[Air-L] From 'gazing' to 'grabbing': Lecture this week: Terri Senft at Aarhus University

[Annette Markham]

Dear Colleagues,

If you're in Aarhus, Denmark, this week, drop by to hear this talk by
Terri!  Also, thanks for distributing this announcement to those who might
find it relevant.

***
The STS group and Department of Information Studies invites you to attend a
talk by Theresa Senft, PhD, New York University. This Week!

Wednesday, June 25
10 (:15) - 12:00
Nygård 2nd floor Lunchroom
Aarhus University

*Title:* From Gazing to Grabbing: Feeling One’s Way through Data that Moves"

*Speaker:* Theresa Senft, Ph.D., New York University

*Abstract: *What does it mean to write about data that moves us
emotionally, data that moves through a range of actors and networks online,
or both of these? I have long argued that rather than solely theorizing
social media transactions through filmic conceptions like “the gaze” or
even televisual language like “the glance,” internet scholars might be
better served by the tactile notion of “the grab.” I chose the word because
of its relation to skin: grab means to grasp, to seize for a moment, to
capture (an object, attention), and, of course, to leave open for
interpretation, as in the saying “up for grabs.” From a materialist
perspective, the grab interests me because it tends toward commodity
fetishism, rather than scopophilia (the psychic modality of the gaze.) From
a feminist and anti-racist perspective, the politics of the grab certainly
matter: it’s difficult to argue with the fact that historically, some
bodies have been grabbed more than others

In this talk, I focus on “grabbing” as a both theoretical construct and
concrete practice of investigation, feeling, and writing. To do this, I
combine Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rythymanalysis as method, Roland
Barthes’s thoughts on writing spectatorship as “wound,” Susanna Passonen’s
arguments about working through sensation as ethical praxis, and my own
research, in which I consider the relationship between online “selfie
culture” and recent developments in biometric and racial profiling
practices, worldwide.
*Bio:*
Theresa M. Senft’s is an internationally recognized scholar of digital
media. Her work explores the impact of digital media technologies on
cultural conceptions of the private, the public, the pornographic, and the
pedagogic in global society. Her most recent book is Camgirls: Celebrity &
Community in the Age of Social Networks (Lang: 2008.) She is co-editor of
The Routledge Handbook of Social Media (with Jeremy Hunsinger, Routledge:
2014) and working on a book tentatively titled, Fame to Fifteen: Social
Media and the Micro-Celebrity Moment.

Senft is on the faculty at the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York
University, where she teaches classes on media, writing, and aesthetic
theory. Prior to that, she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of East
London’s Media Studies Program in the U.K..She most recently founded the
international Selfie Research Network and is editing a special issue on the
topic of Selfies for the International Journal of Communication.


*****************************************************
Annette N. Markham, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics & Communication, Aarhus
University
Guest Professor, Department of Informatics, Umeå University, Sweden
Affiliate Professor, School of Communication, Loyola University, Chicago
amarkham at gmail.com
http://markham.internetinquiry.org/
Twitter: annettemarkham