Public Keynotes RMeS Summer School 2021: Media, Inequalities and Social Change
Monday 21 June 2021 | 16.00-17.00 CET
Gavan Titley | Maynooth University
Keynote: The politics of representation and communicative abundance
Register here, before June 20.
The politics of representation is a long-established preoccupation in Media and Communication Studies, and it has been particularly vital to the critique of racist and racializing images, discourses and artefacts. Of late, however, it has been criticized as a somewhat exhausted enterprise, unable to account for how a cultural politics of representation focused on textual analysis relates to wider media and political processes. Building on the reading ‘Debatability and the politics of representation’ from Racism and Media (2019), this talk refocuses the question by considering it in terms of the density and volatility of the contemporary media environment, where the incessant circulation of representations is folded into a public culture characterised by what I term ‘debatability’. If the dominant modes of critique of representation emerge in a context of media scarcity, what approaches to representation do justice to a context of media abundance?
Bio
Gavan Titley is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Maynooth University and Docent in Media and Communications at the Swedish School of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. His research focuses on the politics of race, racism and multiculturalism in European politics, freedom of speech and ideas of ‘hate speech’ in digital media environments, the future of public service media, and the integration of social theory to media theory. Titley is the author of Is free speech racist? (2020 Polity Press), Racism and media (2019 Sage), The crises of multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal age, written with Alana Lentin (2011 Zed), and the co-editor of After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, racism, free speech (2017 Zed), National conversations: Cultural diversity and public service media (2014 Intellect), as well as the book series Challenging migration studies (Rowman & Littlefield). He is also an occasional contributor to The Guardian.
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Tuesday 22 June 2021 | 09.30-10.30 CET
Saskia Witteborn | Chinese University of Hong Kong
Keynote: Migration and technology research revisited: Theoretical challenges and opportunities
Register here, before June 20.
This keynote presentation focuses on how (forced) migration research has to attend to the tension between exploring technology practices by migrants as well as datafication processes structuring mobilities and the lives of migrants. The talk will point to opportunities for migration and technology researchers, including the study of human and nonhuman practice assemblages and the nexus between embodied and digital practice.
Bio
Saskia Witteborn is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She specializes in transnational migration and technologies and has worked with migrants in the United States, Europe, and East Asia. She researches the political economy of mobility, technology and forced migration, data privacy, and how artificial intelligence structures migration. Her research has appeared in leading journals and in edited collections. She is co-editor of the SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration (2019).
Wednesday 23 June 2021 | 10.00-11.00 CET
Ayham Dalal | Vassar College & Technische Universität Berlin
A screening of the 15 min documentary “13 Square Meters” and a Q&A with the co-producer and urban studies scholar, Ayham Dalal. The film is based on his research on refugee camps and everyday urban architecture; it has been shortlisted for the prize at the London Architecture Film Festival (https://archfilmfest.uk/
