Session Details
September 29, 3-5 pm (CL 208A)
Paul Elliot Johnson, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh
The Painter of Right: Jon McNaughton and the Conservative Fear of Democracy
In the last decade, artist John McNaughton, a Provo, UT-based painter, has gained popularity on the right for his kitschy works, and among liberals, he has become a subject of ridicule. In this talk, Paul Elliot Johnson takes McNaughton's "early period" (2008-2013) seriously, arguing that his paintings reveal a rank hostility to democracy, one that can be connected to the history of US conservatism's status as a self-proclaimed exile formation. McNaughton's paintings react against one of the mainstream carriers of liberal democratic culture: iconographic photojournalism. The capacity for kitschy painting to constitute its own lifeworld, which dissents from the democratic element of liberal democracy, is closely examined here through a reading of McNaughton's work. The project enters conversations about whether there is a latent democratic element within photography.
October 20, 3-5 pm (CL 208A)
Zack Stiegler, Professor, Department of Communications Media, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Todd Campbell, Assistant Professor of Audio Production at Frederick Community College.
Musical Intimacy: Construction, Connection, and Engagement
Zack Stiegler and Todd Campbell will present their new book Musical Intimacy. Discourse on popular music frequently describes artists' recordings and performances as “intimate.” Yet that discourse often stops short of elucidating how a mass-produced commodity such as popular music is able to elicit feelings of intimacy with and among its audience. Through detailed analysis of popular music's composition, performance, production, and promotion, Musical Intimacy examines how intimacy is constructed and perceived in popular music via its affective and technological affordances. From the recording studio to the concert stage, from collective experience to individual listening and perception, their book presents a working understanding of musical intimacy.
November 10, 2023, 3-5 pm (CL 208A)
Graduate Research Showcase
Seth Davis
Science’s Ideology Problem, in the New Age and Now
From vaccines to climate change, America faces a crisis in scientific authority. How well do our theories about how authority declines and changes explain how science evolves today? Current discussions of “post-truth” typically rely on arguments that pit respect for scientific authority against truth decay, but examining similar moments from the past can paint a more complex picture. To shed light on how our trust in science changes in moments of cultural upheaval, I examine the New Age’s ambivalent engagement with physics. Close-reading two best-selling physics popularizations – Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics (1975) and Gary Zukav's Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) – and tracing their influence through newspapers and popular nonfiction, I demonstrate that criticism of science’s ideological backing can ultimately foster renewed, if transformed, esteem for science. Based on my analysis of this historical juncture, I criticize present efforts to combat conservative attacks on science by placing scientific truth beyond ideology.
Reed Van Schenck
White Nationalism as a Peer-to-Peer Interface
Content moderation remains circumstantially effective at best to curtail the influence of far-right subcultures on the Internet. Most importantly, it lags behind emerging cross-platform architectures facilitated by “free speech” applications. This paper develops interface criticism as a method to apprehend how white nationalists sustain their communities beyond outdated models of circulation and virality. Interface criticism analyzes technical indices as synecdoche that empower users to manipulate, individualize, and master software – and the publics they represent. Through a case study of U.S. white nationalist channels on Telegram, interface criticism unveils the racial conceits of digital platforms that empower white supremacists with leverage.
Molly Martin
“The machine is boring, I am fantastic”: The Rhetorical Implications of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Devices
This paper analyzes patents for augmentative and alternative communication devices and the cultural desire to make technologically mediated communication temporary. I reference Western liberal humanism’s correlation of access to voice with access to reason. Using textual analysis, I argue that patents act as a text serving a humanist agenda to discover or ‘recover’ the ‘natural’ spoken voice, marking long-term or permanent AAC users in opposition to the figure of the universal speaking subject.
Sascha Nemseff Villagran
Power in the Flow: Binge-Watching and Interpretative Offloading in the Age of Information
Postmodern theorists contend that the once-dominant grand transcendental narratives governing social relations in Western mediatized societies have waned in influence. In this context, the evolving patterns of new media consumption practices provide an insightful lens for examining the demise of the symbolic efficiency thesis. Drawing inspiration from Scott Lash's non-linear information society framework, this project adopts a media-ecological perspective to investigate the impact of binge-watching on our sense-making capabilities. By eliminating the inter-episode anticipatory wait time, binge-watching effectively removes the space for contemplation, offloading interpretation onto the Video-On-Demand (VOD) interface. This re-mediation engenders "immersive distraction," a mode of watching shows that holds profound ramifications for contemporary subjectivity.
December 1, 2023, 3-5pm (CL 208A)
E. Johanna Hartelius, Associate Professor, Moody College of Communicationn, University of Texas, Austin
Apocalypsis, Truth, and post-2020 Cultural Anxiety
Apocalypsis is a futurist genre of public anxiety, often directed toward authorities and whatever information they may be withholding. In this presentation I analyze the HBO miniseries Chernobyl‘s dramatic enactment of the dual meaning of apocalypsis: total cataclysm and a revelation or, literally, unveiling of truth. Drawing integratively on secular theories of apocalyptic rhetoric and the modern apocalyptic theology of Reformed dogmaticist Karl Barth, I interpret the nuclear explosion as a rupturing intercession into the human realm, and the gradually revealed truth about it as witnessing. Noting that Chernobyl exists as a pseudofiction in a media context of intense uncertainty regarding climate change, public health, and political corruption, the presentation indicates how post-2020 scholarship on apocalypsis might account for disaster and information transparency for a traumatized body.