Seminars

In April 2015, an article appeared in the Atlantic titled, “‘Thank God for Cellphone Video Cameras’: The Vast Technological Change Which Has Helped Make a Movement Possible.” We were seeing police violence as never before, caught by improved smartphone cameras and bodycam footage. The camera promised a different future. Forced to “adjust to a world caught on tape,” the police would have to change.  As the ACLU declared, “video technology” was on the brink of producing “a full-fledged revolution in policing.”         In this talk Professor Peters will present her book-in-progress, which tells the stories of people caught in the crossfire of the camera wars. The book will recount how—in this world of newly ubiquitous recording—police, prosecutors, and a massive political machinery sought to neutralize what the camera showed. It’s the story of how officials sanitized images of violence, learned to finesse the rhetoric of reports and briefings, built evidentiary routines that fragmented, delayed, and recontextualized footage. And it’s the story of people who watched as police attorneys lied, bystanders whose cameras were destroyed, civil rights litigants whose videos were turned against them, family members who begged for bodycam footage showing a police killing but were turned away. It’s the story of how—in the most thoroughly documented era of state violence in American history—our cameras backfired.         In addition to discussing the project itself, Professor Peters will talk about the challenges of translating academic scholarship into writing for general audiences.

This presentation explores modern housing as a compelling problem for media studies by returning to the multimedia practice of housing activist and educator Catherine Bauer. During the 1930s, Bauer established herself at the forefront of radical, New Deal housing reform in the U.S. with the publication of her landmark study Modern Housing (1934), a manifesto for affordable, contemporary housing as a public right. I situate Modern Housing within a multi-media genealogy of interwar modernist experiments in the communication of ideas about modern housing. And I discuss Modern Housing within the promiscuous range of Bauer’s media practice as a housing activist, educator, and public servant across the 1930s and into wartime mobilization. I narrate the coevolution of New Deal housing reform, experiments in welfare media pedagogy, and period-specific debates about propaganda and public relations, which Bauer engaged enthusiastically. Working closely with a series of films about social housing made in and around Bauer’s network between 1938-1941, I track the emergence of race as a conceptual axis in Bauer’s multimedia practice and housing research. In Bauer’s case, these interwar experiments set the political terms for her post-war red-baiting, as well as her midcentury embrace of social-scientific media methods—especially those aimed at combatting racially exclusive housing practices and policies.

Hazy celestial objects called nebulae were a mystery to astronomers for at least two thousand years--and this mystery was bound up with larger questions about the size and shape of the universe. This talk examines the moment when dry plate techniques and long exposure times made it newly possible to photograph deep space. It revisits a debate between two early astrophotographers who used different methods, and disagreed about which nebulae in their images were actual and which were artifacts. Their argument illuminates the role of aesthetics in scientific insight; and also suggests its importance in periods, like our own, when changing visual technologies restructure how reality appears representable.

The book presents an analytical account of one of the most dynamic transformational phases of the media landscape in postwar Japan known as the rise of new cinemas in the 1960s, along with its radicalized engagement with the media practices of the Cold War era. I examine the historical and theoretical intersections between media-based governmental and civic activities, cross-medial articulations of state-endorsed academicism in Japan, postwar corporate culture, and various historical motives and geopolitical tensions regarding the meanings and operations of corporate and industrial media. The central focus of the study is Iwanami Productions (est. 1950), the film division of the famed publishing house. Iwanami first began operation as a science laboratory and subsequently evolved into a major provider of state and corporate sponsored educational, science, infrastructural and public relations media works, and soon later a key player in the new cinemas of the 1960s in Japan. Iwanami, Tsunoda argues, most vividly animated, mapped, and constituted what I describe as processive technics: the key material and epistemological nodes that articulated recursive knowledge networks, an industrial-operational web with self-referential relationality, and a looping circuity of media participation, each of which generated and organized the shifting horizons of techno-industrialization processes and epistemic transitions specific to the corresponding history of postwar Japan.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London was praised in the nineteenth century as the “botanical metropolis of the world.” Since then historians have theorized it as a “center of calculation,” the hub of a global “network” that dictated the logic of how plants, seeds, and expertise moved between botanic gardens within the British empire and beyond. This paper looks at the Kew herbarium, which was first formalized in the middle of the nineteenth century to collect botanical data in a methodical manner and which grew exponentially during the period of high imperialism, in an attempt to understand the kind of work that Kew’s networks might have done. What changed with the institution of the herbarium? How did the accumulation of botanical data impact extractive practices on the ground? And what does the analytic framework of the network explain and what does it occlude?

The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century’s history of war, destruction, and cruelty. This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project—uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world’s largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany’s machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak’s film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout. Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak’s and Agfa’s global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military- industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today.