Event Details

We look forward to welcoming Dr Vincent Gaine and Dr Rolien Hyong from Media and Cultural Studies, Lancaster University, to speak about Contemporary Media Research. Hope to see many of you there.

Vincent Gaine:

Jack of Many Trades, Master of Who Cares?

In this talk, I discuss the challenges of independent research, teaching-only contracts and other people’s modules. I demonstrate that these challenges provide opportunities for adaptation, finding colleagues with associated interests, and identifying niches. Through adaptation and an active search for my own academic space within a wider framework, I have found teaching, scholarship and research opportunities. Join me as I take you through my unorthodox journey, that might offer some tips.

Rolien Hyong:

The politics of models as media: Media studies in times of climate crisis

What do media and cultural studies have to say about climate models and climate technologies used in practical contexts such as farming? Media and cultural studies have often been biased in their orientation toward urban and consumption-related phenomena. My project displaces the focus, in search for a STS-inflected, materialist ecomedia studies that suits a time of climate breakdown. Climate modeling constructs a future-oriented notion of climate change, and meanwhile its mediations constitute present relations. The critical question is: in what ways does it do so, and to what effects? In this presentation, I will discuss the mediation of the climate by models and locate the politics of models in interplays of un/certainties, speculation and quantification, and risk versus possibility.

Vincent M. Gaine is (currently) a Senior Teaching Fellow in Media in the Department of Sociology. He previously worked at King’s College London and the Universities of Wolverhampton, Loughborough and East Anglia. His monograph, Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann, is published by Palgrave. His research focuses on the intersection of globalisation, liminality and identity politics on screen.

Rolien Hoyng is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University with interests in critical data and algorithm studies, cultural theory, and ecomedia studies. Her research addresses the cultural and political implications of digital infrastructures and data-centric technologies in particular contexts of practice, including smart cities, waste, and ecology. Currently, she is working on the role of digital models as uncertain mediations of the climate crisis. Her fieldwork sites reside in Turkey, China, and Europe. For further information: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/people/rolien-hoyng