Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to welcome all of you to the first MOVE seminar of the Spring 2020 semester, which takes place Tuesday 11 February, 12:00 15:00, at MF, room 412.
The topic of the upcoming seminar is infrastructure. Infrastructure is a key concept both in current and classic attempts at theorizing movement of ideas and artefacts, etc., and is thus an obvious MOVE priority. As always, the goal of MOVE seminars is to raise theoretical literacy in ways that is helpful to ongoing research projects among the members of the group. In the seminar we will explore how a focus on infrastructure can produce new vistas in studies of both historical and contemporary materials.
We have invited Professor Espen Ytreberg (Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo) to join us and to present the paper “Infrastructures in the study of media”:
The talk addresses the ways one might want to talk about media as being infrastructural – as a means of pointing towards their organising and disciplining functions; to highlight phenomena of distribution, scale, labour, and materiality. A cross-disciplinary development is sketched that has led researchers toward the infrastructural and (at least in part) away from content, semiotics and language. The talk highlights the ways we might want to talk about infrastructures as involving functional relationships between media and other technologies of production and transport. Also, the concept of infrastructure may help conceptualise forms and functions of movement. These latter points are illustrated using the case of media and other technological infrastructures in the 1914 Frogner Jubilee Exhibition.
A generous time slot is set aside for discussion and Q&A, as well as for putting together a reading comprehensive list.
Ytreberg recommends that we read the two following articles before the meeting:
Espen Ytreberg, “Networked Simultaneities in the Time of the Great Exhibitions: Media and the 1914 Oslo Centenary Jubilee Exhibition,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 5284-5303.
• Please find the article uploaded on the password-protected area of the blog (for the password, we refer to the email sent to all members of MOVE)
Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (The Geopolitics of Information). Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
• Please read the editors’ introduction (and whatever else might be of interest to you)
• This edited volume is available online, for instance through Oria
Please note that we start with a light lunch at noon. Please remind us about food allergies and dietary restrictions.
We encourage all of you to join us, also, at the MF CASR brown bag seminar at 11:30, where MOVE member Ragnhild J. Zorgati (UiO,IKOS) will give a brief presentation of new findings from her her ongoing research on European Islam and contemporary literature.
We looking forward to seeing you all there!
Kristin and Liv Ingeborg
