Erin Moore, PhD candidate in Comparative Human Development, will be presenting “‘Saving Brown Women from Brown Men’ Online: The Role of Philanthropic Social Media in Reproducing Moral Geographies.”
Friday, May 24, 10:30 am – 12:30 pm, in Cobb 310. Refreshments will be provided.
In 2008, the Nike Foundation released “The Girl Effect,” a highly viral online video and website that promotes the foundation’s efforts to support adolescent girl-specific development interventions around the globe. The video’s narrative claims that investing in adolescent girls is the silver bullet to a host of world problems such as poverty, HIV/AIDS and unsafe drinking water. Beyond the catchy production quality, this video is compelling to its viewers for two reasons: it creates a virtual space for identity-based social engagement along gender lines, and it deploys a moralizing geography where girls located throughout the world are united across tribal, national and cultural boundaries in an ostensibly global fight against gender oppression. The Girl Effect invites western women and girls to watch and share this video and thus participate in a space that helps them feel connected to both their understanding of appropriate girlhood and to imaginary girls around the world. Erin argues, however, that the virtual space of engagement emerging from the carefully crafted narrative in this video engenders some insidious unintended consequences. On the one hand, participation in “The Girl Effect” means buying into liberalist economic policies along with a set of normative expectations for the role of women and girls in families and communities. On the other, despite appearing to do the opposite, the Girl Effect (and the genre of philanthropic social media targeting young women as both subjects and objects) reproduces the division between the subaltern and the western viewer.
This event is being cosponsored by the Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop
**Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Chris Carloy at ccarloy [at] uchicago [dot] edu**
Tim Lenoir, University Professor and Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies in Society at Duke University, will present and discuss “Carpetbombing Cyberspace,” his current project with Luke Caldwell.
Tuesday, May 14, 4:30-6:00 pm in Rosenwald 405. Refreshments will be provided.
“Carpetbombing Cyberspace” examines the explosion of concern about cyberwar and information warfare as the most recent morphing of the military-industrial complex, and explores how the “inevitability” of cyberwarfare is being “premediated” through an ecology of attention-grabbing video and online games, alternate reality games, and other popular media such as television and film. Lenoir and Caldwell argue that while existing theories of premediation frame the current situation nicely, they disguise more fundamental and ongoing processes of securitization at the heart of digital capitalism and the headlong rush into the Control Society.
Tim Lenoir’s work has contributed to a number of fields and thus resists easy classification, ranging from the project “How They Got Game: The History of Video Games, Game Design, and Simulation,” to his more recent work on the introduction of computers into biomedical research from the early 1960s to the present, particularly the development of computer graphics, medical visualization technology, the development of virtual reality and its applications in surgery and other fields.
Hannah Frank, PhD candidate in Cinema & Media Studies, will be presenting her paper “The Ripple of a Single Leaf: Animation and Photography.”
In The Cinema Effect (2005), Sean Cubitt imagines a time, not too long from now, when scholars will finally “recognize that the photomechanical cinema is a brief interlude in the history of the animated image” (97). Drawing on debates, new and old alike, in film and media studies, this chapter considers an inversion of Cubitt’s formulation: historians and theorists should engage seriously with that brief interlude in the history of the animated image when animated cartoons were photomechanical cinema. After all, most animated cartoons were, until very recently, photographed, one frame at a time, and hence their constitutive photograms might be read as a series of discrete photographs. Through the frame-by-frame examination of several Warner Bros. shorts from the 1930s-1950s, Hannah argues that cel animation is just as capable of granting viewers access to marginal, unintentional details—to mistakes, accidents, and contingencies—as traditional photography and cinematography.
Friday, May 10, 10:30 am – 12:30 pm, in Cobb 310. Refreshments will be provided.
The paper is available here.
To obtain the password to access this paper, please contact workshop co-coordinator Chris Carloy at ccarloy [at] uchicago [dot] edu.
**Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Chris Carloy at ccarloy [at] uchicago [dot] edu.
Next thursday, Andrew Piper, Associate Professor of German and European Literature and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, will be presenting his paper, “Reading’s Refrain: From Bibliography to Topology.” This workshop session is co-sponsored by the 18th & 19th Century Cultures Workshop.
Thursday, April 18, 4:30-6pm in Rosenwald 405 (refreshments will be provided)
Next Tuesday, Seong Un Kim, PhD candidate in the Department of History, will present “Keeping Television Pure and Clear: the Social Background of the Discourse on ‘Vulgar’ Television in Postwar Japan,” a chapter from his dissertation.
The New Media Workshop meets in Cobb 310, from 4:30 to 6:00pm.
The chapter is available here
To obtain the password to access this paper, please contact workshop co-coordinator Matthew Sims at mbsims [at] uchicago [dot] edu
