April 29-May 1, 1999
with Rachel Adams, Paula Amad, Mark Amerika, Jack Bratich, Susan Burgess, John Caldwell, Elizabeth Coffman, Michelle Glaros, Lawrence Cohen, Roderick Coover, Susan Courtney, David Crane, John Di Stefano, Mary Ann Doane, M. Flanagan, Bernard Gendron, Jill Godmilow, Herman Gray, Mark Hansen, Amelie Hastie, Gina Hausknecht, James Hay, Lynne Joyrich, Cheryl Knott Malone, Robert McChesney, Patricia Mellencamp, Constance Penley, James Schwoch, Mehdi Semati, Mimi White, Mark Williams, and Stephen Wilson
Organized by Lynne Joyrich
This conference was held April 29 – May 1, 1999, and it focused on the production of knowledge within global media culture. It considered not only how scholars have come to know media culture, but how media and mass cultural forms have themselves instituted various forms of knowledge. It also explored how print, film, television, and electronic cultures have generated particular ways of knowing, with their own epistemological and pedagogical practices, standards of evidence and authority, operations of perception and cognition, truths and blindspots.
Thursday, April 29
Welcome: Kathleen Woodward
Public Access”: Intellectuals and International Media
Robert McChesney: “Intellectuals, Media, and the Crisis of US Democracy”
Constance Penley: “Melrose Space”
Chair: David Pritchard
Political and Cultural Knowledges
Law and Detection (Curtin 118)
Susan Burgess: “Who Killed Politics”? A Constitutional Mystery”
Elizabeth Coffman and Michelle Glaros: “Serial Logic: Profiles of the Gainesville Student Murders”
Chair: Robin Pickering-Iazzi
Transformation and Translocal Performances (Curtin 175)
Lawrence Cohen: “Playing with Fire: Multiple Media, the Hindu Right, and the Making of Indian Homosexuality”
Roderick Coover: “Metaphors, Montage, and Worldmaking: An Ethnography of Ghanaian Performance”
Pedagogies of Popular Music
Bernard Gendron: “Pop Aesthetics: The Very Idea”
John Di Stefano: “Sexuality and Its Discotheques”
Chair: Dick Blau
Friday, April 30
Cinema and Visual Perception
Mary Ann Doane: “The Representability of Time”
Susan Courtney: “Racial Knowledge, Visibility, and Cinematic Belief, or, How We See Pinky”
Chair: Jane Gallop
Women’s Lives / Female Expertise
Patricia Mellencamp: “How I Learned to Read the Wall Street Journal: A Tale of Life and Death
Amelie Hastie: “‘It’s not what I know, it’s the way that I know it’: Star Discourse and Celebrity Expertise”
Chair: Kristie Hamilton
Space/Time Continuums
Televisual Time (Curtin 175)
Mimi White: “Television: Knowing History, Making History, Selling History”
Richard Dienst: “Entertaining Thoughts”
Chair: Karen Riggs
Geographies of Knowledge: Mapping Media Practices and Media Studies (Curtin 118)
John Caldwell: “Boy’s Geography Lessons: Probe Technology, Push Programming, and the World”
James Hay: “Locating the Televisual”
Chair: Susanne Lummerding
Knowledge and Anxiety
“Machines That Think”: Media in the 1950s (Curtin 175)
Mark Williams: “Wires and Machines: Knowledge/Anxiety via 1950s TV-Tech
Cheryl Knott Malone: “Big Brains on the Big Screen: Desk Set
James Schwoch: “Ambassador RAMAC: Media and Techno-Scientific Cold War Diplomacy
Chair: Max Yela
Knowledge Out of Control: Conspiracies and Paranoias (Curtin 118)
Jack Bratich: “Trust No-one (on the Internet): Official Journalism, New Media, and the Politics of Conspiracy Narratives”
Rachel Adams: “Consuming Anxieties: Narrating the Flesh-Eating Bacteria”
David Crane: “All the Facts: Paranoid Networks and Millenial Knowledge”
Chair: Brooke Thomas
Screening of Velvet Goldmine with Todd Haynes (Union Theater)
Introduction: Jennifer Montgomery
Saturday, May 1
Technology of Identity
Herman Gray: “Identities and New Technologies”
Ken Hillis: “Perfect Clarity, Fractured Flesh: Digital Queens and Informational Subjectivity”
Chair: Peter Sands
Interactive Art: Affect and Information
Mark Hansen: “Towards an Affective Model of Cultural Agency: Video Installation Art as Physiological Mimesis”
Stephen Wilson: “Information Arts – Beyond Media”
Chair: Lane Hall
History and Globality
Media Warfare (Curtin 175)
Jill Godmilow: “What Farocki Taught: What’s Wrong with the Liberal Documentary”
Mehdi Semati: “The CNN Experience: Foreign Policy, CNN, and Democracy”
Chair: James Castonguay
Theorizing Commercial Diversity (Curtin 118)
Paula Amad: “Where on earth would like to be?: Benetton Advertising and the Reimagining of Academic Knowledge”
Gina Hausknecht: “Learning to be an American Girl: History, Culture, Dolls”
Chair: Gregory Jay
Cyberculture and Virtual Worlds
Mark Amerika: “Network Congestion: Still-Life with Artificially Constructed Psychobabble”
M. Flanagan: “Knowing through Lara”
Chair: Campbell Tatham
(Re)Producing Gay Identities
Lynne Joyrich: “The Epistemology of the Console”
Todd Haynes: “Risks of Identity”
Chair: Patricia White
Discussants: David Gunkel, Susanne Lummerding, Jennifer Montgomery, Megan Mullen, Patricia White, and Paul Young
Conference Organizer: Lynne Joyrich
Conference Coordinator: Carol Tennessen
