Media and Surveillance

Since its inception, surveillance studies has confronted questions of control and governance, accounting for a variety of technological assemblages like CCTV and tracking devices and their relationships to state politics, cultural identity, and new spatial imaginaries. In today's era of social media, internet tracking and corporate data mining, increased airport and border control, and major government data breaches, scholars are prompted to reconsider the relationship between surveillance and our everyday uses of media.

Since the 19th century, the popular press has engaged in sensationalized crime stories involving women as investigators or perpetrators that captivate readers and influence cultural tastes. Cinematic crime narratives subsequently capitalize on these archetypes displayed in the press, resulting in conflicting yet intriguing critical dimensions to the representations of women in film. The female detective figure embodies evolving female progress, and her investigative qualities also permeate multiple genres such as action/adventure films where a female protagonist takes on many of these traits even if she is not specifically identified as a detective.

The dispositif of the moving and projected image, defying its ossification under the weight of seventies-era apparatus theory, has returned to prominence. Screen architectures and moving-image installations have characterized a large-scale reconfiguration and reimagination of the dispositifs of cinema in the decades leading from the late twentieth into the early twenty-first century. The architecture of the moving and projected image has been at the center of this renewed focus on the dispositif.

Roughly a hundred years since the start of World War I, I am seeking abstracts for a possible panel on British war poetry for the 2016 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 in Louisville, KY (http://www.thelousivilleconference.com). The work of British poets, both those who supported the war effort and those who opposed it, offers a varied resource for teaching and scholarship.

Five days after 9/11, Republican Party activist James Pinkerton proclaimed that 'the World Trade Center has been destroyed, but this has also been a crushing defeat for irony, cynicism and hipness. Here in New York, the city that gave the world Seinfeld, Sex and the City and Studio 54, the victors now are sincerity, patriotism and earnestness' (Newsday, September 16th, 2001). Has Pinkerton's claim come true? If traditional values like sincerity, patriotism and earnestness are ascendant, what space is left for texts that risk to contest or query the status-quo? Should we abhor risk as the cause of the financial crash, or pine for risky artistic practices that might instigate change? Do we need the texts we study to be risky?

Have you ever wondered, "How on Earth can I grade this poem? Can creativity even be quantified?" Or, "how should revision fit into the overall course grade?" In this roundtable, writing instructors from a variety of fields (rhetoric and composition; technical writing; creative writing; and more) will discuss their systems for assessing and evaluating student writing in the college classroom. Both conceptual and pragmatic concerns will be addressed for making the evaluation and feedback process an integral part of our writing pedagogy.