Events

In this talk I use light as a way of opening up questions about the relation of aesthetics to racial capitalism. Drawing from research in Nigeria, but thinking more generally, I move between structures of political economy and the everyday techniques and experience of living with and in light. Brian Larkin is co-director of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research, broadly conceived, examines the operations of media…

The face has had a privileged status in visual media, enrapturing cinematic audiences with its beauty and intensity of emotion. Yet, the study of the face and its social relevance is also the subject of pseudo-sciences like physiognomy and eugenics. This talk examines how the media help to capture the intimate details inscribed within the face, in what I will argue is, an artificial discourse of authenticity, identity, and intimacy by looking at how have media affected the way we…

The cardboard box has long been regarded as the imaginative plaything par excellence. In 2005, the box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Toy Industry Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of play in Rochester, NY—institutionalizing a decades-old association between cardboard and children’s creative play. On the page and onscreen, in museum galleries, schools, toy aisles, and at home, today cardboard occupies a privileged position within children’s material culture where the promises of environmental and STEAM education coalesce.…

Sasha Crawford-Holland Media Studies, Vanderbilt University In 2008, the Inupiaq community of Kivalina filed a lawsuit against the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the United States, seeking damages for the rising temperatures destroying their island home. After years of litigation, courts dismissed Kivalina’s claims on evidentiary grounds: their injuries were not “traceable” to the defendants’ actions. Although irrefutable scientific research links emissions to heat to harm, plaintiffs could not conclusively attribute specific impacts to discrete perpetrators. Heat’s nebulous, atmospheric mediation…