Roundtable Discussion

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The following roundtable was assembled from questions and responses conducted during April and May of 2010.

  1. Global media studies invokes various approaches to media research, reflecting the increasing phenomenon of transculturally and transnational communication. If we consider news or entertainment formats, the internet or mobile communication, major or minor media — public and private communication increasingly transcends national and cultural borders. But how can we respond to this methodologically? Which innovative methods are necessary for media and communication research in a globalized media world?
  2. How have the expanding parameters of production, reception, and distribution challenged classical definitions of “national,” “international,” and “transnational” for scholars in the field of visual studies today?
  3. How are borders and territories of media scholarship being contested and revised in the turn toward the global, while at the same time calling attention to the importance of local specificity?
  4. What historical and theoretical methodologies are employed to complicate the apparent dichotomy of local/global?
  5. What does it mean to do transnational scholarship? What does the broad concept of “global village” mean for visual studies and its future? That is, as scholars we often interrogate global media structures, but what does it mean to reflect on the notion of a global village of scholars?
  6. How are spatial geographies mapped onto the study of cinema, television and digital culture that position the object of study but also (re)situate the scholar?

Respondents

Dr. Amelie Hastie is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Duke UP, 2007) and The Bigamist (“BFI Classics,” Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009); the editor of a special issue of Journal of Visual Culture on “Detritus and the Moving Image”; and the curator of a project entitled Objects of Media Studies for the on-line journal Vectors. Her work has also appeared in Cabinet, Camera Obscura, Film History, Framework, Screen, and anthologies on film history and television studies. She is currently at work on a book about the television series Columbo.

Dr. Roshanak Kheshti received her Ph.D. in anthropology and women’s studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005 and is currently Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her research centers around the consumption of culture through sound and film, with a focus on world music, race and gender, in addition to queer theory and sexuality in Iran. Publications include "Cross-dressing and Gender (Tres)Passing: The Transgender Move as a Site of Agential Potential in the New Iranian Cinema" in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 24(3), 158-177; "Acoustigraphy: Soundscape as Ethnographic Field" in Anthropology News 50(5), pp. 15, 19; "Musical Miscegenation and the Logic of Rock and Roll: Homosocial Desire and Racial Productivity" in “A Paler Shade of White,” American Quarterly 60(4), 1037-1055; and "Inversion, Significance and the Loss of the Self in Sound" in Parallax 14(2): 68-77. She has also published numerous musical recordings both as a former member of bay area-based experimental rock band The Ebb and Flow and independently as composer and performer for an independent film score.

Dr. Laura U. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. Her current project is a book called Infinity and Enfoldment: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, August 2010). She is the author of The Skin of the Film (Duke University Press, 2000), and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002). Her research interests and projects range from Arab cinema and Islamic genealogy of new media art to theories of embodiment, affect and olfaction, and new media aesthetics. She has curated programs of experimental media art for venues including the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, the Images Festival, Toronto, the Pacific Cinematheque, the Argos Festival, Brussels, the Seoul Net Experimental Film Festival. She teaches courses in Film Theory, Contemporary Arab Cinema, and Interdisciplinary Research Methods in Art and Culture Studies.