Past Events

Monday, November 9, 2009 , 07:00 PM

Einstein Auditorium (Room 105), Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions Barney Building, 34 Stuyvesant Street

A lecture by Leonidas Martin Saura; Presentation at 7:00pm; reception to follow.

A visual tour around the “artivist” projects created by Leonidas Martin. This talk and presentation will explore the relationships between art and activism, how creativity can be a powerful tool for social transformation, how we can resist the power while we have a really good time, and why we must take direct action as one of the fine arts.

Leonidas Martin is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches video, new media and political art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, some of them well known internationally (Los Agencias, Yomango, Pret a Revolter, New Kids on the Black Block...) He also writes about art and politics for cultural blogs, journals and newspapers. As a video maker he has created several documentaries and movies for television and internet. He is a member of the cultural collective “Enmedio” (www.enmedio.info). Last but not least, he is an expert telling jokes, often using this divine gift to get free beers and to avoid police arrest.

Sponsored by: The Community Learning Initiative and the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study; The Department of Media, Culture and Communication and The Department of Art and Art Professions at The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.

Friday, October 30, 2009 , 09:00 AM - 06:00 PM

Helen Mills Theater
(137 West 26th Street)
137-139 West 26th Street NYC137-139 West 26th Street NYC
137-139 West 26th Street NYC137-139 West 26th Street NYC

9:00  Doors open | Coffee served

9:15  Welcome

* Marita Sturken, Chair
* Rod Benson, Director of Graduate Studies


9:30  Panel I – Vision, Sound and/as Commodity

* Jamie Berthe, “Deconstructing Tarzan or Reconstructing Racial Hierarchies?”
* Melissa De Witte, “Memory and the Spectacle: Phantom and fantasy in a new economy of the image”
* Jennifer Heuson, “Soundscapes of the Black Hills: An acoustemology of the American West”
* Faculty moderator: Martin Scherzinger


11:00 Panel II – Politics of Memory

* Lisa Gitelman, "Daniel Ellsberg and the lost idea of the photocopy"
* Hatim El-Hibri, “Sectarianism, Maps and Beirut: From the French Mandate through the end of the civil war (1920-1991)”
* Christine Weible, “How the creation of museums and memorials at the site of the ex-ESMA is impacting collective memory of the Dirty War in Argentina”
* Scott Selberg, "Cognitive Fever: Remembering Alzheimer's at the National Library of Medicine"
* Faculty moderator: Nicholas Mirzoeff


12:45  Lunch served


1:30  Brian Larkin, Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University, “The Mobility of Images and the Ethnography of Value: Cinema in Nigeria”


2:45  Break


3:00 Panel III – Media Activism

* Victor Pickard, "Crises and Opportunities in the Ongoing Struggle for Public Service Media"
* Evan Brody, “(De)scribing Disease: Capitalist HIV imagery and cultural memory”
* Dwaipayan Banerjee, “Media Activism in its Local Place: Lessons from Bhopal”
* Marco Deseriis, “The Faker as Producer: Politics of fabrication and the three orders of the fake”
* Faculty moderator: Allen Feldman


4:45  Reception | Drinks served

Friday, October 9, 2009 , 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM

Warren Weaver Hall RM 109

Memefactory comes to NYU: Learn Your Meme, Love your Meme, Know your Meme!

Memefactory is a performance for anyone who uses the internet. Whether you are perplexed by pictures of cats with awful spelling or spend over 9000 hours a week surfing image boards, we promise you'll either learn something or explode from overexposure to lulz.

Three gentlemen with three computers and three projectors take the audience on a fast-paced and whirlwind tour of every major internet meme, famous piece of internet media and more YouTube footage that we care to admit over the course of one and one half of one hour. Biologist Richard Dawkins defines as meme as a unit of cultural transmission - in the general sense a meme can be any piece of information which travels between members of culture - for us, however, memes involve funny pictures of cats and people doing silly dances.

Directions:
http://cs.nyu.edu/web/Location/directions.html
(Free and Open to the Public)

WHO: What We Know So Far

SPONSORED: by NYU @ Free Culture, NYU Council for Media and Culture, NYU Center for Religion and Media, NYU ACM's Chapter

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 , 05:30 PM - 08:30 PM

Casa Italiana

Friday, May 8, 2009 , 05:30 PM - 09:00 PM

Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK)
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor

Directions: www.nyu.edu/ipk/directions.html

Critical Positions on Promotional Paradigms
Creative cities, PR nations, celebrity diplomacy, Hype Machine, branded philanthropy, YouTube identities... These are both symptoms and effects of what Andrew Wernick termed "promotional culture": the extension of promotional discourses, practices and performances into virtually all areas of public life.

The goal of this two-day conference is to develop a set of productive critical perspectives on promotion in relation to contemporary culture. We seek to assemble creative and interdisciplinary frameworks to identify common themes and disjunctures inherent to these forms of communication. At issue is the changing role of the consumer-citizen-user in contemporary life.

Note: This is a two-day conference running May 8 - May 9. For panelist details please go to: www.nyu.edu/ipk/brand/index_mini.html

Conference organizers: Melissa Aronczyk, NYU and Devon Powers, Drexel University

This conference is sponsored by the NYU Council for Media and Culture, Drexel University, and by the Institute for Public Knowledge.

Friday, April 24, 2009 , 12:30 PM - 02:00 PM

NYU Kaufman Management Center (44 West 4th Street) room 4-90

Koval, a founding partner of the Kaplan Thaler Group, oversees all account management, strategy, marketing and general business operations of the agency. Clients include: Aflac, Revlon, Kodak, Herbal Essences, and Continental Airlines.

About The Power of Small:
In today’s world, we’re faced with overwhelming challenges — professionally and personally. We often feel stuck and don’t even know where to start. But we can all tap into the unbelievable power we have within to “get going” and make a huge difference in our lives and the lives of others. How? By starting SMALL.

In the follow-up to their bestselling book, THE POWER OF NICE, co-authors Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval show you how to harness the power of small to improve and transform your life and navigate through uncertain times.

From making a great impression at an interview to maximizing your household budget, you can conquer today’s biggest challenges just by thinking SMALL. All you need to do is refocus your attention on the little things and learn to “sweat the small stuff.” THE POWER OF SMALL shows you how.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 , 06:30 PM - 08:30 PM

NYU Silver Building (32 Waverly Place) Hemmerdinger Hall (lobby level)

The Alchemy of Tin: The Cultures of Jazz in Downtown New York in the 1970s

Description:
In jazz history, the 1970s have habitually been overlooked or dismissed as a period when the music went into severe decline. But in fact there was a remarkable ferment of activity in the decade, especially in New York -- much of it underground, in small clubs, musician-run "lofts," and independent theaters -- and jazz played a central role in the arts scene that developed in NoHo, SoHo, and the East Village. This lecture considers the social and musical space that developed around the Tin Palace, a nightclub that provided from its perch on the Bowery a crucial hub for cross-fertilization among the arts.

A reception will follow the lecture.

Speaker’s bio:
Professor Edwards is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. With Robert G. O'Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004).

Hosted by the NYU Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture, and Communication through the support of Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff
 

Monday, April 6, 2009 , 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM

82 Washington Square East (Pless Hall),
First Floor Lounge

Thursday, March 5, 2009 , 04:30 PM - 08:30 PM

Information Law Institute, Room VH218
(40 Washington Square South)

Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology 

In the age of genetics, biotechnology, and bioinformatics, life is increasingly fashioned and configured at the intersection of several discourses and practices, such as population genetics, molecular and informatic sequences, human enhancement technologies, and the therapeutic and agricultural applications of genomics.

Asides from raising crucial epistemological questions, these technoscientific practices compete for attention, credibility, and funding within the scientific community, the market place, and the public domain. But as the far-reaching implications of biotech research unravel, the opacity and secrecy surrounding the industry and the patenting of life become increasingly problematic. This is partly due to the difficult ethical questions raised by the life sciences, but also to the rapid extension of scientific knowledge production to a number of non-scientific environments.

As Bruno Latour (2001) has pointed out, the tendency of the experimental method to transcend its modern boundaries is the result of three distinct processes: 1) the end of the scientific laboratory as a secluded space available only to specialists; 2) the increasing agency of patients and ordinary citizens in formulating the scientific questions to be solved; 3) and the extension of the scale of scientific experiments to the whole planet, as in the case of global warming, AIDS, and so on.

Within this triple displacement, which turns the technoscientific experiment into a more and more collective endeavor, a thriving community of bioartists, researchers, and hobbyists have provided new analytical and activist models by which to intervene and participate in the life sciences. Through a broad set of hands-on interventions that provide a critique-in-action of both the political economy and the naturalization of the biotech industry, bioartists and researchers have fostered interspecies contacts, engineered hybrid life forms, and set up independent Biolabs. Together, they propose new scientific protocols and call for a wider, and far more direct participation among lay, artistic, activist, and academic publics.

Radars & Fences II features five researchers and artists who have been at the forefront of the battle for the democratization of the life sciences over the last decade: Beatriz da Costa, Natalie Jeremijenko, Richard Pell, Claire Pentecost, and Paul Vanouse will present their own work and discuss with the public models of interdisciplinary engagement at the beginning of the "biological century."

Full conference overview and schedule can be found here:
http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/md1445/rf/

***

This forum is being coordinated by doctoral candidate Marco Deseriis as part of a grant awarded by the NYU Council for Media and Culture with assistance provided by the Information Law Institute

Wednesday, March 4, 2009 , 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM

Pless Hall 3rd Floor Lounge
(82 Washington Square East)

What do 135 producers of children's TV from 66 countries around the world think about gender portrayals that children can view on their screens? What are producers’ visions for better quality TV and their production practices for improving it? The study demonstrates how gender and culture are strongly intertwined, yet 8 common principles for gender equality on television emerged in the grounded analysis. The presentation will highlight the potential benefits of integrating professional and academic ways of knowing about the media world in order to stimulate social change. In addition, discussion will consider how children’s views about media and their everyday realities can inform media practices to be more attentive to humanistic and democratic principles.
 

This Panel Presentation features:

Dafna Lemish, Professor in the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University, Israel; and Founding and current Editor of the Journal of Children and Media. Her research interests include the role of media in children's lives, as well as gender representations and the role of media in the construction of gender identities. She has a particular interest in cross-cultural and multi-method studies and has participated in a variety of international studies. Her recent books include The Wonder Phone in the Land of Miracles: Mobile Telephony in Israel (with Cohen and Schejter, Hampton Press, 2008); Children and Television: A Global Perspective (Blackwell, 2007); Children and Media at times of Conflict and War (co-edited with Götz, Hampton Press, 2007); Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children: When Harry Potter Meets Pokémon in Disneyland (with Götz, Aidman, and Moon; Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005); Media Education Around the Globe: Policies and Practices (co-edited with Tufte and Lavender, Hampton Press, 2003).
 

Producer/director Lynne McVeigh is an Associate Professor of television, sound, and children’s media and Executive Director of Craft Studies at the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, Undergraduate Department at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.  In 1994, she won the David Payne Carter Award, TischSchool of the Arts most prestigious teaching honor. Ms. McVeigh teaches courses in basic sound production, intermediate television production, and children’s television. She is co-director of The Fearless Theater Company, which is made up of young people with and without disabilities, and has created with the members theater, television, and radio programs. She has also involved The Fearless Theater Companywith NYU programs, staff and students, creating a temporary home for the troupe and making possible the radio series, Satchmo’s Gang on WNYU-FM. Writer, producer, and director of children’s plays, as well as instructional and documentary programs for television and radio, Ms. McVeigh’s credits include: Paths of Rebellion, an award winning PBS series on the American Revolution, Ivy, a film on the American university, Dawdles the Duck, a special feature on children’s radio series, Radio Recess, Court Trials in American History, 11 radio programs for public radio, Music of the Cinema, radio series for National Public Radio, and Personal Moments, a radio series on sex education as well as educational consultant for Noggin’s web series, Radio Noggin. Most recently, she produced and directed, Historymakers for The Fearless Theater Company. This twenty-eight minute video was created with students in workshops at two high schools next to the World Trade Center site and presents their thoughts and ideas on the aftermath of 9/11.

JoEllen Fisherkeller, Associate Professor, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Her research and teaching interests focus on young people’s everyday experiences with popular media and communication technologies, identity negotiation and cultural learning in context, and youth media education principles and practices. She is author of a book titled Growing Up with Television: Everyday Learning Among Young Adolescents (Temple University Press, 2002), has published several invited book chapters, and has peer-reviewed articles in journals such as The Communication Review, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, Journal of Educational Media, and Television and New Media. Fisherkeller is currently editing a book compiling research on International Perspectives on Youth Media.

Presented by:

• New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (Steinhardt)
• Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Studies (Tisch)
• The Council for Media and Culture

Thursday, February 12, 2009 , 05:00 PM

Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway Ave., Room 648

Jonathan Sterne (McGill)
“Is Music a Thing?”
Respondent: Robert Rowe (NYU)

Steve J. Wurtzler (Georgetown)
“Sound Design: Everywhere!”
Respondent: John Belton (Rutgers)

Introductory Remarks: Jonathan Kahana (NYU)

Moderator: Martin Scherzinger (NYU)


Jonathan Sterneis the author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003) and a wide range of articles that pose analogous questions for other media such as computers, the internet, television and Muzak.

Steve J. Wurtzler is the author of Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (Columbia, 2007) and of chapters in Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture, Keyframes, and Sound Theory/Sound Practice.


Robert Rowe is Director of the Music Composition program and Associate Director of the Music Technology program in the Steinhardt School at NYU. His book/CD-ROM projects Interactive Music Systems (1993) and Machine Musicianship (2001) are available from the MIT Press.


John Belton is the author of Widescreen Cinema and other books, and edits the Film and Culture series for Columbia University Press. He is former Chair of the Archival Papers and Historical Committee of the SMPTE.

* * *
Sponsored by:
NYU Music Council; NYU Arts Council; NYU Council for Media and Culture; Media, Culture, and Communication (NYU Steinhardt);
Music (NYU Steinhardt); Music (NYU CAS); Cinema Studies (NYU Tisch)

Thursday, November 20, 2008 , 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

Pless Hall - 7th floor conference room
(82 Washington Place)

“…to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores… a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” -Barack Obama

As the power nexus shifts from the national to the transnational level, the United States of America stands out as not only the most powerful government in the world but also the possible “spoiler” of a truly multilateral, multistakeholder approach to media and communication policy making. For the past two decades at least, the US government has usually stood alone in this area, sometimes as a passive bystander to debates, sometimes taking an aggressive stance to defend its interests, sometimes obstructing initiatives aimed at wider collaboration. Since November 4th (as in so many other issue areas) the world can hope that this may now change. What might the election of an Obama administration mean for the emerging global media and communication policy environment? My talk will explore this question by looking at some of the flashpoint issues that are currently on the global media policy agenda, such as: implementation of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, Internet governance and the future of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Millennium Development Agenda, and the World Bank’s recent show of interest in the role of media in fostering good governance and public accountability.

Visiting Scholar Marc Raboy is Full Professor and Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. A former journalist in a wide variety of media, educated at McGill, Professor Raboy taught previously at the Université de Montréal and Laval University. He is the author or editor of sixteen books and more than one hundred journal articles or book chapters, as well as reports for such organizations as the World Bank, UNESCO, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, the European Broadcasting Union, the Policy Research Secretariat of the Government of Canada, and the Quebec Ministry for Culture and Communication. He has been a senior research associate in the Programme on Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford, and is a member of the international council of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), past president of the Canadian Communication Association, and member of several editorial boards. From 2001 to 2003 he served as expert advisor to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for its study of Canadian broadcasting. He is also a founding member of an international advocacy campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society.

Professor Raboy has taught courses on Canadian media institutions, communication policy, cultural development, and international communication. His current research looks at media and communication governance issues in light of increasing globalization.

Friday, November 14, 2008 , 09:30 AM - 06:00 PM

Helen Mills Theater
137 West 26 Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues)

The NYU Council for Media and Culture and the NYU Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture, and Communication announce a graduate conference on the theme of “Standards and Practices.” We welcome all graduate students, MA or PhD, from any of the departments and programs affiliated with the Council for Media and Culture.

Standards and Practices

9:15                 Coffee

9:45                 Welcome and Announcements

Brett Gary, NYU Media, Culture, and Communication

Ben Kafka, NYU Media, Culture, and Communication

10:00               Keynote Address

Keller Easterling, Associate Professor,
                        Yale School of Architecture

11:00               Panel I - Standard Deviations

Cynthia Conti, "Is Anybody Listening?: Questioning the Local Bond between LPFM Broadcasters and their Audiences"

Gabriele Cosentino, "The Glamorous Normalization of Deviance on Italian Media"

Sarah Stonbely, “An Investigation into the Importance of Defensive Position-Takings in the Journalistic Field”

Moderator: Martin Scherzinger, NYU Media, Culture, and Communication

12:30               Lunch

1:30                 Panel II - Cultural Practices

Ben Mederios, “The Author of His Own Misfortune: Gender and the Politics of Mediated Confession in the James Frey Memoir Scandal”

Rianne Subijanto, “Contesting Standards, Establishing Practices: Popular Piety Culture in the Production of a Religious TV Series”

Casey Brienza, “Sizing Up Manga: When Standardization Destabilizes Definition”

Moderator: Ben Kafka, NYU Media, Culture, and Communication

3:00                 Break

3:15                 Panel III - Calibrating Technology

Robert Wosnitzer, “Turret Capitalism: Mediatizing Risk Standards and the Practices of Credit Trading”

Travis Hall,  “Processed Identities: The Creation of Bureaucratic Identification”

Carolyn Kane, “Redeeming the ‘Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’: Collaboration, Control, and Digital Color Aesthetics at Bell Laboratories,
1968-1984”

Moderator: Joshua Greenberg, Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship, New York Public Library

4:45                 Concluding Remarks

Ted Magder, NYU Media, Culture, and Communication

 
5:00                 Reception

Thursday, October 23, 2008 , 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM

Institute for Public Knowledge (20 Cooper Square)
Fifth floor

Directions to IPK: http://www.nyu.edu/ipk/directions.html

In this talk, Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths, University of London) will consider what can be learned for media analysis from work on the ethics of recognition (Honneth’s work in social theory and Ricoeur’s work in ethics). His discussion will draw on his previous work on media ethics and on media rituals, and address also specific topics including the question: can there/ should there be an ethics of reality TV?

Couldry is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London where he is Director of the Centre for the study of Global Media and Democracy: www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/global_media_democracy/

Couldry is a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, for the fall semester of 2008. He is the author or editor of 7 books, including most recently Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World  (Paradigm Books, USA, 2006) and (with Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham) Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Friday, October 17, 2008 , 06:00 PM - 09:00 PM

NEW LOCATION*:
Cantor Film Center, Room 102
(36 East 8th Street)

*Due to the number of RSVP's, we have moved the screening to a larger venue. 

* Contact Dr. Chyng Sun at chyng.sun@nyu.edu for more information. *

The critics of pornography have observed that in recent years, there are two trends occurring simultaneously: on the one hand, pornography has become more and more mainstream and accepted; on the other hand, newer, harsher and more degrading treatments of women are constantly being developed and quickly gain popularity, so the average content has become more and more extreme. Why?

To answer this question, The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships investigates the three independent yet interconnected aspects of the pornography industry – production, content and consumption – in order to help the audience gain a holistic understanding. It focuses on this central question: how does pornography help shape our gender and sexual identities, and our relationships?

This film includes interviews of pornographers, porn performers, and
scholars in psychology, media, economics and popular culture. Most
importantly, men and women candidly discuss how their or their
partners’ use of pornography has affected them. The film provides not
only analysis that debunk the myths and stories about abuse and
alienation, but also revelations of pleasure, desire and humanity.
Moreover, the film examines pornography’s effects on the performers and audience beyond the liberal celebrations as well as the conservative / moral denunciations; it engages a nuanced discussion of desire and harm, choice and system constraint, liberty and responsibility.

Please arrive early -- seating is limited. An RSVP does not guarantee a seat.

***

Directed and produced by: Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker
Associate Producer: Robert Wosnitzer

This screening is co-sponsored by:

• NYU, Center for Media, Culture and History
• NYU Steinhardt, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
• NYU, Council for Media and Culture 

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 , 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

20 Cooper Square (3rd Avenue at 5th Street)
7th floor

A panel discussion and celebration on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The late I. F. Stone, a crusading investigative journalist,
published his own weekly in Washington from 1953 to 1971.
Information about his life and examples of his writings can be
found at www.ifstone.org/testing (soon to become www.ifstone.org).  

Thursday, March 6, 2008 , 05:00 PM

Thursday, March 6, 5:00-8:30 pm
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South
Vanderbilt Hall
Room 206

Friday, March 7, 10:00 am-2:00 pm
NYU Kimmel Center for University Life
60 Washington Square South
Room 808

Radars and fences, satellites and walls, networks and bunkers. Two different sets of technologies confront us: the former epitomize the selective and flexible character of what Gilles Deleuze termed the “societies of control”; the latter embody the “old” disciplinary paradigm based on separation, physical mass containment, and restriction of the freedom of movement. Most of the times control and discipline coexist ad reinforce each other; sometimes they seem to collide. This is due to a variety of far-reaching factors and transformations occurring in the productive sphere.

Full conference overview and schedule can be found here:
http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/md1445/rf/

***

This forum is being coordinated by doctoral candidate Marco Deseriis as part of a grant awarded by the NYU Council for Media and Culture with assistance provided by the Information Law Institute

Friday, December 7, 2007 , 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

NYU Kimmel Center for University Life, room 909
(60 Washington Square South)

Roundtable with Recipients of Grants for Summer Field Research in Media and Culture:

Melissa Aronczyk
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development
Department of Culture and Communication
Topic: Branding National Identity

Juan Monroy
Tisch School of the Arts
Cinema Studies
Topic: US Television, Latin America, and the Decade of Development

Dillon Paul
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development
Department of Art and Art Professions
Topic: International Field Research in Social Justice Media

Sabra Thorner
Graduate School of Arts and Science
Department of Anthropology
Topic: Transformations of an Australian Visual Lexicon: Resignifying Photography to Produce Contemporary Aboriginalities

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 , 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM

Glucksman Ireland House
(One Washington Mews -- The entrance is on Fifth Avenue between 8th Street and Washington Square North, just a few doors north of the Arch in Washington Square Park.)

Join us November 13 from 7 - 9 pm at Glucksman Ireland House for a discussion with Robert W. McChesney of his new book Communication Revolution. A light reception will follow. Please note seating is on a first come first serve basis.

Robert W. McChesney is a research professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of several books on the media, including the award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy, and co-editor (with Ben Scott) of the collection Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism (both available from The New Press). He lives in Urbana, Illinois.

Howard Zinn has called Robert McChesney “one of the nation’s most important analysts of the media,” and Mark Crispin Miller describes him as “the greatest of our media historians.” Now McChesney brings both his authoritative analysis and unparalleled historical knowledge to bear on the growing but only fitfully successful field of media criticism and scholarship.

In this sharply argued book, McChesney explains why we are in the midst of a communication revolution that is at the center of twenty-first-century life. Yet this profound juncture is not well understood, in part because our media criticism and media scholarship have not been up to the task. Why is media not at the center of political debate? Why are students of the media considered second-class scholars?

McChesney’s concise history of media studies shows how communication scholarship has grown increasingly irrelevant in recent years, even as media became a decisive issue of our times. Now the burgeoning media reform movement, in which McChesney has been a key player, has made it even more clear that the revolution in communication calls for a transformation in the way we think about media.

Robert McChesney’s work has been of extraordinary importance. . . . It should be read with care and concern by people who care about freedom and basic rights. —NOAM CHOMSKY

This talk is sponsored by the NYU Council for Media and Culture and the NYU Steinhardt Department for Media, Culture, and Communication

Saturday, November 3, 2007 , 11:00 AM

Center for Architecture
(536 LaGuardia Place between Bleecker and W. 3rd Streets)

NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, the Center for Religion and Media, and the Council for Media and Culture are pleased to present a screening and discussion with filmmaker Paromita Vohra

Q2P
(Paromita Vohra, 2007, 53 min.)

Set in Mumbai, the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn't, and how gender, power, and the need to "go" make up public space and bodily well-being.

As part of a day-long conference on Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet: Outing the Water Closet Bringing together pioneering scholars of sex and gender with leading design professionals and activists to consider, critique, and reconstruct the public rest room.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer, whose work has been widely screened at festivals and museums worldwide. Her films as director are Q2P, a film about public toilets and the vision of the global city, which was awarded the Best Documentary Award at the IFFLA and Stuttgart festivals, besides being exhibited at the Tate Modern, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale) a documentary on moral policing and tabloid culture set in Meerut; Where's Sandra?, a film about sexual and community stereotyping of Christian women; Work In Progress (2004) about the World Social Forum which took place in Bombay in 2004); Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City (2004), a film that probes the myth of Bombay's cosmopolitanism through the politics of land and food,(Award for Best Film Indo-British Digital Film Festival); Unlimited Girls (2001), an exploration of what feminism means to different people in urban India (Women's News Award, Seoul Film Festival; Best Film, Aaina Film Festival, Best Documentary, Bollywood and Beyond, 2004); A Woman's Place (1998), a film about women's legal strategies in India, South Africa and the USA (for PBS); Annapurna: Goddess of Food (1995) about an organization of women food workers in Bombay's textile mill area which has been broadcast in 10 countries and A Short Film About Time (1999) a short fiction about a woman with a broken heart, her therapist and his watch.
Her films as a writer includes the feature films Silent Waters, about a woman whose life is transformed by growing fundamentalism in a Pakistani village (dir: Sabiha Sumar), (Best Screenplay Award, Kara Film Festival, Best Film, Locarno Film Festival) and Khamoshi:The Musical (Additional Scriptwriting) (dir: Sanjay Leela Bhansali); the documentaries Skin Deep, A Few Things I Know About Her (Silver Conch,MIFF 2002, National Award for Best Documentary, 2002) and If You Pause: In a Museum of Craft. She writes extensively for print, both fiction and non-fiction, including a fortnightly column for the Mumbai Mirror. She teaches scriptwriting as visiting faculty at various universities and has done considerable work with young people with a focus on radio.

FOR ENQUIRIES CONTACT- Paromita Vohra: parodevi@gmail.com, 011-91-9189377960

Friday, November 2, 2007 , 11:00 AM - 05:00 PM

NYU Sociology Department
(295 Lafayette, 4th Floor, Rm 4156 - conference room)

Mass media have had a substantial impact on social life since their
inception. By contributing to a shift in our relationship to time, space,
others, and ourselves, media technologies and networks have played, and continue to play, important roles in the very conception of modernity and contemporary lived experience. Media sociology scholarship seeks to study media in their historical, economic, political, and social contexts. The production of media content, the effects of form on content and reception, audience studies, and organizational theory are just some of the areas that media sociologists explore.

Epistemological questions include: How does sociology, as a discipline, contribute to the study of media; to the way we conceptualize media; and to how we understand media? What is distinctive about the sociological approach in media studies? How does it differ from approaches that emphasize culture, history, economics, technology, and law, to name but a few? Is there a "separate" sociology of media? Can it stand alone?

The NYU/Columbia Media Sociology Forum is intended to push the
frontiers of this research. The Forum will feature two graduate student panels as well as a research methods discussion led by John Thompson (Professor of Sociology, University of Cambridge), Herbert J. Gans (Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University), and Rodney Benson (Assistant Professor, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication; Affiliated Faculty, Department of Sociology, New York University).

Forum Schedule:

11-11:15 Welcome

11:15-12:45 Panel 1, Foundations and Parameters of Media Sociology Research
> Charles Girard, "What Role for Normative Ideals in Media Sociology Research?"
> Ben Peters, "Media Sociology in 1960s Estonia"
> Rasmus Nielsen "The Political Public"
> Monika Krause, "Public Service and the Transformations of the Journalistic Field"
    (Moderator: Aram Sinnreich)

12:45-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:00 Panel 2, Media Sociology Research in Practice
> Christopher Anderson, "Inside the Exploding Newsroom: The New > Newsroom Ethnography"
> Jason Stanley, "Absence, Distortion, Annihilation: Photojournalistic Representations of Gender, 1976-2000"
> Lucas Graves, “Questions or Quotes: An Analysis of Sources and Statements on NPR’s Morning Edition and the BBC’s Newshour”
> Pnina Schmasmi, “Headphone Culture in Urban Areas”
    (Moderator: William Solomon)

3:00-3:15 Coffee

3:15-4:45 Research Methods Discussion with:
>  John Thompson, Herbert Gans, and Rodney Benson
    (Moderator: Sarah Stonbely)

5:00-6:30 Reception

Please send questions to Sarah Stonbely at sas630@nyu.edu

Thursday, November 1, 2007 , 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

King Juan Carlos Center
(53 Washington Square South)

"The New Visibility" | Today we live in an age of mediated visibility: thanks to the development of mediated forms of communication, the visibility of individuals, actions and events has been severed from the sharing of a common locale. One no longer has to be present in the same spatial-temporal setting in order to see the other or witness an action or event. The rise of this new form of mediated visibility has transformed the relations between visibility and power and created new forms of contestation and struggle in the modern world. Skilful politicians exploit this to their advantage; with the help of their PR consultants and communications advisors, they seek to create and sustain a basis of support by managing their visibility in the mediated arena of modern politics. But mediated visibility is a double-edged sword: it also creates new risks for political leaders, who find themselves exposed to new kinds of dangers. Hence the visibility created by the media becomes the source of a new and distinctive kind of fragility. However much political leaders try to manage their visibility, they cannot completely control it. Mediated visibility can slip out of their grasp and can, on occasion, work against them, as attested to by the multiple forms of trouble which afflict political leaders in the age of mediated visibility – gaffes, leaks and, above all, scandals. The public domain has become a complex space of information flows in which individuals and organizations struggle to make themselves seen or heard or to prevent others from doing so. Mediated visibility is not just a vehicle through which aspects of social and political life are brought to the attention of others: it has become a principal means by which social and political struggles today are articulated and carried out.

Speaker's Bio
John Thompson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He works on social theory, media theory, political communication and the changing structures of the media industries. His publications include Ideology and Modern Culture (1990), The Media and Modernity (1995) and Political Scandal (2000); he was awarded the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and the Social Sciences in 2001 for his work on political scandal. Since 2000 he has been working on the changing structure of the book publishing industry, including the impact of the digital revolution on the printed word. The first phase of this research was concerned with the transformation of academic and higher education publishing; the results are published in Books in the Digital Age (2005). The second phase of this research, currently underway, is concerned with the changing world of general-interest trade publishing and the making of bestsellers.

Sponsored by Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff

Monday, October 15, 2007 , 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

Tisch School of the Arts
(721 Broadway, Rm 006)

A provocative look at masculinity and manhood in rap and hip-hop, where creativity collides with misogyny and homophobia, exposing the complex intersections of culture and commerce.

Meet the filmmakers-Director and producer: Byron Hurt
Co-producer and editor: Sabrina Gordon
Moderator: Dr. Trevor Milton

Sponsors:

* Media Studies Club, McGhee Liberal Arts, School of Continuing and Professional Studies
* Center for Media, Culture and History
* Tisch School of the Arts, The Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, the Directors Series
* Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
* Department of Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development

Thursday, October 4, 2007 , 07:00 PM - 08:30 PM

Great Room
19 University Place, 1st Floor
Free and Open to the Public

The Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy
and The Program in Educational Communications and Technology
NYU Steinhardt Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology

invite you to a guest lecture by

Jay Lemke, Professor   
Educational Studies, The University of Michigan

Friday, September 28, 2007 , 09:00 AM - 06:00 PM

Helen Mills Event Space
137-39 West 26th Street
(between 6th and 7th Ave.)

NYU Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
Graduate Student Conference

Keynote Speaker: Professor Arjun Appadurai, New School University on The Ethics of Possibility: New Media in a Globalizing World

Description: "Toronto School,” “Chicago School,” “Birmingham School,” “Frankfurt School” -- scholars of media and communication recognize that there must be a list of indispensable authors and texts, though we have a hard time knowing just which authors and exactly which texts that list should include. Our hesitation reflects both ethical and pragmatic concerns. Few of us are willing to engage in the processes of selection and exclusion that canon formation requires. And still fewer of us are confident we would be able to select all the right authors and all the right texts even if we were so inclined.

Yet our teaching and scholarship demand that we make such decisions all the time, no matter how problematic we find them. Syllabi must be written, footnotes composed. Our objective should thus be to arrive at these decisions as deliberately and transparently as possible. For this year’s graduate conference, the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication invites proposals for papers that make the case for or against including a specific thinker on the list of “required reading.”  To be clear, the question is not, Who should be read in media studies? but, Who should be required? Who should simply be recommended? Who can we afford to ignore? And based on what criteria?

Note:
Presentations by Media, Culture, and Communication MA and PHD candidates will follow Professor Appadurai's talk.

The conference will conclude with a 1-hour reception.

Thursday, September 27, 2007 , 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

Silver Center - Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Square East

Pre-event reception
246 Greene Street, lobby
4:30-5:30 pm

References to habit are more or less ubiquitous in modern social and cultural theory, sometimes as a ‘virtue’, as in the case of the habits instilled by discipline, but more usually as a problem, as an impediment and blockage to the dynamics of change. References to habit play this role in the formulations of the ‘classical period’ of sociology as well as in the later literature on the sociology of everyday life where, particularly when inflected by gendered discourses, women embody the habitual repetitions of the everyday which the dynamics of modernity must periodically overthrow. They play a similar role in accounts of the role of avant-gardes in renovating modern culture by challenging habituated modes of perception, with the audiences of popular media often being seen as embodying the inertia, the habitual forms of inattentiveness, that avant-gardes must pit themselves against. They are similarly invoked in accounts of the specificity of the aesthetic, from eighteenth-century civic humanism through to Foucault’s ‘aesthetics of existence’. And they play a key role in the discourses of colonialism, particularly when reinterpreted under the influence of evolutionary thought, in explaining why some societies – once in the forefront of humanity’s advancement – get stuck in the rut and why others, those designated as ‘primitive’, never got started at all. In ranging across these uses of habit, this lecture will review the role played by the Kantian conception of culture as a process of free and undirected self-formation in providing the standard of personhood against which habit has increasingly come to be defined; it will also review some the difficulties that this presents.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007 , 04:30 PM - 06:00 PM

Puck Building (295 Lafayette St. @ Houston)
Department of Sociology, 4th Floor

Please join CRAIG CALHOUN and RICHARD SENNETT, editors of the new Routledge collection, Practicing Culture, to celebrate the launch of this publication.

A collection of articles by Sociology and Communications doctoral students and recent graduates, Practicing Culture seeks to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research.

Practicing Culture is the product of a transatlantic collaboration called NYLON, which brings together graduate students in sociology and related fields in New York and London. Headed by Calhoun and Sennett, the NYLON research group is committed to developing ways of infusing critical cultural analysis into sociology as a whole and the integration of cultural analysis studies with political economy and structures of social relations in a more complete analytic approach.

Practicing Culture is the first of three volumes that will appear under the Routledge series title, Taking Culture Seriously.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007 , 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

Demos, 220 5th Ave, 5th Fl

Join Demos and GoLeft.org for a discussion with Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy.

No RSVP is required for this event.

Monday, May 7, 2007 , 06:00 PM - 09:00 PM

Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street
Theater 101

(Free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:30 pm)

The Department of Anthropology and
The Program in Culture & Media at New York University present:
DOCS ON THE EDGE

SMOKE SCREEN
by Wazhmah Osman

When the rising number of suspicious fires that have been breaking out in Brooklyn begin to surround her own apartment, filmmaker Wazhmah Osman responds with her camera. She sets out to find the stories and situations of people burnt out of their homes and meets the community groups who have organized to challenge the larger forces that are changing their cityscape.

***************************************

GREAT AUNT GLORIA
by Sabra Thorner

What does it mean to be a glamorous uptown girl turned elderly Parkinson’s patient in New York City? In spite of increasingly debilitating physical limitations, Gloria Thorner is determined to live life in her own way.

Through the relationship between the filmmaker and her great aunt, this film explores how memories of the past inform present understandings of ourselves and our loved ones.

*************************************************************************

HEART AND SKULL
by Lauren Kogen

After working for four years as a production artist at Marvel Comics, Jacob Chabot has finally quit his job in order to pursue his artistic dreams full-time. In seeking critical and popular success for his most recent comic, “The Might Skullboy Army,” Jacob shows that optimism and imagination are essential survival tools for independent artists.

*************************************************************************

ARPA VIAJERA
by Orlando Lara

Arpa Viajera joins Verónica Valerio, a Katrina evacuee and Mexican singer, as she journeys to her performances through the subways and city streets of New York City with little more than her voice and her five-foot harp. Just as Verónica begins to make a space for herself in the Latino music scene of New York City, she is forced to choose between the music of her roots, the music of her future, and the music that will earn her permission to stay in
the United States.

*************************************************************************

EAU DE PARFUM
by Sara Rashkin

In the world of fine fragrance whale vomit can be as valuable as rose extract and being called a nose is a compliment. Offering a rare glimpse behind the scenes of fragrance production, with insight from a top perfumer, The New York Times perfume critic, a local designer, and passionate perfume fans, this film will change the way you see that little bottle of perfume on the counter.

*************************************************************************

Sunday, April 29, 2007 , 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM

Bronfman Center (7 East 10th Street)

Sponsored by: NYU Center for Religion and Media; NYU Center for Media, Culture and History; NYU Bronfman Center

Looking Jewish: Photography, Memory, and the Sacred > Scholars, curators and artists explore how photographic practices memorialize the "vanished world" of East European Jewry before the Holocaust. In conjunction with an exhibition of the work of photographer Raphael Goldchain.

• Free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.

Thursday, April 19, 2007 , 06:00 PM - 08:30 PM

Pre-lecture reception:
246 Greene St. (6-6:45pm)
 
Lecture:
Silver building, room # 808 (7-8:30pm)

Talk title: The Anti-Imperial Tradition

Description: Critics of the American empire have overlooked a crucial historical resource--a homegrown critique of imperial hubris that stretches from William James, William Jennings Bryan, and Randolph Bourne in the early 20th century to George Kennan and J. William Fulbright in the Vietnam Era. Those critics rejected the messianic abstractions and misplaced metaphors deployed by apologists for American interventions abroad. Anti-imperial language was concrete, specific, and grounded in fundamental American principles: a republican distrust of irresponsible power, a democratic commitment to popular sovereignty. This lecture will reconstruct the anti-imperial tradition and demonstrate its relevance to contemporary foreign policy.

Bio: Jackson Lears was educated at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, and Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in American Studies. He is the author of No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981 and Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History in 1995. He has written on cultural hegemony in the American Historical Review, on modern art and advertising in American Quarterly, on memory and power in the Journal of American History, and on a variety of topics in cultural history in other scholarly journals. He has also co-edited two collections of essays, The Culture of Consumption and The Power of Culture. His new book, Something for Nothing: Luck in America, was published by Viking Penguin in January 2003.

He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Winterthur Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University. In October 2003 he received the Public Humanities Award from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. He has been a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications. He has taught at Yale University, the University of Missouri, New York University, and Rutgers University, where he is now Board of Governors Professor of History and editor of Raritan: a Quarterly Review.

Free and open to the public, but seating is limited.
Seating is first come, first served. Please RSVP.

Sponsored by:  NYU Department of Culture and Communication; Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff

Thursday, April 12, 2007 , 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM

Glucksman Ireland House (1 Washington Mews > entrance is on Fifth Avenue between 8th Street and Washington Square North, just a few doors north of the Arch in Washington Square Park)

The NYU Council for Media and Culture invites you to a Salon with Stephen Duncombe & Eric Klinenberg.

Stephen Duncombe, Associate Professor, Gallatin School;
Author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy
Arguing that "fantasy and spectacle have become the property of fascism," theorist, performer and activist Duncombe asserts that progressives should "build a politic that embraces the dreams of people and fashion spectacles that give those dreams form." His persuasive and pyrotechnic display of radical political thinking draws on a quirky mix of models-celebrity culture, the video game Grand Theft Auto and Umberto Eco's idea of opera aperta or free interpretation of art-to delineate how progressives can convey their message to a larger audience. What makes this polemic both inventive and exciting is its author's love of high and popular culture, which allows for deft juxtapositions of cultural icons like Bette Davis, Charles Baudelaire, Dungeons and Dragons and Tony Soprano. While many of his arguments have a flashy aura, Duncombe (The Bobbed-Haired Bandit) also makes incisive observations, such as that Cindy Sheehan and Rosa Parks had significant political experience before they entered the public eye or that politics rests as much on the imagination as reality. Noting that much current progressive writing retools old modes of thought, he persuasively and entertainingly argues that "if we really want to change reality, then we have to try and do something different."

Eric Klinenberg, Associate Professor, College of Arts and Science;
Author of Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media
For the residents of Minot, North Dakota, Clear Channel Communications is synonymous with disaster. Early in the morning of January 18, 2002, a train derailment sent a cloud of poisonous gas drifting toward the small town. Minot's fire and rescue departments attempted to reach Clear Channel, which owned and operated all six local commercial radio stations, to warn residents of the approaching threat. But in the age of canned programming and virtual DJs, there was no one in the conglomerate's studio to take the call. The people of Minot were taken unawares. The result: one death and more than a thousand injuries.

Opening with the story of the Minot tragedy, Eric Klinenberg's Fighting for Air takes us into the world of preprogrammed radio shows, empty television news stations, and copycat newspapers to show how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg argues that the demise of truly local media stems from the federal government's malign neglect, as the agencies charged with ensuring diversity and open competition have ceded control to the very conglomerates that consistently undermine these values and goals.

Such "big media" may not be here to stay, however. Fighting for Air delivers a call to action, revealing a rising generation of new media activists and citizen journalists-a coalition of liberals and conservatives-who are demanding and even creating the local coverage they need and deserve.

Hosted by the NYU Council for Media and Culture.  RSVP is required.

Thursday, April 5, 2007 , 06:30 PM - 08:00 AM

NYU Kimmel Center for University Life (60 Washington Square South)
Silver Board Room, #914

RSVP Required. Go to www.cencom.org to register for this free event for students and faculty.

The Cyberspace revolution is changing mass marketing at an astonishing rate as the Web becomes the best route to reaching any given target group. If you're in the marketing field, or plan to enter, it's vital to understand the concepts on which Web-based marketing is built. Our experts demystify vernacular and explain what you need to get up to speed.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007 , 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM

NYU Steinhardt Barney Building
34 Stuyvesant Street
(between 2nd & 3rd Avenues, at 10th Street)

Go to www.cencom.org to register.  The event is free for students and faculty.

Op-Ed pages are a powerful forum for public discourse, and a well-written piece can affect social change. But with limited page space, editors tend to favor the powers-that-be. Enter the Blogo-sphere and on-line citizen journalism, opening the field to a broader range of voices. Media opinion-makers explore the impact of this new phenomenon.

• Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
• Tunku Varadarajan, Editorial Features Editor, Wall Street Journal
• Matt Stoller, political activist/blogger
• Sheryl McCarthy, Columnist, Newsday; Board of Contributors, USA Today
• Andrzej Rapaczynski, Editor and Director, Project Syndicate
• Catherine Orenstein, contributor, New York Times, Washington Post (moderator)
  
  Co-produced with The Woodhull Institute and the NYU Steinhardt Department of Culture and Communication
  

Thursday, March 29, 2007 , 04:45 PM - 06:15 PM

Silver Center, Room 207 (100 Washington Square East)

Sponsored by:  NYU Department of Anthropology

Deborah Kapchan (Performance Studies) > Giving Soul to Global Music: Morocco's Fes Festival Redefining World Religions

• Free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.
  
  

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 , 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM

NYU Kimmel Center, 10th floor, Rosenthal room
RSVP: email uppernorthside@international.gc.ca

The Marshall McLuhan Lecture, celebrates the intellectual legacy of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media guru and scholar who declared "the medium is the message."

Sherry Turkle will deliver the spring 2007 lecture. Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from HarvardUniversity and is a licensed clinical psychologist.
 
She is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); and Life on the Screen:  Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, November 1995; Touchstone paperback, 1997).

Professor Turkle is currently completing a book on robots and the human spirit and editing a three volume collection on the relationship between things and thinking. The first two volumes, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With and Objects in Mind: Falling for Science, Technology, and Design will be published by the MIT Press in 2006. The third volume, The Inner History of Devices will follow in 2007.

Professor Turkle has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture and on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the effects of technology for CNN, NBC, ABC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline and 20/20.
 
This annual lecture event is presented by NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Culture and Communication, the Canadian Consulate General, and the McLuhan family. The event is free, and open to the public.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 , 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM

NYU Kimmel Center for University Life (60 Washington Square South)
Silver Board Room, #914

• Budd Mishkin, Reporter, NY1
• Jenna Wolfe, Sports Anchor/Reporter, WABC-TV
• Jon Wertheim, Staff Writer, Sports Illustrated
• Johnette Howard, Sports Columnist, Newsday
• Josh Freedenberg, Associate Director, NBC Sports
• Lolita Lopez, Weekend Sports Anchor, CW11 News
  
  Co-produced by the Center for Communication and the NYU Steinhardt Department of Culture and Communication

Friday, March 9, 2007 , 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM

Cantor Film Center (36 East 8th Street)

Sponsored by:  NYU Center for Religion and Media; NYU Center for Media, Culture and History; NYU Religious Studies program

Amongst White Clouds (dir: Edward Burger, 2005, 86 min.) A journey into the hidden tradition of China’s Buddhist hermit monks living in scattered retreats dotting China's Zhongnan Mountain range raises questions about their former marginalization, and current rediscovery, as religious practices revive in the People’s Republic.

• A discussion between filmmaker Edward Burger and Angela Zito (CRM) will follow the screening.
• Free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.
  
  

Monday, March 5, 2007 , 10:00 AM - 02:00 PM

NYU Law School, Furman Hall (245 Sullivan Street, between West 3rd/4th St.)

Sponsored by:  NYU Department of Journalism

Please join our distinguished panel for a lively roundtable discussion of cutting-edge fair trial/free press issues affecting the press, the courts, law enforcement and the legal profession. Continental breakfast and a buffet luncheon will be provided. CLE credit will be available.

• Chair: Hon. Judith S. Kaye, Chief Judge of the State of New York
• Co-chairs: Hon. Albert M. Rosenblatt, Associate Judge, NYS Court of Appeals; Rex Smith, Vice President and Editor, Albany Times Union
• Secretary: Madeleine Schachter, Esq., VP and Deputy Gen. Counsel, Hachette Book Group USA
• Treasurer: John Gross, Esq., Ingerman Smith, LLP

As space is limited, please reply by February 26, 2007, to ftfp@courts.state.ny.us with your name, title, address, telephone and e-mail address in order to reserve a seat.

Friday, March 2, 2007 , 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM

King Juan Carlos Center (53 Washington Square South)

Sponsored by:  NYU Center for Media, Culture and History;  NYU Center for Religion and Media

With God on Our Side: "George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right"  (David Van Taylor and Calvin Skaggs, 1996, 100 min.)

• An in-depth look at President Bush’s connection with evangelical Christianity. A conversation between filmmaker David Van Taylor and journalist Jeffrey Sharlet (CRM) will follow the screening.
• Free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.

Thursday, February 15, 2007 , 04:45 PM - 06:15 PM

Silver Center - Heights Lounge, Room 207 (100 Washington Square East)

Sponsored by:  NYU Department of Anthropology

John Bowen  (Washington University) > Shaping Islam to France (and Vice-Versa?): Schools, Debates, and Sacrifice

• Free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007 , 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM

Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street
(between Rivington and Stanton)

The New Press is pleased to announce a reading, book signing and party for DREAM: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, by Stephen Duncombe.

What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonald’s commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much. And, as Stephen Duncombe brilliantly argues, this is part of what’s wrong with progressive politics. According to Duncombe, culture—and popular fantasy—can help us define and actualize a new political aesthetic: a kind of dreampolitik, created not simply to further existing progressive political agendas but help us imagine new ones.

Dream makes the case for a political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them. Instead, they need to learn how to communicate in today’s spectacular vernacular—not merely as a tactic but as a new way of thinking about and acting out politics. Learning from Las Vegas, however, does not mean adopting its values, as Duncombe demonstrates in outlining plans for what he calls "ethical spectacle."

Wednesday, February 7, 2007 , 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM

Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street

Natural Family Values (Frank Feldman and Troy Williams, 2007, 40 min.)

This film explores a small town in Utah that divides over a resolution defining "the natural family", as a group of "unnatural" families rise up in defiance.  A discussion between the filmmakers and Ann Pellegrini (CRM) will follow the screening.
For more information about the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, please call 212.998.3759. Also, please visit the Center for Religion and Media at NYU Center for Religion and Media at NYU.

Sponsored by: NYU Center for Religion and Media; NYU Center for Media, Culture and History; NYU Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality

Tuesday, February 6, 2007 , 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM

239 Greene Street
7th floor conference room

Zala Volcic (School of Journalism and Communication, University of Queensland)
Yugo-nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the former Yugoslavia

This presentation examines how the media and other cultural practices are presently being mobilized in former Yugoslav communities in an attempt to re-create a shared cultural memory. Discourses of  nostalgia for the former Yugoslavia circulate in a variety of media texts and practices. The talk maps different nostalgic practices in former Yugoslavia, while it explores the layers of Yugoslav nostalgia that has produced various and diverse media events, new spaces, identities, memories, material products, and complex mediated representations, such as, for example, the Josip Broz Tito memorial webpage (titoville.com) in Slovenia, the creation of a ‘new, old’ country called Yugoslav Yugoland in Subotica, Serbia, or a ‘really real’ Yugoslav reality TV show “To sam ja” in Skopje, Macedonia.

Zala Volcic is a Lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Queensland, Australia.  She is interested in the cultural consequences of nationalism, capitalism, and globalization, with a particular emphasis on international communication, media and cultural identities. Her research seeks to connect media with work in journalism, media studies, cultural geography and nationalism studies. Broadly speaking, she is interested in the ways in which social theory and philosophy can illuminate cultural products and practices (and vice versa) so as to provide a clearer understanding of society as a whole. The larger question she poses in her research is the way in which economic transformation to a capitalist economy is conflated with political transformation to a democratic system, and the inherent conflicts between these two developments. Her goal is to work toward the improvement of the credibility (application) of the theoretical framework to assist in the struggle for an alternative to regional ethnic conflicts.

Free and open to the public. 

Sponsored by:  NYU Department of Culture and Communication

Friday, September 29, 2006 , 10:00 AM

A Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium

There is much at stake in designing systems of identification and identity management, deciding who or what will be in control of them, and building in adequate protection for our bits of identity permeating the network.

This symposium examined critical and controversial issues surrounding socio-technical systems of identity, identifiability and identification. It showcased emerging scholarship of graduate students at the cutting edge of humanities, social sciences, artists, systems design & engineering, philosophy, law, and policy working towards a clearer understanding of these complex problems, and building foundations for future collaborative work.

In addition to graduate student panels, keynote talks will be delivered by Professor Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law & Technology at the University of Ottawa, and Dick Hardt, CEO and founder of Sxip Identity.

Program Committee

- Martin Galese, JD student, NYU School of Law
- Alice Marwick, PhD student, NYU Department of Culture & Communication
- Joseph Reagle, PhD student, NYU Department of Culture & Communication
- Jessica Shimmin, PhD student, NYU Department of Culture & Communication
- Aaron Williamson, JD student, NYU School of Law

Sponsors

- National Science Foundation PORTIA Grant CCR-0331640

-Microsoft Corporation

- New York University, Council for Media and Culture

- New York University Steinhardt School, Department of Culture and Communication

- New York University, Information Law Institute

Monday, April 2, 2007 , 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM

Kevorkian Center (50 Washington Square South)

Sponsored by:  NYU Kevorkian Center; NYU Center for Religion and Media; NYU Center for Media, Culture and History

Ted Swedenburg  and Joel Gordon (University of Arkansas) > Bab al-Hadid / Cairo Station: Reassessing an Egyptian Film Classic

• Bab al-Hadid/Cairo Station (1958) is the consensus masterpiece of Youssef Chahine, Egypt's most well-known director internationally.  What does the film tell us about Egypt (and the Middle East) at mid-20th century?  And how does it play 50 years later?
• Free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.
  
  

Thursday, March 29, 2007 , 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM

Kevorkian Center (50 Washington Square South)

Sponsored by:  NYU Center for Religion and Media; NYU Center for Media, Culture and History; NYU Kevorkian Center

Annabelle Sreberny  (University of London, SOAS) > Persian Letters and Their Global Purloining: the non-correspondence of  Mahmoud Ahamadinejad and George Bush

• President George W. Bush never responded to Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s letter in spring 2006, but the letter does allow us to think about how different media alter the boundaries between the private, the personal, the public and the politics of dialogue.
• Free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.