Cinema and Media Studies (CMS) and the Simpson Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Cluster Host a sponsored graduate conference titled "Media, Power, Technological Determinism" June 4th, 2022, Online (in-person location PDL B536) Does the modern office floor plan of the skyscrapers redefine the division of labor? Does the thermostat in a documents archive secretly manipulate what we can read? We have little doubt in that Google shapes how we search for information, but does Google shape how we think too? These perennial debates can be traced to Marshall McLuhan’s claims about the unstoppable force of media technologies in shaping our mind, body, and environment. Raymond Williams labels McLuhan as a “technological determinist”, condemning his disregard for the historical development of technology. But does this label of “technological determinist” give the right to abolish the way McLuhan understands media technologies? Indeed, like Williams, many have pointed out that technological objects do not independently exist among us, but are embedded in a cultural and political network. However, when we open the socially constructed “black box”, as Pinch and Bijker described, what is revealed may only be what Langdon Winner calls a “hollow inside”—void of power relations. “Media, Power, Technological Determinism” graduate conference at UW Department of Cinema and Media studies aims to once again invoke the debates around “technological determinism.” We welcome paper proposals for a 20-minute presentation that include (but not limited to): • Historical, ethnographical, and comparative studies of media technologies
• Media and technology industries in Global South (innovation, maintenance, and labor)
• Technology and the environment of nature and culture (ocean, forest, architecture, and city)
• Media, technology, and design
• Scientific representation (maps, digital images, etc.) We offer a small amount of funding for presenters who plan to travel to Seattle for the conference. Tentative Schedule:
Keynote Speakers: Nicole Starosielski, NYU (Online)
James Tweedie, UW Body and Vision Machine-Woman and Woman-as-Machine: Gender, Technology, and the Cinema in Metropolis and The Doll, Nicola McCafferty, Northwestern University (In-person) “MacLuhanism,” or, the Local Validity of Technological Determinism, D. W. Kamish, Simon Fraser University (In-person) Borges’ Fable and the postdigital empire: New approaches to place-based education, Erin Riesland, University of Washington (In-person) Beyond the Mask: On Smell Object, Preventive Media and Containment in CoVID-19 Era
Wentao Ma, UC San Diego (In-person) Respondent: TBD Ecoculture “Seeing like an American: The Atacama Desert as a Media Laboratory in the Good Neighbor Era”, Stephen Borunda, UCSB (In-person) The Agriculture-Visual-Media Feedback Loop, Kendra Lee Sanders, University of Chicago (Online) Indexing Guiyu Wei: The Problematics of Environmental Forensics, Tinghao Zhou, UCSB (Online) Telementoring and the Heterotemporal Clinical Landscapes of Chronic Pain and Opioid
Prescribing, Lee Brando, The New School (Online) Respondent: Dr. Weixian Pan, NYU Shanghai (Online) Digitality and Platform Becoming Opaque, Becoming No-Body: Imagining Trans Futurity Beyond Remembrance, Kanika Lawton, University of Toronto (In-person) Conceptualizing Performative Ideology Labor in Navigating Dataist Political Communication Surveillance in China, Alex Jiahong Lu and Yuchen Chen, University of Michigan (Online) “The Medium is the Massage:” On TikTok’s Incitement and Constriction of Commercialized Everyday Dance Practices, Bettine Josties, The New School For Social Research (Online) StarCraft, Eugene Kwon, Yale University (In-person) Total (Sonic) Recall: Robotic Listening on Mars, Eleanor Ford and Joel Sutherland, U Chicago (Online) Respondent: Anna Parkhurst, UW (In-person)
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