatar-gamer entanglements
March 19th, 2024
5 PM GMT
Abstract: Posthuman subjectivity suggests a condition of emergence, intra-acting with other entities, understanding our subjectivity and our actions as contingent and entirely dependent on what is around us. Where “interaction” suggests two distinct entities engaging with one another, Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action explores the ways in which we are not ontologically distinct subjects (as the concept of “inter”action might suggest) but are bound up in our relations to everything around us. Intra-action serves as a revision of interaction to account for the ways in which distinct agencies emerge only from those engagements with “others”. In order to research how posthuman subjectivity emerges and is experienced in more depth, my research utilises the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) avatar-gamer relationship as a rich and complex example of an everyday posthuman subjectivity, to demonstrate the posthumanising of commonplace practices and affects.
The blurring between avatar and gamer has been explored extensively (e.g. Banks and Bowman 2016; Gee 2008; Filiciak 2003; Sundén 2012) and player experiences vary between seeing the avatar as a “tool” for navigation (Collins 2011); as “characters” to empathise with (Belman and Flanagan 2010); as an “ideal self” (Jin 2011); or as a “representation” of the gamer’s identity in the gameworld (Filiciak 2003: 97; Cerra and James 2012: 168). However, many of these analyses are grounded in a traditional humanist and anthropocentric approach. My research instead explores the avatar-gamer as an example of posthuman subjectivity, where avatar and gamer are entangled in multiple embodied and affective ways. Drawing on a posthuman autoethnography, which specifically troubles the notion of self and the “I”, this presentation utilises fieldnotes from playing the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft with my avatar, Etyme. Here, “I” becomes indicative and performative of a subjectivity wherein different entities intra-act (Barad 2007). Using analytic categories including performance, empathy, nostalgia, and death, I demonstrate how the gamer is in no more control of the avatar than the avatar is of the gamer. This view uses feminist, critical posthumanism to demonstrate how avatar and gamer are not ontologically distinct, but perform through distributed agency and networked affect, negotiated through cultural and societal understandings of self and selfhood.
Bio: Dr Poppy Wilde is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University (BCU). She is author of Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge 2023), and co-editor of Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism (Palgrave 2024). Her work focuses on what it means and how it feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. Her research projects explore critical posthumanism in a variety of media contexts, through gaming, zombie studies, makeover television, music artists, and affective methodologies. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3334-059X
Mengyu Luo (University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, PRC) – Power Dynamics in Shanghai’s Cultural Production: Music, Heritage, and Institutions
April 16th, 2024
8 PM CST/ China Standard Time (GMT +8)
Abstract: The relationship between power and cultural production has long been a focal point in cultural studies. In the context of Shanghai, a city where ‘east meets west’, this dynamism holds significance due to the continuous negotiation between tradition and innovation, local and global influences. This complexity is evident in music field, where Shanghai boasts the distinction of hosting a symphony orchestra that dates back to the year 1879 and serving as the cradle of Chinese popular music. With yesterday’s legacies braiding into today’s urban and heritage discourse, the city now resonates with a convergence of music expressions in terms of genres, performances, and venues.
Despite the vibrant music scene, the city’s cultural landscape is also a testament of the evolving power structures and institutional policing. Producing music that aligns with mainstream values not only poses challenges for artists but also underscores the broader socio-cultural shifts, reflecting the interplay between cultural heritage, institutional norms, and the evolving social expectations. Integrating my previous and ongoing explorations of Shanghai’s music institutions and production modes, this presentation provides a holistic understanding of the power dynamics at play in Shanghai’s cultural production. This presentation scrutinizes the role of institutions in this process, becoming not only providers of cultural power, stewards of Shanghai’s cultural legacy, but also active participant in defining the city’s cultural identity.
Bio: Mengyu Luo is Associate Professor at University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, China. She obtained her PhD degree at Social Sciences Department, Loughborough University. Her research interests include cultural studies and heritage studies.
Recent publications on the topic:
1. Mengyu Luo (2018). Cultural policy and revolutionary music during China’s Cultural Revolution: the case of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. International Journal of Cultural Policy. 24(4): 431-450. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2016.1219351
2. Mengyu Luo* & J. Tebbutt (2019). From Cultural Revolution to cultural consumption: forming a contemporary identity through Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. 33(3): 351-368.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10304312.2019.1587741
3. Mengyu Luo (2022). Power and identity transition in symphonic music: Shanghai Symphony Orchestra from the 1920s to the 1950s. Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. 36(1-2): 126-142.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02560046.2022.2066702
4. Mengyu Luo (2020). The omnivore turn in cultural production: case study of China’s Rainbow Chamber Singers. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 23(1): 81-101.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367877919875972
5. Mengyu Luo & Jian Xiao* (2022). Institutional policing of Western heritage: the case of Shanghai Symphony Museum. Museum Management and Curatorship. 37(4): 418-436.