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.