Image of Detroit River with Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario skylines
March 1-2, 2019
EDGY MEDIA Symposium:
On Borders, Migrations, Media Studies and Media Arts
March 1st in Windsor at the School of Creative Arts
Multimedia Studio, Alan Wildeman Centre for Creative Arts
360 Freedom Way, Windsor, ON N9A 1E4 (across Freedom Way from the Armouries)
Keynote Lecture 5:30 - 6:30 pm is Open to the Public
Dr. Radha Hegde, New York University: “Disposability, Bodies and Media Infrastructures”
Performance Hall, SoCA Armouries, 37 University Avenue East
Public Reception for the Feedback Exhbition, Veteran’s Hall and SoCA Gallery, Armouries, 7-10 pm
March 2nd in Detroit, College for Creative Studies, Detroit
201 E Kirby St, Detroit, MI 48202
EDGY MEDIA: ON BORDERS, MIGRATIONS, MEDIA STUDIES & MEDIA ARTS
This symposium brings together scholars, curators, and artists to present studies of the ways in which communications scholarship, media studies, and media arts have been shaped by borders and migration. The symposium’s theme is framed around, but also facilitates and extends, a cross-border installation of the international touring exhibition Feedback: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts and Detroit’s College for Creative Studies. The symposium starts with the premise that experiences of borders and the necessity to migrate have long shaped theories, methods, and practices within media and communication studies and related media arts. Borders are highly mediatized sites of exclusion and inclusion, characterized by customs and security technologies and infrastructures; networks of communication among families, migrants, refugees, sanctuary institutions, and settlement organisations; and the politics of labour and commodities in transit. While communications scholars have begun to address the 20th-century transnational origins and legacies of their fields (e.g. Averbeck-Lietz 2017), media theorists and artists have yet to clearly trace the role played by borders and migration in their fields’ intellectual histories. Today, media theorists, media artists, and communication scholars are responding to border crises with a range of approaches to develop critical cartographies of the complex networks of media, migration, and labour (e.g. M2Lab, Chakravarty 2016). Yet we are also witnessing theoretical shifts away from 1990s paradigms stemming from ideas around borders, liminality, and alterity introduced during a more tolerant dream of a post-1989 “borderless world” (Bhabha 1994; Flusser 1992, 2003; Mezzadra & Neilson 2013; Mignolo 2000; Said 1994; Spivak 1995). EDGY MEDIA provides an opportunity to share comparative research knowledge on the question of how borders, frontiers, edges, margins, and related paradigms of migration, circulation, translation, and flows have all served as key metaphors for understanding media; and how we might extend these paradigms to consider the mediated infrastructures and contexts of borders and migration today.