Media Fields VIII: Zones of Mediation (virtual, 2022)

Keynotes

• Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont)
  "Zones of Estrangement and Solidarity: Stumbling Toward Earth"
  
  Adrian Ivakhiv is Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture, and Steven Rubenstein Professor in Environment and Natural Resources, at the University of Vermont. His books includeEcologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013), Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (2018), and the forthcoming The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds. He is a fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, and the Cinepoetics Centre for Advanced Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (where he Is based for 2022-23 as a Cinepoetics Fellow and Fulbright Scholar). He is co-editor of Media+Environment journal and of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, and blogs at Immanence: Ecoculture, Geophilosophy, MediaPolitics and Ukr-Taz: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone.
  
  
• Yuriko Furuhata (McGill University)
  “Into the Clouds: Atlases of Anthropogenic Weather”
  
  Yuriko Furuhata is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her first book, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013), won the Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her second book, entitled Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022) explores the geopolitical conditions underpinning environmental art, weather control, digital computing, and cybernetic architecture in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on a new book project, titled The Edges of Deep Time: Archipelagic Archives of the Anthropocene, which explores scientific maps, photographs and films of fossils, clouds, snow and ice in relation to the settler colonial histories of geosciences in Japan and North America. 

Panel 1: Oceans, Ports, Logistics

• Jakob Claus (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg)
  
  "Pacific Islands as Ethnographic Zones: Mediation of Knowledge within German Colonial Ethnology"

  
  Jakob Claus is a research associate at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. He studied cultural and media studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, Goldsmiths College in London, and Leuphana University in Lüneburg. Currently he is working on a PhD project investigating constellations of proximity and distance between colonialism, ecology and situated knowledge in early 20th century pacific ethnology.

• Prem Sylvester (Simon Fraser University)
  “Geofencing and the Logistical Algorithm: Reading the Socio-Spatial Text of the Port of Vancouver”
  
  Prem Sylvester is an MA student in the School of Communication and holds a B.Tech in Information Technology from College of Engineering Guindy, India. His interests lie in studies of network politics and cultures, logistical media, and the making of digital (urban) space. He is interested in producing interdisciplinary research that draws on media studies, STS, urban studies, political economy, and computer science, among others. His thesis elaborates the function of locative, networked logistical media in (re)producing exclusionary social, spatial, and historical relations.

• Simone Winkler (University of Zurich)
  “At the Edge of Breakwater Zones along the Seashore: Of Lighthouse-madness and the Poetics of Ocean Spray”
  
  Simone Winkler (M.A.) is a (German) research assistant at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She holds an interdisciplinary bachelor's degree in literature, art, and media studies at the University of Konstanz as well as a master's degree of the Réseau Cinéma at the University of Zurich and the University of Lausanne with a thesis on historical discourses on the notion of the cosmic in film aesthetics around 1920. She is currently working on her dissertation in film history on aesthetic (dis)connectedness in oceanic environments of silent film (and beyond). 

Panel 2: Zones of Curation and Play

• Patricia Ciccone (University of Southern California)
  “Maintenance Zones or: How to Keep a City Alive”
  
  Patricia Ciccone is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation research draws on infrastructure studies, visual cultures, and critical urban theory to investigate the rhetoric of maintenance in the context of late-capitalism. She is also currently working on an experimental documentary about San Gorgonio Pass wind farms and is a frequent collaborator of the Montreal-based art collective Donzelle.
  
  
• Amy Harris (Simon Fraser University)
  “Crossing the Critical Zone: Climate Change Themes in Exhibitions and Galleries During Covid-19”
  
  Amy Harris is a PhD Candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, and the Manager for the Digital Democracies Institute also at SFU. Her research focuses on climate change communication, particularly through museums, exhibitions and affective environments. She worked in various fields before pursuing a Masters in Communication which she completed in Spring 2020, and is now excited about her current PhD program, and research direction.
  
  
• Basil Dababneh (University of Chicago)
  “Multiscreen Masculinities and the Silly Zones of Queer Ordinariness in Akram Zaatari’s Dance to the End of Love (2011)”
  
  Basil Dababneh (he/they) is a Neubauer Doctoral Fellow and PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where they study the forms of silliness in and across cinema and media. Basil primarily works at the nexus of queer and trans of color critique, popular and digital media studies, and affect theory. Basil also holds a Gender and Sexuality Studies Certificate from the University of Chicago.
  
  
• Laura Laabs (Goethe University)
  “Branded Space, Brand as Space: Astro’s Playroom and the Mediation of PlayStation”
  
  Laura Laabs is a research fellow and PhD candidate with the DFG research training group “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. In her dissertation project preliminarily titled Ludic Thresholds, Laura Laabs examines video game paratexts in the context of contemporary and historical media ecologies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in theater, film and media studies from Goethe University, and a master’s degree in film and media culture studies from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since 2020, she has been serving as editor for the German game studies journal Paidia. Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung.

Panel 3: Biozones

• Jason Livingston (University of Buffalo)
  “Every Film is a Prison Film: Critical Pedagogy, Sacrifice Zones, and Surplus Populations from the Mississippi Delta to Bayou Country”
  
  Jason Livingston is a media artist, film programmer, and writer. His award-winning work has screened widely, including Sheffield, Camden, Rotterdam, and Anthology Film Archives. Under Foot & Overstory is distributed by the CFMDC, and Lake Affect is available through EAI’s Experimental Television Center collection. Awarded residencies include the Millay Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Jason is pursuing a practice-based PhD as a Presidential Fellow with the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees with the Flaherty Seminar.
  
  
• Eleanor Ford (Independent Scholar)
  "Geiger Counting: Ontologies of Radiation Measurement"
  
  Eleanor Ford is an independent scholar and artist based in Chicago. Their current work seeks to schematize the necessity of technology to the human interpretation of natural forces, including radiation, waveforms, and geologic time.
  
  
• Sean Purcel (Indiana University)
  “The Philadelphia Consumptive: Zoning Tuberculosis in American Medical Research”
  
  Sean Purcell is a PhD candidate at Indiana University’s Media School and senior digital methods specialist at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. Mixing digital installation practice, media studies, and medical humanities, his work complicates and questions the continued reliance on the historically exploited subject in medical museums and biomedical argumentation. His most recent work includes Tuberculous Imaginaries, an installation on the history of tuberculosis at the iFell Gallery in May 2022, and “Dermographic Opacities” published in 2022 by Epoisen.
  
  
• Sasha Crawford-Holland (University of Chicago)
  “Zones of Coverage: TV Infrastructure and Thermal Violence”
  
  Sasha Crawford-Holland is a PhD candidate in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago researching how people use nonfiction media to organize power relations. Sasha’s dissertation examines how media rescale social experience by extending and modulating thermal perception. Their writing about media politics is published in Film History, Television & New Media, Synoptique, and American Quarterly. 

Panel 4: Urban/Communal Infrastructures

• Talveen Saini (Toronto Metropolitan University)
  “The Spectatorship of Ethnic Enclaves: A Look into Brampton”
  
  Talveen is a second-year Masters student in the Communication and Culture Program at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). Talveen's research primarily focuses on race and place, racial economies, representations of race, and political economies of media, creative, and cultural industries. Talveen is currently working as a Research Assistant for the Brampton Arts Agency, (formerly known as the Arts, Culture, and Creative Industry Development Agency of Brampton, Ontario) as she works on her Major Research Paper on the experiences of racialized artists in the city of Brampton, Ontario.
  
  
• Ziwei Chen (Independent Scholar)
  “The Shanghai Arcades: A Brief History of Chinese Urban Media”
  
  Ziwei Chen is a recent MA graduate of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. His research interests lie broadly in media and cultural theory as well as Chinese film and media historiography. His current project looks at the media and technological history of socio-technical systems such as the shopping malls and railway transportations in China and examines their entanglement with Chinese post-socialist governance and the politics of mass mobilization and consumption. He has presented his works at USC’s First Forum and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. When not reading or writing, he can usually be found at various coffee shops around the city of Los Angeles.
  
  
• George Ramirez (New York University)
  “Potential: Light, Fields, and Color in 1990s Comic Books”
  
  George N. Ramírez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where his work focuses on digital media, Latinx popular culture, and theories of mediation. He holds a M.A. in American Studies from George Washington University, a M.S. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.S. in Physics and History from Yale University.

Conference Organizers

• Hannah Garibaldi
• Kelsey Moore
• Kyna McClenaghan
• Stephen Borunda

List of Sponsors 

• Carsey-Wolf Center
• Department of English
• Department of Film and Media Studies
• Department of History
• Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC)
• Literature and the Environment Research Center
• Media + Environment Journal
• Media Fields Journal
• Theories of Media Techniques in the Wake of Postcolonial and Environmental Studies Reading Group 
• Transcriptions Center

UAW Academic Workers Strike Solidarity Statement

Carsey-Wolf Center Screening: Altiplano (Postponed)

Call for Papers