The final session of the CML colloquium before the summer revolves around anti-racist practices and activism in the academy, and institutional resistances to the unsettling of its scripts and algorithms. Our guest Nelly Y. Pinkrah, PhD candidate at Leuphana University and member of the steering committee of the Forum Antirassimmus Medienwissenschaft (FAM), will introduce us to the current issue of the German Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft that she co-edited: X – Kein Lagebericht (with Jiré Emine Gözen and Ömer Alkin, who unfortunately can’t make it).

The issue thematizes and explores anti-racist practice within media studies. The invited contributions represent a spectrum of how we can deal with racist continuities in media studies and at the academy at large, how it informs our research practice, and how we can turn the experience of racism–whether in real life or through racist residues in texts, films and other sources–into a source of anti-racist activism and tactics of instituting dissent. The issue contains a conversation between Nelly, Sarah Sharma, and Johannes, which focuses on McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, the question whether Elon Musk is a media theorist and what that means for our pedagogical aspirations.

Nelly will also give us some very exclusive insights into the process of assembling this issue–for publishing texts about racist residues in media studies necessarily turns into an empirical study of institutional resistance against the re-writing of institutional scripts and algorithms.

#media theroy #anti-racism #big tech #design #McLuhan #dissent #language

Schedule

13:30–14:30ish
Presentation & Discussion ZfM – Kein Lagebericht (Nelly & Johannes)

Break (15 min.)

14:45–max. 16:00
Discussion & Collective Research on Tactics of Instituting Dissent

Guest

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a cultural and media theorist and political activist. She writes and workshops on topics such as racism, gender, media (&) technology. Her doctoral thesis about Édouard Glissant and cybernetics is prepared at Leuphana University Lüneburg, where she is associated with the Centre for Digital Cultures. She was a lecturer at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in 2021 and a Doctoral Fellow at the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University, Montréal from October 2018 to May 2019. In 2019, she also organized the first Stanford Leuphana Summer Academy on Media Studies. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the German Forum Antiracism Media Studies (FAM) and a member of the DFG Network »Gender, Media & Affect«. Latest: Alkin, Ömer / Gözen, Jiré Emine / Pinkrah, Nelly Y. (Ed.): »X | Kein Lagebericht«. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften (ZfM), Heft 26.

Readings & Materials

ZfM – X Kein Lagebericht
Gestures of Dissent
  • Lucie Kolb (2022), Not Part of Our Praxis?, Texte zur Kunst 125: Genres and Gestures of Dissent.
  • Forum Antirassismus Medienwissenschaft (FAM) (2022), Rassismuskritische Arbeit an/in der Medienwissenschaft. Das Forum Antirassismus Medienwissenschaft (FAM). In: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 26: X | Kein Lagebericht, 150-158. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18118.
  • Kanonkritik, Arbeitskreis (2020), Welcher Kanon, wessen Kanon? Eine Einladung zur Diskussion. In: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 26: X | Kein Lagebericht, 159–171. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18119.
  • Sarah Sharma (2019), Feminism of the Broken Machine, Article (LINK) & Talk at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0A1lydIUlA.
  • T.L. Cowan & Jas Rault (2020?), Heavy Processing Part II — Central Processing Units: Trans-Feminist and Queer Manifestos and the Feminist Data Manifest-No Playlist, http://www.drecollab.org/cpu/.
Tech Bros & Media Theory / Philosophy