Promotional+Material

__**Promotional e-mail to HASTAC Scholars**__

The term “life itself” refers to how the //biological//  body, on any scale, becomes a site for political, technological, scientific, and critical engagement. The founding of the Human Genome Project in 1988 marked the life sciences as a major cultural paradigm of the late twentieth century; the early part of the twenty-first century has continued this proliferation of the biological, initiating the increased funding and visibility of such phenomena as biomedia, biotechnology, bioinformatics, biometrics, and other technological engagements with the biological. The phrase “life itself,” then, is suggestive of both the essence or foundation of the biological (life at its core) and of the ways in which the biological has influenced/infiltrated modes of thought in many other disciplines (from cybernetics to political theory). Comparative media studies - which emphasizes thinking across various media forms, theories, and contexts - has taken up this discourse, investigating in recent years certain “biological” phenomena such as media ecologies, outbreak narratives, genetic databases, disease surveillance networks, and insect media.

 This forum hopes to engage the biological in its many dimensions through comparative media studies and comparative media studies through the biological. In the process, we hope to investigate and interrogate the contemporary understandings of “life itself” in its mediated forms. Such interrogation is at once metaphorical (DNA as the code of life, the metaphoricity of science, viral media), rhetorical (the appearance and development of outbreak narratives and depictions of contagion across literature, films, digital art, and the popular press), and material (disease surveillance networks, media ecologies, forensic media practices).

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We are excited to share this important interdisciplinary conversation with these scholars in comparative media studies and the sciences :=====

Hosts: Mary Karcher (Wayne State) Kim Lacey (Wayne State) Dana Solomon (UCSB) Lindsay Thomas (UCSB)

Please join us for what will surely be a lively discussion on the "S" in HASTAC!

(Kim, I think this is great. The only comment I have is that if we end up not really emphasizing CMS and STS ini our opening spiel (see below) then we may have to modify the first sentence of the second paragraph. ~ Mary)

__**Draft letters to invited guests**__

(ok, this is not the best of letters, and I hope we can improve on this; however, as I always tell my students, if you don' t have a draft to start from, then you have nothing to revise and make better! )

Dear Dr. XXX,

I am contacting you to invite you to be part of an academic forum as a guest scholar and participant.

Three fellow graduate students and myself are members of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaborative (HASTAC) Scholar's program, and we are hosting a forum discussion for fellow HASTAC scholars during the month of February.

HASTAC is a consortium of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and engineers committed to new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology. The HASTAC Scholars fellowship program is comprised of recognizes graduate and undergraduate students engaged in innovative work across the areas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.

The forum we are leading is entitled "Comparative Media Studies and Life Itself" and aims to engage the biological in its many dimensions through comparative media studies while also interrogating comparative media studies through the biological. In the process, we hope to investigate the contemporary understandings of “life itself” in its mediated forms. Such an engagement is at once metaphorical (DNA as the code of life, the metaphoricity of science, viral media), rhetorical (the appearance and development of outbreak narratives and depictions of contagion across literature, films, digital art, and the popular press), and material (disease surveillance networks, media ecologies, forensic media practices). It is also interdisciplinary in scope; this forum will center itself on the nexus of two large fields of interest in the humanities: comparative media studies, and science and technology studies. By pointing to the ways in which these two large fields have been and can be brought together, we hope to emphasize important developments in interdisciplinary humanities scholarship and to create some of our own.

We are inviting you to be a Guest Scholar because we feel that your work in XXXXXX is at the heart of topic that will be under discussion in our forum. We believe that you would be able to offer interesting insight into the topic of comparative media studies and life itself, and that your comments would greatly add to the ideas and theories we hope to discuss in our forum.

If you decide to participate in the forum, you would be expected to respond to one of more of our opening posts. You would be welcome to post your own thoughts on the topic, respond to other scholars' comments, offer additional arguments, etc.

I have included a link to a previous forum so that you might see for yourself how the HASTAC Scholar forums work, the kind of discussions had and the typical number/frequency of the posts made throughout the month.

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If you have any questions, or if you would like some more information, please feel free to contact us.

We appreciate your consideration of this invitation, and we hope that you will agree to join us in what promises to be an exciting and stimulating conversation.

Sincerely,

Mary Karcher (Wayne State) Kim Lacey (Wayne State) Dana Solomon (UCSB) Lindsay Thomas (UCSB)

__**Our/invited guests Twitter accounts?**__ @kimlacey @marykarcher @lindsayt45

__**Opening spiel for forum homepage**__

Title: Media Studies and Life Itself ( what do we think of the title?)

The term “life itself” refers to how the biological body, on any scale, becomes a site for political, technological, scientific, and critical engagement. The founding of the Human Genome Project in 1988 marked the life sciences as a major cultural paradigm of the late twentieth century; the early part of the twenty-first century has continued this proliferation of the biological, initiating the increased funding and visibility of such phenomena as biomedia, biotechnology, bioinformatics, biometrics, and other technological engagements with the biological. The phrase “life itself,” then, is suggestive of both the essence or foundation of the biological (life at its core) and of the ways in which the biological has influenced/infiltrated modes of thought in many other disciplines (from cybernetics to political theory). Mediation is at the heart of such influence and infiltration, and media studies has taken up this discourse. Investigating the ways in which the biological mutates and evolves across various media forms, forms, theories, and contexts and the ways in which media themselves are changed through such transformations, media studies has investigated in recent years certain "biological" phenomena such as media ecologies, outbreak narratives, genetic databases, disease surveillance networks, and insect media. This forum aims to engage the biological in its many dimensions through media studies and media studies through the biological. Our goal is to investigate and interrogate the contemporary understandings of "life itself" in its mediated forms. Such interrogation is at once metaphorical (DNA as the code of life, the metaphoricity of science, viral media), rhetorical (the appearance and development of outbreak narratives, films, digital art, and the popular press), and material (disease surveillance networks, media ecologies, forensic media practices). It is also interdisciplinary in scope; this forum will center on the nexus of two large fields of interest in the humanities: media studies and science and technology studies (STS). From foundational works by Marshall McLuhan and Thomas Kuhn, to more recent work from Friedrich Kittler, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway, to the contemporary work of scholars like Lisa Gitelman, Jussi Parikka, and Eugene Thacker, the questions that scholars in these two fields tend to ask can be remarkably similar. By pointing to the ways in which these two large fields have been and can be brought together, we hope to emphasize important developments in interdisciplinary humanities scholarship and to create some of our own. Like the Critical Code Studies forum, we hope to address the "S" in HASTAC in order to link the humanities to seemingly disparate fields of inquiry, to engage in "interdisciplinary" discussion that is in fact intimately linked to the work of the humanities, and to create a space for unusual methods, peculiar questions, and monstrous productions to arise. What does it mean to look at media studies from the perspective of science and technology studies and vice versa? What does it mean to do this through the lens of life itself? What are the stakes of such intersections for scholars in the humanities? How can scholars engage in productive interdisciplinary work while maintaining discipline and rigor? We welcome disciplinary transgressions and promiscuous speculation in the discussion of these questions and more. To get the ball rolling, we would like to offer some discussion of a few arenas within which the biological, STS, and media studies all circulate. (Question: Lindsay quite rightly was concerned about making our forum focus too narrow. When I was trying to revise this, I wondered if we need to talk about any one specific field at all? If we do, perhaps it could be "For example, two fields in particular have taken up this discourse in recent years. Media Studies--which emphasizes thinking across varoius media forms...Science and Technologiy studies has...". Also, as I was rereading Fiona's guide to hosting a forum, each of us has to post an initial post in which we outline our particular interests and perspectives on this topic. We could bring up more about STS and CMS there if we want. Thoughts? ~ Mary)

(Also, how the HECK do you guys change font size and color in this editor?! I'm on a mac, so perhaps that's part of the problem, but the stuff I change always ends up so SMALL!! ~ Mary It's really annoying because sometimes the text doesn't do what you want it to do. I have been copying and pasting text into Word and changing it there, then copying and pasting it back in here. Is there a way to get access to the html source code so we can edit there? - Lindsay) Didn't use this but could: Recent HASTAC forums have focused on topics of particular interests to the humanities (H), the arts (A) and technology (T); however, science, the “S” in HASTAC, has not been given as much voice. To that end we, we want to draw the (hard?) sciences (S) into the discussion... 1. Beginnings and Endings of Life: Media studies and science and technology studies offer unique perspectives on life at its beginnings and ends. From reproductive medicine and technology to dead media and zombie media, issues surrounding the beginnings and endings of life intersect both fields. How can we understand the mediation of life through reproductive technologies? How can we understand death through projects like the [|dead media project]? How is the archive and its relation to life and death functioning here? What about [|zombie media]? Where and how does a biopolitics turn away from the organization and maintenance of life and toward a thanatopolitcs or necropolitics? How is such a shift communicated and mediated? 2. Networked Life: From [|Bruno Latour's actor-network theory] to [|embodied experience] and [|distributed cognition], media studies and STS continue to understand life as extended, networked and connected. If start from this proposition, what then do the biopolitics of a network look like? What can [|the layering of networks in a disease surveillance network], for example, tell us about the ways in which networks harness both biology and information technology? How can we understand networks themselves as viral (viral media, viral capitalism)? What do viruses, both biological and [|computational], tell us about networked media ecologies? 3. Life and Issues of Scale: Technology as wide-ranging as nanotechnology, medical imaging technologies, and electron microscopes increasingly allow us to speak of life on a molecular scale. What happens when we move to microscales and speak of life? What happens when we move from microbiology to particle physics? How can we discuss life as radically non-human? How do issues of non-human production and perception fit in? 4. Life as Production and Practice: In his C-Theory article “Biophilosophy for the 21st Century,” Eugene Thacker distinguishes biophilosophy from the philosophy of biology; whereas the philosophy of biology is concerned with articulating a concept of 'life' that would describe the essence of life, biophilosophy is concerned with articulating those things that ceaselessly transform life. Following the trail of biophilosophy into the productive realm, how do we use life itself for the processes and production of bioart? How can bioart be historicized? How does bioart produce life as art? What about performance art? Further, beyond the realm of artistic production, what do we make of the merging of material production and the biological human body (i.e. tissue banks, patented cell lines, etc.)?

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**__Images for forum homepage (images are linked to original site)__**

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (I'm wondering if we shouldn't reorient the focus of the forum a bit and begin the spiel by focusing more broadly on the goal of making intersections between media studies and science and technology studies as a whole. We can then use the biological as a particular instance of intersection. The more I think about it, the more I realize that forums have tended to organize around general topics and fields (even more general than we have already: take, for example, the CCS forum active right now) rather than more specific ones. I also think that orienting the forum around the intersections of media studies and STS really encapsulates at least my central motivation for proposing the forum in the first place. What follows below (above the horizontal line) is what I have come up with in this vein. I am also a bit wary of the term "comparative media studies" instead of just the more common "media studies." Thoughts? - Lindsay)
 * The Broader Focused Spiel**

I think we should use "media studies" and drop the "comparative". After a little digging online, I think "comparative" got added by a program at MIT, and that what most people use and recognize is just "media studies" (from what I can tell!)

Following the Critical Code Studies forum with our forum on media studies and science and technology studies (STS) is actually quite apt. Like the Critical Code Studies forum, our forum seeks to link the humanities to seemingly disparate fields of inquiry, to engage in "interdisciplinary" discussion that is in fact intimately linked to the work of the humanities, and to create a space for unusual methods, peculiar questions, and monstrous productions to arise.

Two major interdisciplinary fields of study, media studies and STS, have made a large impact on how scholars in the humanities think about their methods of inquiry. **Description of both fields, broadly speaking.** From foundational works by Marshall McLuhan and Thomas Kuhn, to more recent work from Friedrich Kittler, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway, to the contemporary work of scholars like Lisa Gitelman, Jussi Parikka, and Eugene Thacker, work in these two fields has often focused on objects themselves - including digital, textual, visual and auditory media, institutional and media infrastructures, cyborgs and microorganisms, computer viruses and biotechnology - as the focal points of scholarship. In this way, media studies and STS, although often treated as separate fields, have much in common. This forum seeks to explicitly bring them together.

One more paragraph that describes in more detail specific works, our invited guests, the history behind thinking these two fields together (ie identify works that bring them together)?

What characterizes the kinds of questions raised and the kinds of works produced by media studies and STS? Where can we locate shared practices and projects? What is at stake in these intersections? We invite and welcome anyone interested in these topics to contribute, and to get discussion going we have outlined some categories and questions.

The term “life itself” refers to how the //biological// body, on any scale, becomes a site for political, technological, scientific, and critical engagement. The founding of the Human Genome Project in 1988 marked the life sciences as a major cultural paradigm of the late twentieth century; the early part of the twenty-first century has continued this proliferation of the biological, initiating the increased funding and visibility of such phenomena as biomedia, biotechnology, bioinformatics, biometrics, and other technological engagements with the biological. The phrase “life itself,” then, is suggestive of both the essence or foundation of the biological (life at its core) and of the ways in which the biological has influenced/infiltrated modes of thought in many other disciplines (from cybernetics to political theory). Media studies has taken up this discourse, investigating in recent years certain “biological” phenomena such as media ecologies, outbreak narratives, genetic databases, disease surveillance networks, and insect media. Such investigations of the understanding of "life itself" in its mediated forms is at once metaphorical, rhetorical, and material.
 * Media Studies and Life Itself**

- Beginnings and Endings of Life: What does it mean to think about death in the age of information technology, in which digital information is supposed to last forever? What do concepts of dead media or zombie media mean? How can we think about cell lines, which theoretically last forever, in relation to something like the “art” of Gunther von Hagens (plastination), which keeps bodies dead forever? - Life and Issues of Scale: Technology as wide-ranging as nanotechnology, medical imaging technologies, and electron microscopes increasingly allow us to speak of life on a molecular scale. What happens when we move to microscales and speak of life? What happens when we move from microbiology to particle physics? How can we discuss life as radically non-human? How do issues of non-human production and perception fit in? - Life as Production and Practice: In his //C-Theory// article [|“Biophilosophy for the 21st Centur] y,” Eugene Thacker distinguishes biophilosophy from the philosophy of biology; whereas the philosophy of biology is concerned with articulating a concept of 'life' that would describe the essence of life, biophilosophy is concerned with articulating those things that ceaselessly transform life. Following the trail of biophilosophy into the productive realm, how do we use life itself for the processes and production of bioart? How can bioart be historicized? How does bioart produce life as art? What about performance art? Further, beyond the realm of artistic production, what do we make of the merging of material production and the biological human body (i.e. tissue banks, patented cell lines, etc.)?

- Communications infrastructures - Archives and archiving technologies (esp. digital) - Neoliberalism, technology, globalization?
 * Institutions and Infrastructures**

- Studies on attention spans, the "dumbest generation" rhetoric, the ways in which the internet shapes our brains **-** connection to McLuhan - Works on media technologies: //Grammophone, Film, Typewriter//, //Always Already New//, works on radio
 * Media Technologies, Sciences of Communication**

[From Kim: I think we should stick with our original idea--the new one seems a little unfocused to me. "Life Itself" will be plenty exciting/engaging, especially since we really wanted to touch on the "S" in HASTAC when we first pitched the idea.]