MEDIA FIELDS 2: INFRASTRUCTURES
MEDIA FIELDS 2: INFRASTRUCTURES
UCSB, April 9-10, 2009
Thursday, April 9: McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020); Friday, April
10: Mosher Alumni House
Media Fields 2: Infrastructures is an interdisciplinary conference on media and infrastructure hosted by graduate students in Film and Media Studies, Communication, and Comparative Literature at UCSB.
The first Media Fields conference, sponsored by the Department of Film and Media Studies at UCSB in 2007, gathered students and scholars to reflect upon how their projects related to the idea of the field in the epistemological and environmental registers of the term. Media Fields 2 will hone in on the more specific idea of infrastructures. If a field is an expanse of space, infrastructures are skeletal and map out interactions, relations, and orders of elements in such a space.
Recent work on media by scholars such as Brian Larkin, Lisa Parks, Jonathan Sterne, and Zhang Zhen points to the import of infrastructures in relation to the study of material spaces, representations, and practices associated with filmgoing, piracy, satellite footprints, globalization, and urbanization. Media Fields 2: Infrastructures aims to build upon such work and to open a dialogue between different disciplinary approaches to the study of media infrastructure, provide a forum to discuss the neglected material aspects of current media systems, and ask questions about how the term “infrastructure” could help link the study of media across the humanities and social sciences.
Media Fields 2: Infrastructures will begin with a roundtable discussion on Thursday, April 9, at 4 PM in the McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020). The roundtable will be followed by a keynote address by Brian Larkin on "The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure" at 5:30 PM. Larkin, a leading scholar in the study of media infrastructures, is associate professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University and the author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008), and co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (University of California Press, 2002). The conference will also include presentations by graduate students and scholars from across the United States. These presentations will take place on Friday, April 10, 2009 from 9 AM to 7 PM in the Mosher Alumni House. UCSB professors Jennifer Earl, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Parks, Cristina Venegas, and Charles Wolfe will serve as panel moderators and roundtable discussants.
Media Fields 2: Infrastructures is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Center for Information Technology and Society, Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media, Consortium for Literature, Theory, and Culture, and Department of Film and Media Studies.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information and to view the full conference schedule, please visit http://mediafields.wordpress.com/.
