Organized by Zeynep Çelik Alexander and Brian Larkin, with the Theory and History of Media University Seminar, Columbia University.
2021-2022 Seminar Series
Media condition the sensory environments in which we live. How bright or dark is the world? How humid? How warm or cold? What sounds do we hear and pass through, what images do we see and move among? Our worlds are constituted by ambient infrastructures, the technologies that bring these environments into being and that organize our sensory experience of life. The CCM event series this year brings together a diverse set of thinkers in media theory and beyond to examine these ambient worlds. How, and to what end, are these ambient worlds organized? Do these sensory experiences have a politics and if so, how? We will examine the relation between technologies and the bodies that interact with them to see how environments are constituted in and through media and, in turn, come to constitute the bodies and technologies that operate within them.
FALL 2021
Monday, Sept 20, 6pm (Zoom)
Rahul Mukherjee (U Penn)
"Sensitivity and Sensing: Toward a Processual Media Theory of Electromagnetic Vibrations”
Friday, October 29, noon (Zoom)
Eva Horn (U Vienna) and Derek McCormack (Oxford U)
A Conversation on Air
Monday, November 8, 6pm (TBD)
Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia U)
“Symptoms and Submergence: A Media History of Shipwrecks”
SPRING 2022
Friday, January 28, noon (Zoom)
Vanessa Agard-Jones (Columbia U) and Kimberly Bain (Tufts U)
A Conversation on Elemental Media and Race
Friday, February 11, noon (Zoom)
On Barak (Tel Aviv U), Weihong Bao (UC Berkeley), and Lucia Allais (Columbia U)
Workshop on Environmentalities
Friday, February 25, noon (Zoom)
Jennifer Gabrys (Cambridge U)
"The Forest that Walks: Digital Fieldwork and Distributions of Site”
Monday, March 7, 6pm (TBD)
Cajetan Iheka (Yale U)
"Agbogbloshie's Media Ecologies”