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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160211T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20160211T170000
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SUMMARY:Lisa Parks: "Drone Matters: Vertical Mediation in the Horn of Africa"
DESCRIPTION:Lisa ParksUniversity of California\, Santa Barbara\nSince 2002\, the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and CIA have orchestrated a covert drone war from Camp Lemonier in the African country of Djibouti\, monitoring and striking alleged al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab suspects in Yemen and Somalia. As a media scholar\, UC Santa Barbara’s Lisa Parks is interested both in the discourses that have been used to expose covert US drone interventions and in the ways that drone operations themselves function as technologies of mediation. Drawing upon media such as training manual diagrams\, infrared images\, Google Earth interfaces\, and drone crash scene photos\, this talk explores the drone’s mediating work through three registers: the infrastructural\, the perceptual\, and the forensic. Focusing on maneuvers between the ground and sky\, Parks suggest that military drone operations are irreducible to the screen’s display and should be understood as practices of vertical mediation–as practices of communication and materialization that occur dynamically through the vertical field\, and\, as such\, have particular kinds of affects. The talk based on a chapter of her forthcoming book\, Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror. \nLisa Parks is Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP\, 2005) and Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge\, forthcoming)\, and is co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois\, 2015)\, Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies\, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP\, 2012)\, Undead TV (Duke UP\, 2007)\, Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU\, 2003)\, and another in progress entitled Life in the Age of Drones (under contract\, Duke UP). Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin\, McGill University\, University of Southern California\, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a principal investigator on research grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/lisa-parks-drone-matters-vertical-mediation-in-the-horn-of-africa/
LOCATION:MIT Building 56\, Room 114\, Access via 21 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Lisa-Parks.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160218T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20160218T170000
DTSTAMP:20260426T034037
CREATED:20160115T162252Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20160120T174615Z
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SUMMARY:Caroline Jack: "How Facts Survive in Public Service Media"
DESCRIPTION:Caroline Jack\, CMS/W Exchange Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University\nEconomic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation\, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded\, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978\, the nonprofit\, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ responsibility to become economically knowledgeable\, and distributed over ten million copies of a glossy brochure designed to teach citizens the least they needed to know about the American economic system. Activist groups criticized the Ad Council campaign as propagandistic–but when these groups responded with their own information campaigns\, they found themselves excluded from access to public funds and airwaves. Where was the line between objective information and propaganda? Who had the power to decide? How has this dynamic changed over time\, as new media technologies have emerged and neoliberal policies and philosophies have moved from the margins to the center of American political culture? In this talk\, Jack calls attention to corporate managers and executives as consequential social and ontological actors with distinctive vernacular theories of media and politics. \nCaroline Jack is an Exchange Scholar in CMS/W and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her article “Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series” was recently published in Enterprise and Society.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/caroline-jack-how-facts-survive-in-public-service-media/
LOCATION:MIT Building 56\, Room 114\, Access via 21 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Vintage-CRT-television.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160225T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20160225T170000
DTSTAMP:20260426T034037
CREATED:20160115T150419Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20160115T150503Z
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SUMMARY:Vincent Brown: "Designing Histories of Slavery for the Database Age"
DESCRIPTION:Vincent BrownCharles Warren Professor of History\, Professor of African and African-American Studies\, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University\nMultimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been\, could be\, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery\, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database\, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61\, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it\, the vision that allows us to see its traces\, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities. \nMulti-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History\, Professor of African and African-American Studies\, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research\, writing\, teaching\, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/vincent-brown-designing-histories-of-slavery-for-the-database-age/
LOCATION:MIT Building 56\, Room 114\, Access via 21 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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