The Cultural Studies Ph.D program sponsors an annual speakers' series providing an opportunity for our students to hear and meet some of the most exciting and innovative scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are opportunities to socialize with our visitors afterwards. As always, these presentations are open to all members of the university community.
2024-25 Academic Year
Alex Levant
October 3, 2024, Lady Eaton: The Pit
I'm Blue: AI Literacy in the Age of Agentic Machines
Meet Blue, our family robot – curious, introspective, and sometimes funny. Blue engages in meaningful discussions on any topic, all without requiring internet access or data storage. As a key component of our research project on generative AI, Blue not only stimulates curiosity but also helps demystify this rapidly evolving technology.
This talk examines the public’s reception of generative AI through the lens of “AI Realism” (Lewis 2024), with the goal of enhancing AI literacy as systems evolve from basic conversational chatbots to autonomous agents capable of independent action. By sharing primary research with open-source Large Language Models using applications such as Open Interpreter and AutoGPT (and with live interventions by Blue), I aim to illuminate possible trajectories of this technology and the risks these developments may pose.
Grounded in “Activity Theory” (Levant et al. 2024, Vygotsky 1978), which posits that human subjectivity is in its essence a product of social interaction rather than purely neurological processes, my approach highlights how AI agency emerges from the social practices embedded within these systems, not merely the physical hardware (Pasquinelli 2023). By situating the deployed autonomous AI agents in my case studies within activity systems (Engeström 2015), I identify their relationship to human agents and the limited, often unpredictable nature of their agency. In contrast to prevailing trends in posthuman theory (Braidotti 2013; Barad 2007; Latour 2005), AI agents display an asymmetrical form agency – an agency without intention (Nardi 2005). Within this framework, I investigate differences between machine learning and human learning, exploring new directions in machine learning research (Reigeluth and Castelle 2021) and their implications for the future. As AI technology rapidly advances, the absence of a regulatory framework in Canada – and much of the world – makes this conversation both timely and crucial.
Dr. Alex Levant is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. He specializes in critical media theory and emerging/future technologies. He is co-editor of Activity Theory: An Introduction (Columbia University Press 2024) and Dialectics of the Ideal (Brill Academic Publisher 2014). His articles have been published by, among other outlets, Historical Materialism, Stasis, Critique, Educational Review, and Mind, Culture and Activity.
2023-24 Academic Year
Gavin McLachlan
January 16, 2024
Architecture is Aggression
This seminar will use philosophy and examples from architectural practice to identify problems that arise from built solutions to social demands.
A new civic building, like a hospital, is an act of aggression. It obliterates the site that was there before, occupying and replacing it with a vision shaped by the dreams and anxieties of the governing system. Lately, these visions are preoccupations with security, risk mitigation and essentialization. The architecture that results defines a territory (physical, cultural and relational) and, within those confines, reinforces a set of operations that insist on conformance while reducing agency and accountability.
The process that generates the design of this type of building, the manner in which complexity and vernacular community networks are rejected, redefined and often replaced, can be critiqued through a reading of Bernard Stiegler (The Age of Disruption) and Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern). Problems identified relate to the delirium of authority that drives the new design (Stiegler’s “optimism and “pessimism”) as well as the continued impact of the purification and isolation of information and identity (Latour’s process of purification) in arriving at the building program and form’s definition.
However, the same texts also support an alternate approach to the process that locates civic architecture in a community, determines what needs are being responded to and how that response is structured through a design. It rejects the authority and bias of data for something emergent, one where the evolving and unanticipated narrative of the community’s needs can be heard and told. The success of the narrative, in how it informs the design, is found in its capacity to accommodate a changing individual, cultural and historical complexity. And, whether the community is permitted to define and progressively modify the territory of the building.
Gavin studied at Trent University and the University of Toronto before spending the next 20 years working in architecture designing healthcare and justice buildings and writing/presenting about the relationship between space, recovery and violence.
In the News! November 21, 2023
Students in Cultural Studies’ Radio and Podcast Workshop at Trent Durham create their own radio broadcasts
Splash. Woof. Crunch. Creak. All sounds you might not expect to hear in a university class. In Dr. Rick Cousins’ Cultural Studies course at Trent University Durham GTA, you will hear all that and more, as students explore the use of sound in storytelling.
David Holdsworth
November 21, 2023
Styles of Practice in the Natural and Human Sciences: Text and Image from Thoreau to Foucault
The talk will have as its implicit thesis that, from a methodological point of view, both the natural and human sciences have more in common than divides them. It will proceed in five stages towards an explicit thesis about the nature of interdisciplinary inquiry: (1) an overview of my work on styles of practice, in contrast with A. C. Crombie’s styles of thought and Ian Hacking’s styles of reasoning; (2) an analysis of text and image in the work of the 19th century naturalist Henry David Thoreau; (3) a review of Michel Foucault’s conception of saying and seeing (the articulable and the visible) as a general understanding of text and image and their engagement; (4) an appeal that we avoid monolithic questions (with apologies to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose work I deeply respect) such as “What is Philosophy?”; and, (5) a conclusion to the effect that all theoretical practices, such as cultural theory (and, yes, theoretical physics), can be simultaneously philosophical, scientific, and creative.
David Holdsworth is emeritus Professor from the Trent School of the Environment and the former director of the MA Program in Theory, Culture and Politics (now the MA Program in Cultural Studies) at Trent University. His career has divagated wildly from Physics (Waterloo / McMaster) to Philosophy of Science (Western), Theoretical Physics (Cologne), Mathematics (Queens), Philosophy (Toronto), Radiation Risk Assessment (Ontario Hydro), Environmental Studies (York), to Environmental Theory and Continental Philosophy (Trent). The current talk is based on a 2018 Publication (“Styles of Practice in Philosophy and Mathematical Science”) and themes from a course taught in the English Seminar in the University of Cologne (2018) whimsically called “Where’s Walden?”. He labours to this day under the spell of Gilles Deleuze.
The Cultural Studies Ph.D program sponsors an annual speakers' series providing an opportunity for our students to hear and meet some of the most exciting and innovative scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are opportunities to socialize with our visitors afterwards. As always, these presentations are open to all members of the university community.
S. Trimble
November 7, 2023
Stories of Arrival: A Feminist Cultural Studies Mixtape
This talk reflects on the entanglements among autobiography, research, and pedagogy. By combining stories about my family, an account of my academic journey, and reflections on my experiences as a teacher, I inquire into what Stuart Hall (2017) describes in his memoir as “the connections between ‘a life’ and ‘ideas.’” How do we begin to account for what Sara Ahmed (2006) calls the “histories of arrival” that bring us to scholarly work, and what value might there be in the undertaking? How do these histories inform the ways we inhabit the fields and (inter)disciplines that shape our research questions? How do they animate our pedagogical strategies, sometimes consciously and sometimes not? By riffing on the figure of the haunted house – as my growing-up place, a cultural object I study, and a trope I pass on to my students – I open up questions about a field(?) it took me a long time to recognize as my academic “home”: feminist cultural studies.
S. Trimble (she/they) is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream and Undergraduate Chair at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her book, Undead Ends: Stories of Apocalypse (Rutgers, 2019), draws on Black feminist thought and queer theory to explore the cultural politics of mainstream apocalypse films. They also write cultural criticism for non-academic audiences, some of which can be found in the Bitch Media archives, and the most recent of which is a personal essay on The Exorcist included in the queer and trans horror anthology, It Came from the Closet (Feminist Press, 2022). Trimble loves dogs, basketball, and spooky season.
2022-23 Academic Year
Stephen Brown
March 9, 2023
Romancing the Book: Bibliophilia and the Crucial Materiality of Eighteenth-Century English-Language Print
The talk will explore several genres that arose during the first media revolution (1660-1830) as market forces developed capacities for the ever-increasing production and distribution of printed texts and ephemera, including newspapers, magazines, and parlor
games. Our attention will be focused on examining and handling period artefacts, rather than theorizing the topic. These will include
original coffee house collections of The Spectator and The Athenian Mercury, the first family board games, the first children’s books,
cook books, music, advertising, trade cards, satirical prints, and such related artefacts as eighteenth-century beggars’ badges and an
example of a notorious “barber’s copy” of a very rare eighteenth-century Scottish poetry collection.
Stephen Brown is a specialist in Book History and antiquarian book collecting. He has held research Fellowships in Canada, the United States, and Britain, including Canada Research Fellow at Trent University, Ormiston Roy Fellow in Scottish Studies at the University of South Carolina, Visiting Fellow at both the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, and Visiting Lecturer for the National Museums of Scotland and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. An Affiliate Research Fellow with the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh since 2006, he has acted as a consultant for the National Library of Scotland and the Signet Library, while assisting in the curation of exhibitions for the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh Rare Book Collection, and the National Library of Scotland. He is a leading authority on the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the evolution of newspapers and magazines in Scotland. His History of the Book in Scotland, 1707-1800 was honoured with the Besterman McColvin Print Award from the UK’s Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. He has taught at Trent since 1985, is the recipient of a Symons Teaching Award and a 3M National Teaching Fellowship, and was Master of Champlain College from 1993-2009.
Dr. Hugh Hodges
March 1, 2023
The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher’s Britain in 21 Mixtapes
About the book
This is the late 1970s and ’80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher’s Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. “Tell us the truth,” Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It’s a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher’s fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing presents an original and polemical account of the era.
Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as “extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work.” He currently teaches at Trent University, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms.
Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick
February 9, 2023
Place Matters: Critical Topographies in Word and Image
A meditation, in word and image, on the meaning and significance of place.
A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In Place Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalise the study of landscape.
Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography’s tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place making in such sites as Colonus, Mont Sainte- Victoire, Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu’Appelle, Donetsk airport, and the island of Lesbos. With contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, and others, the collection examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration, residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge.
In his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “Places, like feasts, are moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography.” Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, Place Matters presents critical topography as an approach to analyse, interpret, and reflect on place.
James Penney
January 19, 2023
Acts of Poetry, Acts of Interpretation: Genet and Lacan
This salon seminar will have two aims: first, to introduce my about-to-be published book Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion; and second, to frame the challenge of introduction writing, which I’ve always found difficult, in a way that may prove helpful to a broader audience of graduate students and academics in the humanities. The book stages a somewhat high-concept dialogue between the French writer Jean Genet and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the philosophical theme of ontology, or the metaphysical inquiry into being.
I argue that Genet’s literary discourse on the poetic image and Lacan’s theory of the act of interpretation in psychoanalysis rely on a similar conviction concerning an inherent negativity in both knowledge and being: an epistemo-ontological torsion, discontinuity, or incompletion. Further, I consider the challenge of introducing the book’s complex theoretical argument (which considers both the long and complicated history of “poetry” as well as the references to logic discourse in Lacan’s theory of the act) while at the same time addressing the difficulty posed by writing about Genet, a major canonical figure of 20th century world literature with a huge and generation-spanning bibliography of criticism that includes monumental works by, among countless others, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. Next, I try to position my book’s argument against the recent proliferation of ontological inquiry in so-called continental philosophy in currents such as object-oriented ontology (OOO) and speculative realism. Finally, addressing contemporary controversies linked to race, sexuality and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I reflect on the extraordinary continued relevance of Genet’s work today.
James Penney teaches in the Cultural Studies and French and Francophone Studies departments at Trent University. His previous books are After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (2014), The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference (2012), and The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire (2006). His new book project considers Badiou, Lacan and the idea of philosophy.
Pamela Forgrave
December 8, 2022
Damaged but Managed: Beekeeping as Transition Support for Soldiers and Migratory Honey Bees
This discussion focuses on veteran beekeepers in transition in the space of the apiary. Drawing on concepts of feminist new materialism, trans-corporeality (Alaimo), agential realism (Barad), and vital materialism (Bennett), Pam examines how the ‘veteran’ is created and “successfully re-established in civilian life” through relationships with honey bees. Pam argues that the veteran-honey bee relationship offers a bridge between the biological sciences and social humanities. The deep engagement of the veteran beekeepers with their honey bee subjects is an area that rational science often shies away from, however, these groups are demonstrating the impact of community, connection, and non-humans in mental health and identity recovery. Significantly, the veterans report intense emotional and sensory experiences in their relationship with bees and frame their engagement as “purposeful protection of honey bees through small-scale beekeeping”. It is also suggestive that the role culture plays in successful identity formation is significant enough to disrupt the current dominant medical model. But they also continue to reflect a commitment to binary understandings of identity rooted in colonial and patriarchal attitudes and humanist practices that have developed over centuries of interaction. Is partnership possible through ideologies of protection?
Pam Forgrave is a Ph.D. candidate at Trent University in Cultural Studies. She is interested in multispecies relationships and the impact of science and technology on their interactions. Her dissertation focuses on the centuries-long relationship between soldiers and honey bees and the ways they have shaped understandings of 'the other'. They have a shared experience of weaponized bodies and are perceived as meritorious despite the levels of harm they inflict and have inflicted upon them in the service of others. Pam’s interest in this area developed during her years working with veterans transitioning to civilian life and a commitment to expanding civilian understanding of the realities of soldiers’ lived and embodied experiences. Pam considers herself a bee-lover rather than a beekeeper for it is the bees that keep her grounded, keep her connected, and inspire her to imagine a new way to ‘bee’.
David Hollands
October 13, 2022
Believing in Illusion: Monstration, Contemplation, and Spectacle in the Hollywood Blockbuster
Tom Gunning's much debated description of early film as an exhibitionist cinema of attractions has been used as a theoretical framework to interpret a number of different types of films: films pre-1906 or 1908; avant-garde films from the 1920s and beyond; and the re-emergence and fierce popularization of the Hollywood Blockbuster from the mid-1970s to now. It is that last category that I focus on primarily. For theorists and critics like Linda Williams, Wanda Strauven, or Dick Tomasovic, attraction as defined by Gunning is applied broadly to the Hollywood Blockbuster in any number of ways, almost to the point where the concept has been stretched to breaking. What is not explored nearly as much in the same context is monstration, a cine-narratological concept proposed by Gunning's friend and collaborator André Gaudreault.
Like attraction, monstration in early cinema can also foreground the visibility of spectacle, but not necessarily in the same exhibitionist sense; monstration foregrounds visibility while attempting to hide the presence of the "narrator," the communicator of filmic discourse. In the context of the Hollywood Blockbuster, attraction is only one piece of the creation of onscreen spectacle.
Monstration emphasizes the temporal and graphic dimensions of a film's spectacle explicitly, and it does so in three ways: (1) the usually lengthy duration in screen time of the moments of spectacle, as seen in Gravity (2013) and 1917 (2019); (2) specific ways of shot framing of the moments of spectacle to emphasize their sense of believability, as used in Interstellar (2014); (3) manipulating the quality of the image itself at the time of shooting to make the image appear less constructed or mediated, as in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Just as attraction has been used to describe and analyze the aesthetics and technologies of Hollywood Blockbusters, monstration as an overall interpretative framework can also provide insights into how onscreen spectacle is constructed.
David Hollands holds degrees in Film Studies from York University and Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Trent University. David focuses on cinema narratives, cinema technologies, and genre. His dissertation explores the concept of cinematic "attraction" from its initial appearance in Russian film theory of the 1920s to its reimagining by film historian Tom Gunning in the 1980s, as well as the parallel history of the development of the related concept of monstration. In his work, David explores how both attraction and monstration can be applied to Hollywood Blockbusters, as well as filmmaking in the digital era more broadly.
2021 - 2022 Academic Year
Fan Yang (杨帆)
March 11, 2022
Window of the World: Transparency, Digital Placemaking, and Shenzhen Urbanism
Shenzhen, the first Special Economic Zone established in 1979 in southern China, has transformed from a global electronics manufacturing hub and counterfeiting capital into a UNESCO City of Design within the span of four decades. This article examines three digital-imaging practices that emanate from the city to explore the city’s multiple connections to globalization from above and globalization from below. The first is the 2004 narrative film The World, directed by Jia Zhang-ke (often known as a Sixth-Generation Chinese auteur) and based in part on lead actress Zhao Tao’s experience working in Shenzhen’s Window of the World theme park. The second is Shenzhen-based company Transsion’s design of smart phones for the African market, which have roots in the city’s Shanzhai (i.e. “knockoff”) mobile phone sector. The third is large-scale light shows around the city in 2018-2019 that turn the facades of high-rises into electronic screens, featuring LED-light imageries generated by algorithms. Utilizing digital media to illuminate Shenzhen as a networked place in the world, these relational place-making practices simultaneously engage with and reveal the contradictions of transparency as a normative ideal upheld by global tech giants and Euro-American governments. Together, they provide a distinctive window to discern China’s cultural and political dilemmas in the 21st century.
Fan Yang (杨帆) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). An interdisciplinary scholar, Yang works at the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, and contemporary China. She is a faculty affiliate in the Asian Studies program, and serves on the Global Studies Coordinating Committee. Yang is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2016. Complicating the prevalent story of China’s economic rise from the perspective of cultural change, the book argues that WTO-era China’s contested encounter with the globalizing intellectual property regime illuminates the nation’s cultural dilemma in the twenty-first century. Yang is currently at work on two new projects. The first, tentatively titled Disorienting Politics: Rising China and Chimerican Media, explores the economic, political, and cultural implications of China’s “rise” from the critical perspectives of transnational media and cultural studies. The second project, Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South, examines the first Special Economic Zone located in southern China as a media-architectural nexus that straddles globalizations from “above” and “below.” Yang’s scholarship on such topics as branding, internet censorship, food and media, “fiscal orientalism,” and Shenzhen urbanism has appeared in Theory, Culture & Society, New Media & Society, positions: asia critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Asian American Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, antiTHESIS, among others. Yang obtained her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, where she was the recipient of a High Potential Fellowship. She also holds an MA from the Ohio State University and a BA from Fudan University, Shanghai.
If you missed this event, a recording is posted
Svitlana Matviyenko
January 14, 2022
Biological Citizenship: The Case of the Chernobyl Zone
Living in a “risk society” (Beck 1992) means witnessing a global increase in the number of man-made disastrous accidents, including technogenic catastrophes, that leave an irreversible imprint on the large areas turning them into ghostly exclusion zones or accidental territories, in the Virilian sense of the word. Drawing on the work of American anthropologist Adriana Petryna, this talk reads the material trace of radiation on the body as a marker of citizenship, or rather, “biological citizenship,” as a form of belonging to the accidental territory, produced by the state’s techno- and bio-politics.
Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication. Her research and teaching are focused on information and cyberwar; political economy of information; media and environment; infrastructure studies; STS. She writes about practices of resistance and mobilization; digital militarism, dis- and misinformation; Internet history; cybernetics; psychoanalysis; posthumanism; the Soviet and the post-Soviet techno-politics; nuclear cultures, including the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion. She is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize.
If you missed this event, a recording is posted
Alexandra Boutros
November 18, 2021
A Cultural Studies Approach to the Communicative Praxis of Talking to Covidiots
The Covidiot (a portmanteau of Covid and idiot) is clearly a figure of our contemporary moment. But does this figure have its genesis solely in the COVID-19 pandemic, or does it emerge from other moments, or from pre-existing social and cultural conditions? In this talk I will ask who (are Covidiots), where (are they found), when (do they emerge), and finally why (talk to them) in order to explore what the Covidiot might tell us about how we apprehend concepts like health and illness; individuality and collectivity; freedom and restriction; safety and risk; and public and private. The figure of the Covidiot is embodied in bodies that are raced, classed, gendered, and positioned in relation to a host of subject positions including religion, settler-colonialism, and education. The Covidiot, I argue, emerges as a symptom of a dis-ease with subjectivity in a time of extruded civic responsibilities. Tracing the circulation of the Covidiot tells us about the cultural work it performs in a contemporary moment structured by a history of tension between dispersed civic-mindedness and pop culture individuality.
Alexandra Boutros is an associate professor in Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is a graduate of McGill University’s Communication Studies and Art History department. Her research generally explores the intersection of identity, media, and technology in the context of religious, cultural and social movements. Recently publications fall in the fields of religion and media, critical race theory. She served as chair of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, and sits on the editorial board of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
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Armond Towns
October 21, 2021
The Medium is the Message, Revisited: Media and Black Epistemologies
Who is the human in media philosophy? Although media philosophers have argued since the twentieth century that media are fundamental to being human, this question has not been explicitly asked and answered in the field. Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy. Delving into the narratives of the Underground Railroad, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the digitization of Michael Brown’s killing, On Black Media Philosophy deftly illustrates that media are not only important for Western Humanity but central to alternative Black epistemologies and other ways of being human.
Armond R. Towns is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Communication. Dr. Towns’s work brings together Black studies, cultural studies, and media philosophy. His current book, On Black Media Philosophy, is scheduled for publication in early 2022 from the University of California Press. In it, he examines a variety of topics, from the work of Charles Darwin to the narratives of enslaved people on the Underground Railroad to the speeches and writings of the Black Panther Party to the digital animations of police violence
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Kama La Mackerel
September 23, 2021
Interstices: towards a decolonial trans poetics of the past and the future
Since graduating from the Theory, Culture and Politics MA program at Trent University in 2011, Kama La Mackerel has gone on to establish themselves as a leading multidisciplinary artist and writer in Canada. In this talk, they look over their body of artistic work of the past decade, which spans from performance, poetry, photography, the moving image to digital art and literary translation, to offer a theoretical framework in which they ground their aesthetics and politics. At once a performance lecture and a studio visit, this talk will delve into the following questions: Is a decolonial enunciation possible at all in a racialized body that bears the weight of colonial history? What are the strategies of selfhood that a trans artist can deploy to catalyze new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation? How can hybrid spaces and interstices provide an anticolonial framework to disrupt fixed identifications as they relate to space, time, history, language, kinship and the body?
Kama La Mackerel is an award-winning Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator and literary translator who has exhibited, performed and lectured internationally. Their body of work includes photography, video, installation, performance, textile and literature. They are the author ZOM-FAM which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. World Literature Today called ZOM-FAM “a milestone in Mauritian literature." Kama is presenting their new multimedia installation and performance QUEERING THE IS/LAND BODY at the 17th edition of MOMENTA, Biennale de l’image in Fall 2021.
If you missed this event, a recording is posted