Colloquia Fall 2016

 Dr. Mara Einstein‘s latest book, Black Ops Advertising, is an exposé of the rapid rise of sponsored content, a strategy whereby advertisers become publishers and publishers create advertising. Einstein shows how stealth advertising has so blurred the lines between editorial content and marketing message that it has become virtually impossible to tell real news from paid endorsements. She will discuss her findings and how they apply to our current media milieu.

 Raymond Brescia, Associate Professor at Albany Law School, discusses his book The Future of Change: How Technology Drives Social Movements. He outlines the history of social change in the U.S. and uncovers the ties between technological innovations and social movements. From the printing press to Facebook and Twitter, he reveals connections between social movements and the technologies and social innovations that have helped them flourish.

 For Steven Lambert art is a bridge that connects uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with everyday life. His work aims to craft the conditions that will allow these ideas to connect with people for a mutually meaningful exchange. Often this means working collaboratively with the audience, bringing them into the process or even having them physically complete the work. Lambert is currently a professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase.

 Dara Blumenthal is the co-founder of an organizational consulting firm, and applies her PhD in sociology to questions about the nature of work. Her book, Little Vast Rooms of Undoing, is a meditation on socially dictated practices and their associated emotions. She argues that experiences within public toilets expose the fissures of individual identity construction and understanding, while in turn, opening the possibilities for a more relational and cohesive experience of the embodied self.

 Philip Leventhal is the editor for film and media, journalism, and literary studies titles at Columbia University Press. He will engage with us about what he looks for in a book proposal, as well as the changing nature of the publishing industry. He will also solicit from us what sorts of titles we would like to see published, and how we engage with books in our research.

 Dr. Kyra Gaunt‘s work contrasts the hypervisibility of marginalized online groups like black girls, who are overindexed on video driven mobile web, with the invisibility of their participation in a text based, open source site like Wikipedia. She argues that a vilifying culture and visual meme generation around images of a generalized black girl socially reproduce racialized and gender oppression in an age where algorithms reflect taste.

 Peter Ian Cummings is the longtime editor of XY Magazine, the world’s largest gay youth magazine. Former London and Paris correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Advocate, he has spoken and written extensively on sexual liberation, on the relation between economic inequality and aesthetics, the diversion of the LGBT movement to commercialism, and, most recently, on American atomization and the decline of intimacy.

 Brian Hughes

  Stephen Bartolomei & Arjeta Kackini

  Adam Netsky & Dolores Diaz