The NYU Council for Media and Culture is pleased to announce our 2009 grant competition awardees:
Writing and Production Grants
Chelsea Searles
Gallatin/ Film Production
El Salar
A film essay that examines the issue of sustainability through the lens of Uyuni, Bolivia, a small Andean Town whose vast lithium reserves have earned it the moniker, “the Saudi Arabia of the Electric Car.” Over half of the world’s supply of lithium liesin the Salar de Uyni, the worlds largest salt lake. While the Bolivian governement is unwilling to give up its resource cheaply or easily, it is seeking international partners to help develop the lithium industry on a large scale, with plans to commence mining in December 2009. I have already made contacts for a private visit to an existing pilot plant for lithium extraction, and plan to shoot the exterior of the plant with permission (in process). This initial footage will enable me to re-fundraise for a documentary that will find an audience at both student and environmental/social film festivals.
Jennifer Heuson
Steinhardt / Media, Culture, and Communication
Soundscapes of the Black Hills
Critical scholarship on vision, as both a cultural object and a form of knowledge, abounds. In contrast, sound receives only marginal attention. My work will engage sound as a way of experiencing, encountering, and knowing the world. To do this, I will investigate the sound environments of the black Hills of South Dakota, conducting field recordings and interviews, sketching sound maps, and collecting sound-related artifacts. My goal is to uncover links between sound, heritages tourism, and historical and cultural knowledge. The project will culminate in a written article, an audio collection with a book of maps and artifacts, and a website.
Reid Pillifant
GSAS / Journalism
A Moveable Death: Mississippi's Traveling Electric Chair
The proposed project looks at the period between 1940 and 1954, when the State of Mississippi executed its condemned criminals in the world’s first – and for a time, only – traveling electric chair. As a hybrid of the old and new models of the death penalty, Mississippi’s electric chair provides a unique window into the practice of capital punishment in the South just before the Civil Rights Movement, and the reaction of both the public and the media toward this bizarre spectacle. What motivated Mississippi to switch to a traveling model, and what were the consequences of that decision for the condemned men and for the state?
Dissertation and Thesis Grants
Dwaipan Banerjee
GSAS / Anthropology
Transnational Media Activism and the Bhopal Gas Disaster
In 1984, a poisonous cloud of methyl isocyanate leaked out of a Union Carbide Plant in Bhopal, engulfing the slum settlements and leading to the immediate death of over two thousand. More than 20,000 people have died as a result of the toxic leak over the 24 years that followed, and the slum-dwellers that live around the area have been left with chronic medical conditions and forms of disability that prevent them from earning their livelihoods. This dissertation project is focused on both the long-term implications of the disaster and the activist movement that has grown around the event
Gabriele Cosentino
Steinhardt / Media, Culture, and Communication
Political Discourse on Italian Television
My research aims at investigating how the interaction between Italian television and the political sphere occurs at the level of discursive practices. The representation of politics on television increasingly occurs in genres other than the ones traditionally associated with political issues, such as news and public affairs. Increasingly, political subjects and issues on Italian television appear on fake news programs, primetime variety shoes, and reality television programs. In my argument, this has had a tremendous impact on the types of political issues and subjects that are represented on television, on the forms of participation of audiences in the public sphere, and on the ability of politicians like Berlusconi to leverage their familiarity with TV for political ends. My research investigates the transfer of subjects and practices between television and the political sphere, and at evaluating the democratic implications of the phenomenon.
M. Zeynep Dadak
Tisch / Cinema Studies
A Maudlin Cinema: Arabesk Film and Culture in Turkey
I aim to introduce the English-speaking audience to an under-explored field, i.e., the history of Turkish cinema through the lens of arabesk. In the Turkish context, arabesk originally denoted a musical and cinematic form exploring themes of grief, separation, alienation and solitude. Since its emergence 40 years ago, this form has transmuted into an emotional and social undercurrent in Turkey. My conceptualization of arabesk will concretize the profoundly reciprocal impact of arabask and Turkish cinema, and prove that it continues to be a central inspiration for contemporary music and film practices in Turkey.
Rachel Lears
GSAS / Anthropology
Between Two Monsters: Songwriters, Bands and Visual Culture in Montevideo, Uruguay
During the past 2 decades in Uruguay, following the fall of a 12-year military dictatorship in 1985, the rise of visual media in the circulation of popular music has coincided with major political and cultural shifts as the country returned to democracy during an era of accelerating global mediation. My dissertation focuses on the first generation of young songwriters and bands to come of age alongside digital media, exploring how popular music and the visual culture that surrounds it harness social meaning by indexing and constructing time and space through imagery, sound, lyrics and performance. As these artists create new work in dialogue with the work of other artists, they negotiate spatiotemporal coordinates of belonging and claim a place within the nation and the world, history and the future.
Hatim El-Hibri
Steinhardt / Media, Culture, and Communication
Mapping Lebanon
The reconstruction of Beirut’s Central District in the early 1990s was undertaken by Solidere, a company privately owned by prime minister Rafic Hariri. It was part of an attempt by the Hariri government to put Lebanon back into the globalization race, remaking the space into a zone for banks, NGO buildings, restaurants, and boutiques. To aid planning, Hariri’s company also introduced cutting-edge GIS technology to Lebanon during this time. The remaking of Beirut came to depend on this new way of technologically mapping and imagining space. It would become a grid of intelligibility, layered atop previously existing ones, and it was the subject of heated public contestation from the outset. GIS mapping also played a key role in the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, and defined the way both sides came to understand the war. I wish to make sense of these events by investigating the history of mapping Lebanon – the ways changing political, economic, and epistemic priorities affect mapping, and how these priorities also affect the production of space.
Naomi Moland
Steinhardt / Humanities and Social Sciences
Teaching Tolerance through TV: South African Sesame Street
My project will investigate how Sesame Workshop “localizes” coproductions to make them relevant to particular societies. Specifically, I will examine the local meanings of concepts such as race and tolerance, and how Sesame Street’s approach to teaching about these concepts reflects these local meanings. In this proposal, I seek funding to travel to Johannesburg, South Africa in the Summer of 2009, in order to complete a pilot study on Takalani Sesame, wherein I will conduct preliminary interviews with producers and researchers, analyze production documents, and test instruments for episode analysis in the Takalani Sesame episode archives. This pilot study, and subsequent dissertation research, will bring important insights to scholarship on race education for young children, as well as shed light on the process through which international organizations localize their projects.
Jan Padios
GSAS / American Studies
Can You Hear Us Now? Workers, Consumers, and Communications Technology in the Contemporary Philippines
This dissertation tracks the ways that the Philippine state’s implementation of neoliberal policies geared towards flexible conditions of production engender new consumer practices amongst three different groups: Filipino labor migrants, call center workers, and citizen-consumer activists. For all of these groups, technology is a medium through which key contemporary struggles – over the reproduction of the global Filipino workforce, increased privatization of public goods, and state and corporate control over media and technology – is waged. My dissertation will explore these struggles and what is at stake in them for workers, consumers, and activists in the Philippinhes – country recently declared the “world’s text-mesasging capital,” and winnder of the “business process outsourcing destination of the year.”
Scott Selberg
Steinhardt / Media, Culture, and Communication
The Matter with Old People
My dissertation explores the visual culture of Alzheimer’s disease. As a contemporary fear and a conceivable epidemic, Alzheimer’s has surfaced abruptly in U.S. consciousness over the past 2 decades. It comes at no surprise that the rise of awareness of Alzheimer’s should accompany a substantial spike in the diversity and breadth of its mediation: in popular cultural narratives, medical and scientific research, philanthropic and political campaigns, law, journalism, fine art, and many other areas of the media sphere. I plan to examine the broad field of contemporary representation that shapes the disease in the medical, civic, and popular imaginary. I also plan to develop a genealogy of the visual culture of dementia in the US over the past century. Consequently, I will investigate the way in which visuality and cognition have come to inform each other within national narratives of productivity, kinship, and mental and physical health.
Sean Simon
Tisch / Performance Studies
Marking the Ground: Museums, Matter and Memory in the Making of a Nuclear Legacy
This dissertation research focuses on how former nuclear facilities – Department of Energy uranium enrichment and weapons technology plants – are currently making transitions into commemorative sites by employing landscape, artifacts, and documents, in their production of site-specific multi-media monuments. I seek this grant in order to situate my local research at local facilitiestht are currently undergoing transformation in Ohio, with their national counterparts in Albequerque, New Mexico at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, and the Hanford National Monument in Hanford, Washington. By documenting the sites, I hope to identify the interpretive concepts that planners use to re-define and narrate what is sometimes referred to as the U.S. “atomic heritage.”
Christine Weible
Center for Latin American and Carribbean Studies / Museum Studies
Healing, Construction, and the Persecution of Memory
Over 20 years after Argentina’s return to democracy, the country is still unable to come to consensus about what happened between 1976 and 1983, the period known as the “Dirty War.” The suppression of truth during the war, the lies that the military government told the Argentine people as well as the outside world, and the campaigns for amnesty, amnesia, and reconciliation that were advocated after the war, are all stumbling blocks to the formation of a collective memory of the Dirty War. The debates surrounding issues of memory of that time period are particularly contentious as to the establishment of a memorial space and museum at the site of the Navy Mechanics’ school (ESMA), a former clandestine detention center in the heart of Buenos Aires. It is within this context that I propose to conduct my summer research.
Grants for Graduate Student Forums in Media and Culture
Scott Selberg, Marco Deseriis, Hatim El-Hibri
Steinhardt / Media, Culture, and Communication
Radars and Fences III
The 2010 edition of Radars and Fences will explore the production of borders, examining how they come to exist in terms of affects, bodies, and the spatial scales they engage. It will consist of 2 panels, the first focusing on US/Mexico, and the second on Israel/Palestine. We hope that the commingling of affect and space in these dialogues might reinvigorate critical analysis of the border in all of its divergent (im)materialities and locations. Issues we see as especially relevant to the Radars and Fences platform include sex and migrant labor, kinship and familial (re)formations, pharmaceuticals and narcotics, tourism, water and waste, and detection and evasion.
Sarah Stonbely, Matthew Powers
Steinhardt / Media, Culture, and Communication
GSAS / Sociology
Media Sociology
The proposed Media Sociology Forum will bring together like-minded scholars from across the New York metropolitan area and beyond, to explore what the organizers see as an important new thread in media sociology: the importation of French social theory; namely, Field Theory and Actor Network Theory. A growing awareness of the “networked” and de-centralized nature of media has led to a search by media sociologists for theories appropriate to this new reality. Field Theory and Actor Network Theory, in their ontological and epistemological orientations, have entered as new theoretical and methodological approaches for understanding contemporary conditions.