Oceanic Imaginations, 2021-22
In 2020-2021 I organized a series of conversations on the topic of “Ocean Imaginations: Fluid Histories, Mobile Cultures” with my MESAAS colleague, Dr. Mana Kia.
Things look different when viewed from the sea. Categories such as territory, nation, and region can feel less certain, while embodiment, faith, and emotion can become more immediate. Our theme was designed to explore the theoretical, methodological, and material insights to be gained from an oceanic perspective on culture, religion, and the practices of everyday life. Oceans have for long been understood as conduits of movement linking different land masses and peoples together. As connective zones, oceans push us to break out of the siloes of area studies and think more expansively past the transnational. And thus, we know that the circulation of people, texts, goods, practices, and ideas have thick and deep histories across Africa and Asia. However, beyond economically determined factors, what are the constituting elements of these networks of circulation? Moreover, can we think the ocean not only as a space that connects to other places but as a watery, vital place with its own material specificities? In recent years there has been a shift away from a focus on mobility and economic history, towards cultural and interdisciplinary studies that take the “seaness of the sea” seriously. Much of this work, tentatively termed “critical ocean studies,” is a response to the epistemic provocations of the Anthropocene. We propose to link the insights of an earlier model of oceanic studies that broke new ground in studies of race, colonialism, and material culture, with emerging interests that seek to revitalize our assumptions about the environment, aesthetics, and belief systems. As scholars committed to transregional, anti-imperial, and feminist historiography, the ocean is a particularly rich analytic to think with, as well as a mobile and material place to think from.
This year-long conversation was sponsored by the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University.
Our first public event was a lecture by Dr. Pamila Gupta (University of the Witwatersrand): “Of Sky, Water and Skin: Photographs from a Zanzibari Darkroom” held on Friday Oct 30, 2020. A video recording of the talk and subsequent discussion can be viewed here.
Inflamed Publics
I am developed a two-year research project with Dr. Ying Qian from Columbia University and Dr. Laliv Melamed from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, which wassponsored by a Humanities War and Peace Initiative Grant. Our topic was Inflamed Publics: A Sensory Study of Social Media, Violence, and Resistance. We are looking to actively build a resource network with academics, journalists, and activists who work on the themes outlined below. Towards this goal we held an online symposium from April 14-16, 2022. Full program here.
From online troll armies to digital warriors, camouflage to infiltration, the techniques and affects of war pervade global digital cultures today via social media platforms such as Whatsapp, WeChat, Twitter, and TikTok. If older forms of war, as recorded in history and represented in art, produced fire and fury, then these new techniques of war are also incendiary, but the fires are at once virtual and real. This project seeks to understand the relation between everyday digital media technologies, image-making practices, and violence in the 21st century. This is a fundamentally comparative project, building on research on social media practices and cultures of affect and (dis)information across multiple countries. We seek to build a rigorous, interdisciplinary conversation on the uses and abuses of social media across geopolitical divides. Our goal is to bring insights from film and media studies, visual studies, and theories of affect and cognition to an urgent subject of global concern that is currently being studied mainly via social science and data science frameworks. While we wish to dialogue with these critical and urgent insights, we want to explore what might be achieved with a humanities toolkit. Thus, we will consider representation alongside industry, content alongside form, meaning alongside function, and the state alongside a nebulous publics.