Events
Past Events
September 2020
Department of Film and Media Studies Undergraduate Orientation
University of California, Santa Barbara | Department of Film and Media Studies Undergraduate Orientation | Fall 2020 Tuesday, September 29, 1:00pm – 2:30pm, On Line Part I: 40 minutes: 1:00 pm zoom link here Cristina Venegas: Welcome and Quick Introduction of Faculty and Staff (Faculty to BRIEFLY mention what courses they will be teaching in 2020-2021) Peter Bloom: What is Film and Media Studies? Chuck Wolfe: Learning as Discovery Joe Palladino: A Sense of Structure to the…
Find out more »October 2020
TV News & Racial Justice in the U.S.: Critical Reflections on a 2020 Letter-writing Campaign
With Anna Everett, Brandy Monk-Payton, Lisa Parks, Jade Petermon In this timely one-hour webinar, Professors Anna Everett and Lisa Parks discuss a letter-writing campaign they initiated in the summer of 2020 to address the topic of black employees in TV news networks and the coverage of U.S. race relations in TV news. They will discuss the campaign’s origins and the responses it elicited, offering critical reflections about the process. Everett and Parks will be joined by two scholars who participated…
Find out more »December 2020
The Carceral Techno-Imaginary: Between Technological Seeing and Punishment in Black Mirror’s “White Bear” – Wendy Sung
Using the Sandra Bland arrest as a dialogical space, this talk analyzes season 2's episode of Black Mirror, the British anthology TV series, known as “White Bear” (2013). By reference to this televisual media context, I seek to illuminate the failures of the technological rescue narrative by putting this show into conversation with the techno-dystopian carceral imagination alongside the realities of US post-slavery Blackness, technology, and racialized surveillance. The visual capture of racial violence by emerging visual technologies has often been praised as a…
Find out more »February 2021
Hieroglyphics of the Film: Stuplimity and Static in the Films of Ja’Tovia Gary – Kelli Moore (MCC-Steinhardt, NYU)
This talk examines the film and video oeuvre of Ja’Tovia Gary. It focuses on the strategies she employs to address blackness as both sociopolitical narrative and a material quality of film. Gary’s interaction with the staging of her experimental films and film as matter are historical and technical. By reference to the Giverny Suite film series, I recount how the filmmaker encouraged her audience to move about the screening space by thematizing the notion of “stuplimity,” following the writing of…
Find out more »Transworlding (II): Jahan Z Ahmed (Global Studies), “Infrastructures of Islamism in Cold War Pakistan”
This chapter maps the U.S. cultural Cold War institutions, their context, objectives and investments in Islamist imaginaries and how they collectively helped build information infrastructures for Islamist social worlds. It particularly focuses on the institutions involved in influencing print cultures i.e., the Congress for Cultural Freedom - Pakistan Committee (CCF-Pak) and Franklin Book Programs (FBP) and the physical spaces in Pakistan such as universities, publishing houses and libraries where they constructed alliances and patronage networks.
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