What is urban media? This is the question that opens the CMS/SOSC 327 Urban Media course, which is cross-listed between the Department of Communication and Media Studies and the Department of Psychological and Social Sciences at John Cabot University. “Urban Media” explores the entanglements between the processes of urbanization and mediation, without considering one an addition to the other. Rather, Kittler’s famous assertion “The City is a Medium” guided me in designing this course, which reflects many years of researching how the city mediates cultural expressions and how media infrastructure intermingles with urban life.
Drawing from interdisciplinary areas such as urban media studies and urban cultural studies, “Urban Media” is an upper-level undergraduate course designed to bring together students from different subjects. Student enrollment is usually split between the two departments but receives students from other majors and minors in the university as well as study abroad students from diverse disciplines. The course maps and explores critical scholarship as well as practice-based research methods that span the diverse array of fields involved in such an interdisciplinary approach. The first half of the course provides foundational readings on semiotic, narrative, Marxist, ethnographic, feminist, and intersectional approaches to the city, in order to give students analytical tools to critically address their case studies. The second part of the course helps students to conduct a multisensory and interdisciplinary practice-based study of specific urban sites or urban themes, through hands-on activities spanning mental mapping, sound walks and ethnographic observation. Shannon Mattern’s Deep Mapping the Media City has proved very helpful in implementing multisensory and interdisciplinary methods in the student projects, as can be seen in the essays included in this issue.1Shannon Mattern, Deep Mapping the Media City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Leslie Kern’s The Feminist City is also a guiding reading for this class.2Leslie Kern, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (London: Verso, 2021). One of the class activities asked students to think about a location in the city of Rome loaded with urban screens and to reimagine them creatively from a feminist perspective, pairing Kern with Erkki Huhtamo’s essay “Messages on the Wall: An Archeology of Public Media Displays.”3Erkki Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall: An Archeology of Public Media Displays,” in Urban Screens Reader, ed. Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), 15–28. The workshop was designed around Huhtamo’s concept of the “Gulliverization of media,” which directly addresses the intersection of mediation and urbanization. The concept highlights the tension between dualisms that are also central to the feminist questioning of gendered power dynamics, such as the division between public and private. It describes, on the one hand, the enlargement of screens for public media display, from early advertising billboards to contemporary urban screens, accompanying the growing urbanization that makes cities increasingly inhumane and inhospitable. On the other hand, it points to the inverse movement: the miniaturization of images for private consumption, from trade cards and newspaper ads to contemporary visual gadgetry, such as smartwatches, which serve the opposite function— reassuring city dwellers that they have some degree of control over their urban experience.
The prompt for the activity reads as follows:
Feminist activists and artists have taken the ‘gigantic’ affordance offered by urban screens to subvert capitalist, consumerist and patriarchal messages. We saw examples in class, such as Victorian activist and writer Frances Power Cobbe who attacked billboards with a ‘pot of paint and a long-handled brush on her rural drives in order to deface defacements,’4Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall,” 18. an angry Frances McDormand fighting for justice against rape culture and gender-based violence in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, artist Nancy Spero’s pro-choice project being censored from the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square (NY) in 1986. How can we envision urban screens as a way to build a feminist city?
The workshop employed feminist participatory visual methods which engage critically “with the politics and ethics of representation.”5I am extremely indebted to the work done by feminist activists in Rome in recent years through creative and participatory workshops aimed at re-imagining a feminist city. Particularly, I chose to use collage because it has the potential of “making the familiar strange” by opening windows to new worlds.6Mannay, Dawn. “Making the Familiar Strange: Can Visual Research Methods Render the Familiar Setting More Perceptible?” Qualitative Research 10, no. 1 (2010): 91–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794109348684. Moreover, by cutting out small elements from print media advertisements and composing a larger image, collage techniques work at the intersection of shrinking and enlarging that is at the core of the Gulliverization of media. We gathered recent print advertisements from Italian magazines and newspapers geared towards different audiences and political leanings. With this choice, we aimed to tap into contemporary Italian visual culture in order to incorporate a public broad imaginary into our own creative reappropriation of city spaces. The students chose the main train station in Rome, Stazione Termini, which is heavily dominated by urban screens for commercial purposes, but is also a space of marginalization, securitization and consumerism. In co-creating urban screens through collage techniques the students questioned issues of public media display in relation to the politics of representation and commodification of gender.
When I designed this course, I asked myself how students would respond to the challenge of working across media studies and urban studies. I was also concerned that the course might seem too theoretical, and for this reason I designed a syllabus that incorporated hands-on experiments, such as the one described above, along with more traditional forms of assessment like essays. As the quality of the work submitted demonstrates, the choice proved to be successful. Students demonstrated a high level of interest in the topic in their creative and academic outputs. Of course, such a result was not met without adjustments and failures.
The essays presented in this Student Voices dossier are the result of teaching and adjusting the course’s assignments and assessment methods, as well as readings, in two different semesters with two cohorts of students, in Fall 2022 and Spring 2024. The main assignment guides the students’ work from beginning to end, and I revised it over two iterations of the course. In the first iteration, the assignment guidelines asked students to produce a creative project, which could take various forms, such as sound or multisensory urban walks, video or photo essays, and a written reflection on their research and creative process. Students were free to choose an urban site or theme. While this approach encouraged creativity, students also struggled to find a concrete idea for much of the semester. I felt that with stricter guidelines, they could have spent more time developing their projects. Additionally, since my research focuses on the urban night, I noticed a strong interest in the topic from the students. For these reasons, I designed a scaffolding assignment for the second iteration of the course. Students could choose between a written, photo or video-essay and had to submit different parts of their research project weekly, incorporate my feedback and help each other through peer-review. Moreover, they had to focus specifically on the urban night. For example, we watched Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) paired with Stephen Shapiro’s “Pose, Paris is Burning, and the Creation of Community” to think about urban nightlife as a site and practice of resistance for queer communities, and how documentary practice has engaged with the urban night. As a result of the rich conversations gathered during the two different iterations of the course, this Student Voices dossier comprises two essays and a video essay that focus on the urban night in relation to questions of gender, race and class.
Marica Loffreda’s essay “Fear On and Off Screen: Constructing Women’s Fear of the Urban Night in Film” explores how the female fear of sexual assault at night is nurtured by gender norms and represented in four films: Spider-Man (2002), V for Vendetta (2005), Twilight (2008) and Irréversible (2002). She pairs her film analysis with data and studies on gender-based violence to demystify the association between the urban night, public space and sexual assault. This paper is complemented by a video essay in which the author combines scenes from the films and her own internalized fear of the urban night in a compelling supercut video. Ava DeAngelis investigates the “TV Representation of Female Drug Abuse Within the Urban Night” in two popular series: Gossip Girl (The CW: 2007–2012) and Euphoria (HBO: 2019–present). The author scrutinizes the portrayal of the two main characters, Serena van der Woodsen and Rue Bennett, in the spaces they inhabit at night (glamorous New York nightclubs and the dark suburbs of Los Angeles respectively). Taking an intersectional approach, and paying specific attention to race and class disparities, the author looks into the inequities of drug-related policing and its media representation. Finally, Kaitlyn Adèle Barrett-Gullion engages more directly with the city as a medium and as media infrastructure by analyzing “Instagrammable” locations in Rome. Using visual ethnographic methods the author documents photographic practices at popular urban locations in the city that align with the aesthetic principles of visual social media. Her goal is to show how digital media such as smartphone cameras and visual social media platforms such as Instagram have altered the city’s form and how people engage with it.
Although the students were generally new to theories that focus on the media city, the essays presented in this dossier show their profound engagement, curiosity and creativity. I am deeply thankful for their involvement and the insights that they brought to class discussion together with their peers, whose work was also excellent. The ongoing conversation nurtured by Mediapolis and especially the Student Voices section has also been of great inspiration for their work as well as for designing this course and my own assignments.
Notes
| ↑1 | Shannon Mattern, Deep Mapping the Media City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). |
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| ↑2 | Leslie Kern, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (London: Verso, 2021). |
| ↑3 | Erkki Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall: An Archeology of Public Media Displays,” in Urban Screens Reader, ed. Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), 15–28. |
| ↑4 | Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall,” 18. |
| ↑5 | I am extremely indebted to the work done by feminist activists in Rome in recent years through creative and participatory workshops aimed at re-imagining a feminist city. |
| ↑6 | Mannay, Dawn. “Making the Familiar Strange: Can Visual Research Methods Render the Familiar Setting More Perceptible?” Qualitative Research 10, no. 1 (2010): 91–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794109348684. |
Eleonora Diamanti is lecturer in media studies and social sciences at John Cabot University, Rome. Her work has appeared in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Visual Anthropology Review, Convergence, and Ethnologies. Her book project investigates night in contemporary Cuban documentary and ethnographic films. She co-directed Guardians of the Night (2018 – https://guardiansnight.wordpress.com), a short experimental film on the night in Guantánamo, Cuba, and After the Earthquake (2017), a short film on material culture in central Italy.
