Cross Media Seminar I & II

Conjunctures of the Image: Discipline and Mediality

Dates: see below
Venue: University of Amsterdam
Open to: First and second year research master students in Media Studies and related fields, registered with RMeS
Offered by: the Research School for Media Studies (RMeS), as part of the RMa curriculum
Credits: 6 ECTS – Cross Media Seminar I / 5 ECTS – Cross Media Seminar II (or 6 ECTS, including workshop)
Registration: register before: 20 September 2014 (I) / 1 February, 2015 (II). Amount of participants is limited.
Register here: Cross Media Seminar I or Cross Media Seminar II
More Information

Dr. Sudeep Dasgupta and Dr. Markus Stauff. Contact: M.Stauff@uva.nl

This year (2014-15) the Cross-Media Research Group will focus on the category of the image. Because the image is a central category that cuts across media and disciplines alike, there is a temptation to search for an essential conception of the image as such, one that remains constant across these domains and might even, perhaps, provide a unified ground for a newly capacious interdisciplinarity. Against this temptation, the Cross-Media Seminar proposes a genealogical approach to the image. Thus, rather than asking: What is the image? This seminar will ask: What is the image for…? The ambiguity of that question prompts a double-sided inquiry. It means exploring, on the one hand, how the image is variously constituted as an object or site of knowledge production by those disciplines which claim a certain expertise over images. What is the image for Television Studies? What for Film Studies? What for Art History? What for Literary Studies? For Anthropology? For the Biological Sciences? and so on. On the other hand, it means asking how those disciplines constitute themselves around a certain (monopolistic) determination of the image? That is, how does asserting and defending a particular conception of the image provide the conditions of possibility for disciplinarity as such? And how does the mediality of the images – and the historical transformation of each medium’s mediality – play into the different conceptions of images? Throughout the seminar we will explore how counter-intuitive analyses of images provide new perspectives on the work of images as productive sites for cultural analysis. This productivity also affects the stability of disciplines questioning the protocols through which medium-specificity gets stabilized and reframing the image as the possible site for adisciplinarity.

Our readings will include both classical and contemporary texts drawn from a broad range of disciplines and thinkers, including:

Theodor Adorno, Mieke Bal, Lisa Cartwright, Sean Cubitt, Lorraine Daston, Gilles Deleuze, Vilém Flusser, Georges Didi-Huberman, Edmund Husserl, Peter Galison, Fredric Jameson, Gertrud Koch, Bruno Latour, Jean-François Lyotard, Anna McCarthy, Lev Manovich, Jean-Luc Nancy, John Durham Peters, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vivian Sobchack.

Schedule of Meetings:

Cross Media Seminar I:

• 24 September: Guest Lecture/ Discussion. Dr. Raka Shome (CMS + ACGS)
• 3 October
• 14 November
• 5 December

6 ECTS

Cross Media Seminar II:

• 13 February
• 3 April
• 5 June
• Optional: Workshop – Political Aesthetics of the Televisual Image. Date TBA

5 ECTS, or 6 ECTS incl. workshop