Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Cate Thill
Listening for media justice
While a commitment to democratic participation underpins much media and cultural studies scholarship
there has been limited direct engagement with questions of justice. Yet it is clear that media and cultural
practices are central to process of misrepresentation, nonrecognition and disrespect. Nick Couldry advocates
Amartya Sen’s method of working from discernable injustices as a basis for developing an account of media
justice. The ubiquity of media and discursive practices, however, undercuts the possibility of pinpointing –
let alone resolving – specific injustices. In this paper, I argue that social justice-oriented listening offers a
useful methodology for addressing this dilemma. Since it operates as both a descriptive tool for tracing
particular sites of injustice and a normative tool oriented towards transforming the unequal hierarchies of
attention that underpin them, then, it enables us to develop strategies for tackling manifest injustices that
nonetheless articulate with and reframe broader patterns of cultural value.
Tanja Dreher
Mediated attention and Media Justice
In this paper I argue that the uneven distribution of mediated attention is a key concern for an emerging
interest in Media Justice. Judith Butler’s analysis of the uneven distribution of grief and attention to
“grievable lives” in the war on terror provides a generative starting point for a cultural account of Media
Justice. I apply this framework to a number of examples in which the uneven distribution of mediated
attention or grief is called in to question. From #blacklivesmatter to social media memes connecting violent
deaths in Paris, Beirut and Ankara, conventional news values areunderstood as central to the fundamental
injustice of lives which are not grieved or are not seen to matter. My discussion identifies possibilities for
redistributing attention and grief as a crucial contribution to more just futures.
7N
Futuring space, queering history (Chair, Katrina Schlunke)
Johan Vaide Designing projected futures of the Anthropocene – The production of post-apocalyptic space and
dystopia in The 100
Situated within the context of “world building” processes in post-apocalyptic science fiction, this paper
addresses the Anthropocene from a spatial perspective. Using Henri Lefebvre’s spatial analysis (1991/1974)
and Neil Smith’s account on the production of nature (2008/1984) as a theoretical framework, this paper
explores how the Anthropocene can be conceptualised and analysed in spatial terms. Understanding science
fiction as a platform to address environmental issues, this paper draws on a series of engagements with
science fiction series The 100 in which the Anthropocene is taken into its extreme. The series is set in a postapocalyptic
world in which the characteristics of the Anthropocene are exhausted due to a planetary nuclear
war. In order to address the “world building” processes of the series, the paper is based on empirical
materials, such as interviews with the producers and writers of the show, as well as the popular fan podcast
“The Dropship”.
Natalija Majsova
The dawn of the space age in imagery and in thought: an uneasy dialectic
The contribution explores the textual/visual dialectics of 20th century reflections on the space age by
presenting the Icons of Non-Visible project run by the Cultural Center of European Space Technologies
(KSEVT Vitanje, Slovenia) through several case studies. We discuss several cases of allegedly “iconic” space
imagery (First TV image of Mars, Blue Marble, Pale Blue Dot), in order to demonstrate (1) how dominant
interpretations of these images are tied to certain preconceptions about the space age and its implications
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