New Media, Design, Difference, and Affect: A Microseminar with Tara McPherson

Summary

In her recent writing on digital culture, Tara McPherson argues that theory and practice, critique and the creativity involved in design, offer different registers of knowing and being and can complement each other in meaningful ways. As the founding editor of Vectors, the most forward-looking and dynamic cross-disciplinary digital journal in the humanities, she recognizes the expressive capacities of the new screen languages and platforms for good—and for ill—as well as the new opportunities for immersion, non-linearity, and collaboration that they present.

This microseminar frames the visit of Tara McPherson to the University of Washington on October 11-12, 2018, when she will give a public lecture entitled “Platforming Hate: The Right in the Digital Age.” We will read and discuss McPherson’s provocative essays “Designing for Difference” (2014) and “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White” (2012). We will also read work on new media, affect, and design by Zizi Papacharissi, Wendy Chun, and Daniela K. Rosner. A two-page essay is required.

Times and Location

Thursdays, Sept. 27, Oct. 4, Oct. 11, Oct. 18 | 4-5:30 pm

Friday, Oct. 12 | 10:30 am-noon (colloquium with McPherson)

All sessions meet in CMU 218D except for the McPherson lecture in CMU 120.

Tara McPherson, the founding editor of Vectors, is Chair and Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where she directs the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study. She is the author of Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (2018) and co-editor of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts + the Humanities (2014) and Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (2003). She is the lead project investigator on the authoring platform Scalar, which emerged out of Vectors and which has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kathleen Woodward is Lockwood Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotions (2009) and Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (1991). From 1986 to 1995 she coedited Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

Questions? Please contact Kathleen Woodward at kw1@uw.edu