[UWcinema] Seattle University Film Studies Speaker Series March 8th and March 10th

[UW Cinema Studies List]

Dear colleagues and students,

Seattle University's Film and Media Studies program has a really exciting week of talks coming up in early March. Dr. Diana Flores Ruíz will speak on Wednesday March 8th, with a response from SU's Dr. Natalie Cisneros; and Dr. Pooja Rangan will speak on Friday March 10th, with a response from SU's Nalini Iyer<https://www.facebook.com/groups/398344665719853/user/1770709020/?__cft__%5B0%5D=AZV9gy9m62KbmVm74siHR4gT55FgpRwVIefKSjp_D_zkKYGNmhH6qmGBujw7gJOAwEqXXbyncFLPupTxn3lbIuvpfiAj_yimegB8C9IgK4uCzJWCCrICVcQjToSF642jbnTDg2vIegEjQ-ZwdzWhivUNZsJPJLzmej7kXrBI5oqURM7-FwsUMibdsCrK8TdoI-g&__tn__=-%5DK-R>. We are working on flyers, which I will send out soon, but details about the events can be found below.

Event 1:
Title: Self-Evident? Paradoxes and Struggles in Constructing Visual Arguments About Migration

Speaker: Dr. Diana Flores Ruíz, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington

Respondent: Dr. Natalie Cisneros, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University

Time/Place: March 8th 4:30pm at Casey Commons

Event Page: https://fb.me/e/2DURtscI2

Description:
This talk examines how images of migrants’ belongings along the US-Mexico border became a popular visual trope, one which has amplified both anti- and pro-immigrant arguments. Discoveries of sunbleached, disintegrating items such as water bottles, clothing, and toys increased following the 1995 strategy known as Prevention Through Deterrence, which pushed migrants’ journeys into more dangerous, remote parts of the border lands and waters. This presentation begins in 2005, a year that saw a nativist surge in border spectacles and the advent of YouTube, and concludes with contemporary QAnon social media posts and live streaming platforms. In tracing the proliferation of this visual trope, I analyze its appeal to humanitarian organizations, politicians, artists, and environmentalists on the far right and left. Throughout, I demonstrate how the desire to make this visual trope self-evident is bound up in the enduring historical relationship between images and policing the US-Mexico border.

Bio: Diana Flores Ruíz examines forms of mediation that produce and facilitate structures of racialized violence, as well as artistic and activist modes of visual resistance. Her current book project investigates the technological construction of the U.S.-Mexico border through the lenses of apprehension and Latinx visual critique. Spanning from the border’s cartographic founding to its current virtual, biometric capacity, Dr. Ruíz analyzes a constellation of photography, cinema, surveillance, and machine vision to demonstrate how visual cultures of the border constitute differential racial emplacements of mobility and itinerant political subjectivities. Her work appears in Film Quarterly, The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Stanford UP, 2018), and a forthcoming anthology on materiality and performance in the built environments of Mexico City (UAM Cuajimalpa). Her research has been funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies.


Event 2:

Title: Listening with an Accent: The Documentary Audit as Raciolinguistic Pedagogy

Speaker: Dr. Pooja Rangan, Associate Professor of English & Chair of Film and Media Studies, Amherst College

Respondent: Nalini Iyer, Professor of English, Seattle University

Time/Place: March 10th 4:30pm at the Stuart T. Rolfe Community Room

Event Page: https://fb.me/e/4dK6AHxX5

Description:

This talk explores the role of documentary forms in cultivating “neutral” listening habits that justify linguistic profiling and discrimination, and their capacity to engage audiences in listening with an accent, or listening with a relational awareness of one’s embodied social vantage. To that end, I offer a history, a method drawn from my co-edited anthology Thinking with an Accent<https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520389731/thinking-with-an-accent> (UC Press 2023), and an illustration of that method in practice. Early sound documentaries by the British GPO Film Unit were instrumental in shaping the “objective” listening vantage that has become the habitualized locus of documentary listening, or what I call the documentary audit. Pioneers of the neutral commentator voice, these films exported a supralocal accent as a national-imperial norm and gave audiovisual form to raciolinguistic ideals. I trace the postcolonial resonances of the documentary audit in the evidentiary logic of forensic speech analysis through an engagement with works by artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Abu Hamdan’s investigations of the linguistic profiling of asylum seekers by UK immigration authorities are both diagnostic and propositional: they show how documentary forms and comportments are complicit in listening for an accent, and simultaneously cultivate a perceptual and interpretive mode that does not listen for so much as with an awareness of the place from which one has been taught to listen.


Bio:

Pooja Rangan is a scholar of documentary media based in Amherst College, where she is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film and Media Studies. Rangan is the author of the award-winning book Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary<https://www.dukeupress.edu/immediations> (Duke UP 2017), and co-editor of the anthology Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice<https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520389731/thinking-with-an-accent> (UC Press 2023, now available in print and as a free open access ebook). Her new book-in-progress, The Documentary Audit, explores how listening has come to be equated, in documentary discourse, with accountability.




Sincerely,

Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa (he, him, his)
Assistant Professor of Film Studies
Seattle University
901 12thAve
Seattle, WA 98122
schultzfigub at seattleu.edu
https://www.benjaminschultzfigueroa.com

Author of The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life available for pre-order from UC Press here:

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520342347/the-celluloid-specimen

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