Next week, on Friday 27 May, Güneş Tavmen and Hannah Barton are organising what looks to be an interesting interdisciplinary seminar titled ‘What things are, what things do’. The event – sponsored by Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture – will host a set of debates around the ‘structuring structures’ of media culture: in other words, media as at once agents in the world, and crystallisations of the world.

I have pasted the full description below. Theevent is open to all, but registration is essential: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/what-things-are-and-what-things-do-tickets-25344333584

What things are, what things do

This interdisciplinary seminar will debate the role of ‘structuring structures’ in social and cultural contexts. The seminar will run from 2-5pm in the Keynes Library, and will be followed by a reception with wine and nibbles between 5-6pm.

The event will conclude with a free screening of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) which will take place at Birkbeck Cinema from 6pm.

Media cultures provide and (re)enforce ways of interpreting the world, influencing perceptions of matters social, political and ecological. How do complexes of structures – technologies of production, circulation, affiliation and definition – determine media narratives and shape the way we understand, interpret, and act in everyday life?

What things are refers to material structures and their affordances: as city planning is to free movement, as media technologies are to broadcasting, as hardware is to software, code and communities.

What things do refers to the sociological, affective and soft-cultural consequences of infrastructure, all of which relate to power.

This event aims to create a forum in which practitioners from the fields of sociology, media and cultural studies, critical writing and the arts can respond to these questions. By evoking varied, discrete modes of articulation, What Things Are, and What Things Do aims to foster opportunities for engagement in alternative modes of discourse.

This event is supported by Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMAC).

Speakers:

Dr Emily LaBarge is a writer and researcher based in London. She has a PhD from the RCA, where she is currently a visiting lecturer. She contributes to esse arts + opinions and teaches occasionally at Kingston University and Christie’s Education, London.

Dr Maan Barua is a Research and Teaching Fellow at Sommerville College, Oxford. His research interests include cultural geography, postcolonial environmental history and political ecologies of biodiversity conservation. His doctoral research was on ‘The Political Ecology of Human-Elephant Relationships in India’ and his current postdoctoral research focuses on the fields of human and environmental geography. His current research engages with political economies of nature through ‘more-than-human’ perspectives.

Dr Lisa Mullen is currently a Wellcome Trust ISSF researcher at Birkbeck, where she is working on an interdisciplinary project examining how medical tools and technologies are felt and lived by patients and doctors. She is also preparing a monograph based on her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Midcentury Things: uncanny objects in British post-war literature and culture’.

When
Friday, 27 May 2016 from 14:00 to 20:00 (BST)
Where
Keynes Library – 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD