Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi, exploring “the many faces of history” in news reporting around the war on Gaza.
Details
This talk engages with the question of how structural violence can be represented in an age of spectacular distraction and overwhelming noise. Drawing on media content from Western and Middle Eastern sources, this talk investigates the place of history, or the lack thereof, in the mediation of the war on Gaza. It analyses how mainstream Western media are implicated in covering up genocide by unpacking the deployment of history in news narratives. It differentiates between history that is produced in the present for the future, and the erasure of history as the evidence-based narrative of what happened in the past. It then turns attention to visual culture and how history can be visualised amid saturation in images and videos circulating on digital platforms.
Biography
Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi is Associate Professor and Deputy Head for Education in the Department of Media and Communications at The London School of Economics and Political Science. He works on the geopolitics of global communications, particularly in relation to news media and popular culture. His published work explores the politics that shape the ways we talk about and use communications technologies, as well as the role of media in forging our imaginaries of the past and the future. His forthcoming book Entangled Past: The Politics of History in Arab Media is under contract with Oxford University Press. Al-Ghazzi is an editor in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Alexander Sergeant, resurfacing some hidden Hollywood history.
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Herbert Brenon (1880-1958) is one of silent Hollywood’s most important and forgotten figures. Born in Dublin and raised in London, Brenon emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, where he became a touring actor working in quality theatre and vaudeville. By his mid-thirties, he had become one of the nation’s most popular filmmakers. He worked for Paramount, MGM, United Artists and RKO at the height of Hollywood’s silent golden age, and was responsible for some of the era’s greatest commercial successes of the 1920s, including lavish fantasies like A Daughter of the Gods (1916) and adaptations of Peter Pan (1924) and Beau Geste (1926). His films pioneered new production methods and served as star-making vehicles for several female producers/actors including Alla Nazimova, Theda Bara, Louise Brooks and Pola Negri. Yet, today, Brenon’s story is largely forgotten. In this talk, Dr. Alexander Sergeant tells the story of Brenon’s life and career, and argues the case for why Brenon’s name deserves to be better remembered by cinema’s aficionados and fans.
Biography
Dr. Alexander Sergeant is a film theorist and historian specialising in popular media. His first monograph, Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021) was nominated for several scholarly awards, including the BAFTSS award for Best First Book. He is the co-founder of Fantasy-Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, a popular blog/podcast providing weekly discussion of the intertwining worlds of fantasy storytelling and the medium of animation. He is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster.
The Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster welcomes you to this talk on Media Geographies with Prof. David Morley and Dr. Mike Duggan.
In order to understand how the media exercise their power, we also need to contextualise media and commutations studies themselves, by considering how they have been shaped by the specific circumstances of their development in the period of the post WWII economic boom in the affluent democracies of the world’s Northwestern ‘temperate zone’. In an era in which mobility is now becoming a key dimension of inequality, the study of communications must also involve questions of both geography and demography – in particular, the degrees of mobility (or immobilisation) of different categories of persons, technologies and commodities. We should perhaps be sceptical about the myths of digital media’s weightlessness, immateriality and lack of friction and especially its claims to enable us to transcend geography. In a world of heavily policed borders, with the rise of economic protectionism leading to tariff wars and increasing conflict over control of international trade routes, media and communications cannot be understood outside the context of these geo-political issues. In this context, as Foucault argued, we need theories and models which will enable us to understand both the ‘grand strategies of geopolitics’ and the ‘little tactics of the habitat’.
This event will open with a provocation from Prof. David Morley on the intersection between media and geography, followed by a response from Dr Mike Duggan, and what is sure to be a lively and highly informative discussion. The evening will be rounded off with a wine reception and the chance to continue conversations with friends old and new.
Prof. David Morley
David Morley is Emeritus Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Following his early work on media audiences and the household uses of information and communication technology, he has worked in the field of cultural geography for many years now. His publications include ‘Spaces of identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries’ (with Kevin Robins, Routledge 1997); ‘Home Territories ‘ (Routledge 2001); ‘Media, Modernity and Technology: the Geography of the New’ (2005) and ‘Communications and Mobility: the Migrant, the Mobile Phone and the Container Box (Wiley Blackwell, 2016). He also edited ‘Stuart Hall : Selected Essays Vols 1 and 2’ (Duke University Press 2019). His work has been translated into 22 languages.
Dr Mike Duggan (Kings College)
Mike Duggan holds a PhD in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, working in partnership with the Ordnance Survey on studying everyday digital mapping practices. Mike is primarily interested in the intersections between technology, culture and everyday life. He has studied everyday mapping practices, the lived experiences of the sharing economy and video conferencing platforms. He a director of the Livingmaps Network and the editor-in-chief of the Livingmaps Review, a bi-annual journal for radical and critical cartography, which welcomes a range of submission styles from academics, artists, activists and others interested in maps and mapping practices. His latest book is All Mapped Out, is published by Reaktion Books (2024).
This event is hosted by Prof. Tarik Sabry and Dr Doug Specht.