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Past events

• May 2-4, 2024:ÌýMedia Aesthetics: Experience, Practice, and PedagogyÌýThe media aesthetics project examines and engages the saturation of ordinary life by varieties of constant mediation, while also examining the diverse array of mediated experiences and modernities worldwide. Here we have in mind new forms of digital technology from smartphones, ubiquitous wireless networks, social media, and streaming platforms. Art forms such as literature, cinema, music, and visual art remain important here. But now, with the durationally encompassing nature of contemporary mediation, we look to aesthetic experience broadly for its power to navigate the everyday.

• April 9, 2024: An evening with former Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ colleague Adrienne Russell,ÌýpresentingÌýherÌýnew bookÌýThe Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech and Activists are Vying for our FutureÌý(Columbia University Press 2023).ÌýIn her book, Adrienne argues that ourÌýinadequate response to climate change is intertwined with the profound challenges facing our communication environment.ÌýShe will discuss her research on journalists, activists, scientists, and other advocates for climate action, how their efforts are often compromised in today’s media landscape, and what we can do about it. Adrienne RussellÌýis Mary Laird Wood Professor of Communication and co-director of theÌýCenter for Journalism, Media, and DemocracyÌýat the University of Washington, Seattle. She is currently a fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.Ìý

• February 1, 2024: Rethinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust: Globality, Culture, Affect.ÌýComments by contributors: Professor Jayson Harsin (Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ), Professor Bilge Yesil (CUNY Graduate School) and Professor Hannah Westley (Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ) with response by Francois Allard-Huver (Université de Lorraine).

• October 19-20, 2023:ÌýDiscourse on the Plague (1347-1600): Authorities, Experience, and Experiments, Conference at The American University of Paris.ÌýCo-organized by Brenton Hobart (The American University of Paris) and Véronique Montagne (Université Côte d’Azur).ÌýMedical treatises, historical writings and literary narratives about the plague use a common linguistic register which repeated itself from Antiquity through Renaissance Europe and which persists in today’s popular and scholarly imagination of how we envision epidemic diseaseÌý– Covid language and plague language are to a large degree one and the same. TheÌýtruthÌýconcerning disease is thereby molded, if not skewed, by a preconceived discourse, which the writers of suchÌýtruthÌýare (or feel) forced to revisit: to prove knowledge of and move beyond past disease; to establish themselves as authoritative; likely, to learn how to transform ineffable horror into the art form that the printed word is.

• Wednesday, May 10, 2023: MCGC presented Book in Progress Workshop on Dr. Merten Reglitz’s (U of Birmingham) The Human Right to Free Internet Access.
• Wednesday, May 3, 2023: MCGC’s Working Paper Series presented research in progress by Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ scholars Noemie Oxley and Fatima Aziz, with an external discussant to be announced. Imaginaries of contemporary conflicts: engaging with the War in Ukraine on TikTok.
• January 25, 2023: Degenerations of DemocracyÌý(Harvard UP, 2022), dialogue with the authors, Charles Taylor, Dilip Gaonkar, and Craig Calhoun. Featuring commentaries by American University of Paris professors Stephen Sawyer and Julian Culp, and Ilaria Cozzaglio, Goethe University Frankfurt. The event was co-sponsored by the Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ Center for Critical Democracy and moderated by Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ professor Jayson Harsin.
• Spring 2022 Mellon-funded Lecture Series: Comparative Critiques of Post-truth politics and theory (lecture series and edited volume).ÌýSpeakers included: Jack Bratich (Rutgers U.); Ergin Bulut (Koc University, Turkey); Katherine Higgins (U Penn); Jinsook Kim (Emory University);Ìý Alison Hearn (U. of Western Ontario); Kaarina Nikunen (U. Tamere), Lee Edwards (LSE), Bilge Yesil (CUNY). Edited volume forthcoming (summer 2023) from lecture series: Jayson Harsin (ed.) Post-truth and Trust in a Globalized Society: Popular Truth and Consequences. London: Routledge.