Sumita Chakravarty – Media, Multiplicity, Migration
Key Thinkers in the Field: Sumita Chakravarty – Media, Multiplicity, Migration
Monday, October 26, 2015, at 6:00 pm to 7:50 pm
University Center, 63 Fifth Ave, lower level, room L104
Abstract: How do media deal with multiplicity, a phenomenon that is the hallmark of our era of globalization, transnationalism, and migration? What sense can we make of the representational strategies deployed to define these new realities? How might we construct a genealogy of multiple belongings? These are some of the questions I am exploring in my current research project which traces the historical intersections of migration and media.
My talk draws on this research and presents a case study of the media presentations of Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign and the beginning of his presidency. I examine how debates over his birth and citizenship cast him as an ambiguous figure of precarity and instability.
Bio: Sumita Chakravarty is Associate Professor, and former Associate Dean of the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. She has a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in English from Lucknow University, India. She served as chair of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College from 2000 to 2008. She is the author of National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 (U of Texas Press 1993; Oxford U 1996); The Enemy Within (editor, 2000) and several articles in journals and anthologies. She is currently working on a book on the historical intersections of media and migration. Her research interests include media and globalization, film and national identity, and the history and philosophy of media technologies.
Among the courses she has taught in the program are the following: Foundations of Media Theory; The Mass Culture Debate; Understanding the Visual; Cinema and the Erotic Imagination; Question of the Other; Third World Cinemas; World Film Cultures: Stardom; Media Attractions: Technology, Intimacy, Affect; Transnational Cinema; Globalization and Media; Immediacy: Creating an Online Journal.
- Norman Klein – The New Picaresque: Excavating Narrative Forms After the End of Globalization, 1997-2050 - February 2, 2015
- Shannon Mattern – Media Architectures & Archaeologies - October 3, 2015
- Malcolm McCullough – Emergent Media Studies - October 10, 2015