Hi there. I, Shannon, organized Media Studies’ Spring 2017 lecture series. Some of these events might be of interest to you. If so, please join us!

PDF poster here

All events take place in the University Center, 63 5th Ave, in room L104 (lower level) Mondays from 6 to 7:45pm

March 6: Documentary and Difference

GENEVIEVE YUE, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College

Genevieve Yue is an assistant professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, and co-editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Her writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, Film Comment, and Film Quarterly. She is currently completing a book on feminism, materiality, and film theory.

EPHRAIM ASILI, Full Time Artist in Residence, Bard College

Ephraim Asili is an African American Artist, Filmmaker, and Deejay. One of the points of focus in Asili’s work is the African Diaspora as a cultural force. His work often weaves together the near and the far as a way of revealing linkages across history and geography. Thus far Asili’s work has been filmed in locations including  Ghana, Brazil, Jamaica, and Ethiopia as well as in Philadelphia, Harlem, and Detroit. His films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, MOMA PS1, LAMOCA, and The Boston Museum of Fine Art.

March 27: Power Plays with Data

ZARA RAHMAN, Fellow, Data & Society

Zara Rahman is a researcher, writer, and linguist who is interested in the intersection of power, culture and technology. She has travelled and worked in over twenty-five countries in the field of information accessibility and data use among civil society. She was the first employee at OpenOil, looking into open data in the extractive industries, then worked for Open Knowledge, working with School of Data on data literacy for journalists and civil society. Now, she is a fellow at Data & Society Research Institute in New York City, and Research Lead at The Engine Room where she leads their Responsible Data Program, looking into the practical and ethical challenges around using data in social change and activism.

MIMI ONUOHA, Artist & Research Resident, Eyebeam

Mimi Onuoha is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher using code and writing to explore the process, results, and implications of data collection. Recently she has been in residence at Data & Society Research Institute and the Royal College of Art. Onuoha has spoken at and exhibited at events internationally, and in 2014 was selected to be in the inaugural class of Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows. Currently she teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and is a Research Resident at Eyebeam, where she is programmatically and interpersonally investigating data collection, missing datasets, and strategies for intervention and response.

April 17: Media and Thermodynamics

TEGA BRAIN, Assistant Professor, SUNY Purchase; Fellow, Data & Society

Tega Brain is an artist making eccentric engineering, work that intersects art, ecology & engineering. Eccentric engineering reimagines technologies to address their scope and politics, with a focus on externalities and unintended consequences. She has exhibited at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, the Science Gallery Dublin, Eyebeam in New York City and the Australian Centre for Design, Sydney. Tega is a fellow at Data & Society NYC and is an Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase.

NICOLE STAROSIELSKI, Assistant Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU

Nicole Starosielski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is author of The Undersea Network (2015), which charts the development of transoceanic cable systems, beginning with the nineteenth century telegraph network and extending to today’s fiber-optic infrastructure. She is also co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), and the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press. Her current project, Media Hot and Cold, traces the relationship between media technologies, embodied perception, and thermal conditions.

April 24: Expanding Soundscape: Experiments in Field Recording

KEVIN T. ALLEN, filmmaker and sound artist

Kevin T. Allen is a filmmaker and sound artist who makes ethnographically imbued “sound-films” in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, the Wild West, and the migrant farm worker community of Immokalee, Florida. Recent research leads him to find culture not exclusively in human forms, but also inherent within physical landscapes and material objects. His work is featured internationally at museums and festivals and is funded through the Jerome Foundation. He is a part-time assistant professor of sound and filmmaking at The New School.

MAILE COLBERT, Doctoral Research Fellow at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Collaborator in the research group on Cinema and Philosophy, IFILNOVA

Maile Colbert is an intermedia artist and educator with a concentration on sound and video. She holds a BFA in The Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, an MFA in Integrated Media/Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts, and is currently a Research Fellow towards a PhD in the Estudos Artísticos program in the College of Social and Human Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has had multiple screenings and exhibits, and has performed and screened widely in Japan, Europe, Mexico, and the States.

May 1: Everyday Forms of Innovation: Africa Contemporary 

SEAN JACOBS, Associate Professor, International Affairs, The New School; Founder and Editor, Africa is a Country

Sean Jacobs is on the international affairs faculty of The New School. A native of Cape Town, South Africa, he studied there, at Northwestern University and the University of London. He has held fellowships at The New School, Harvard University and NYU. His writings on African politics, reality television, the internet and soccer, have appeared in/on The New York Times, Jacobin, The Guardian, Volkskrant and Chimurenga Chronic.

CLAPPERTON CHAKANETSA MAVHUNGA, Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT

Professor Mavhunga is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at MIT. His professional interests lie in the history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the international context, with a focus on Africa. He is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), and has just finished editing a volume entitled What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? which explores STI in Africa from an archaeological, historical, philosophical, anthropological, STS, engineering, development, and policymaking perspective. Mavhunga’s second monograph—on tsetse fly as a site of African knowledge production—is finally finished after extensive further research and is expected late 2017 or early 2018.