John Fekete Distinguished Lecture

The annual John Fekete Distinguished Lecture series was established in November 2011 and inaugurated in November 2013 by the Cultural Studies PhD Program to honour John Fekete on his retirement from Trent in 2012. The idea of the lectureship is to invite distinguished visitors to the university to share their most recent or forthcoming publications that are influential and important in the field of cultural inquiry.

Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Globalization

Dr. Lisa Parks

Professor of Film & Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab at UC Santa Barbara

Thursday, November 10, 2022 

Watch 2022 Fekete Lecture

In this talk, Lisa Parks, sharing work from her current book in progress, Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Globalization, critiques the tendency of global media research to privilege formalized national frameworks and corporate brands, capital concentrations, and unidirectional models of technological innovation and diffusion. While it is essential, in the speaker’s  view, to track those in power and try to understand their strategies and impacts, it is equally important to pay attention to peoples' everyday experiences with media technologies. Building on research on "invisible users" (Burrell, 2012) and “informal media” (Thomas & Lobato, 2015), Parks argues for an expansion of critical vocabularies to account for the uneven material conditions, varied sociotechnical relations, and diverse epistemologies that shape peoples' knowledges and experiences of media infrastructures in different parts of the world. Peoples' media experiences, she argues, demand more situated, phenomenological, and conceptual approaches that can help to bring forth the everyday social struggles, agencies, and creativities that are vital to understandings of media globalization.

About Dr. Lisa Parks

Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at UC Santa Barbara. She is a media scholar and her research focuses on satellite technologies and media globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; media, militarization, and surveillance; and environmental media. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005).

For more information, contact culturalstudies-phd@trentu.ca or vdezwaan@trentu.ca.