Media today are our situation; they constitute the fabric of living. But a number of new crises–and subjects–have profoundly shaped the field of media studies, including an environmental turn in media studies, elemental media, ubiquitous computing, distributed sensing, and pervasive algorithms and artificial intelligence. Accordingly, this conference revists and updates Mark B.N. Hansen and WJT Mitchell’s landmark Critical Terms for Media Studies (2010) by accounting for how these new ways of thinking impact the subjective, aesthetic, political, material and economic registers of life and living in the twenty-first century.

In particular, the conference will explore the many disciplinary and post-disciplinary transformations in the study of media since its publication (including the moment of “post-critique”). To that end, the conference will bring together an interdisciplinary set of emerging scholars external to the University of Michigan with UM graduate students and faculty to reconsider the project of media critique today.

The morning session (10:00 am-11:30 am, Digital Studies Institute Lab Space) is reserved for a limited-capacity working session with the invited speakers for graduate students involved broadly in the critical study of media. RSVP here: https://myumi.ch/qZkRx

The afternoon (2:00 pm- 5:00 pm, Hatcher Graduate Library, Hatcher Gallery, Room 100) will consist of four 45-minute “Keyword Panel” sessions, with a talk by each guest speaker followed by a dialogue with U-M faculty. The panel discussion is open to graduate students, the Digital Studies Institute, University of Michigan faculty and students, and the general public to reflect on post-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary turns within the study of media technology and culture as well as new limits and possibilities for media critique. RSVP here: https://myumi.ch/qZkRx

Speaker Bios:

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities, Artificial Intelligence, and Media Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He holds a PhD in English Literature, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies, from University of California, Davis. Ranjodh’s research, which traces the aesthetic and political entanglements of our technological cultures, lies at the intersections of science fiction studies, critical media theory, and histories of science and technology.

Thomas Patrick Pringle is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Pringle focuses on historical approaches to film and media, with an emphasis on how media shape how environments are conceived in a given place and time and how technologies interact with physical environments.

​​Anna Shechtman is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English, specializing in media studies and American literature. She is writing a two-volume history of the “media” and “data” concepts in the United States. The first examines the social formations and technologies of production that have allowed “media” to incorporate—and perhaps even supersede—the categories of “art,” “literature,” “communication,” and “culture” in the second half of the 20th century.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology and media, feminist science and technology studies, and media theory. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of History (Science / North America) in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley.

We want to make our events accessible to all participants. CART services will be provided. If you anticipate needing accommodations to participate or would like help filling out the RSVP form, please email Rebecca Uliasz at [email protected].

This event is co-sponsored by ESC, along with Media Studies (Graduate Student) Interest Group, Department of Comparative Literature,  Department of English Language & Literature,  Department of Film, Television and Media,  Department of Communication and Media, Digital Studies Institute.