Deep Dives

April 16, 2021<April 16, 2021

“So long as ignorance and misery remain on earth …”: How Digital Media Revisit our Images of Slums

by Igor Krstić

Igor Krstić discusses the ethics and politics of representing slums in contemporary film, television, and video games, from computer-generated imagery of Victorian London to documentaries about Mumbai.

April 14, 2021<April 15, 2021

Roland Barthes Plays Pokémon Go: On the Algorithmicized Futures of Everyday Life

by David Capener

David Capener reads Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City as a useful conceptual framework for understanding and acting in the archive of everyday life—the production of space by new digital technologies.

August 27, 2020<August 27, 2020

Where We Care: Local Attention in a Platformized Pandemic

by Scott Rodgers

Scott Rodgers explores the novelties and continuities of emergent, very local uses of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what they indicate about our deepening interdependencies with platforms.

March 6, 2020<March 6, 2020

Assembling the Cosmopublic: Art Intelligence and Object-Oriented Citizenship

by Hai Ren

Hai Ren rethinks the creative city away from its anthropocentricism and toward a nonhuman art intelligence

March 1, 2020<March 1, 2020

Re-functioning “Tropical Architecture”: Anti-colonial Constructions in Chinese-built Architecture in Africa, 1960s-70s

by Ye Liu

The China-Africa engagement has been a heated topic of debate for the past decade, not only in academia, but also with the general public. …

July 9, 2019<July 9, 2019

Landscape as Loneliness in The Last Picture Show

by Daryl Meador

Daryl Meador explores how the cinematography, soundscape, and generic context of Texas in The Last Picture Show not only evoke alienation but articulate it to settler colonialism.

February 18, 2019<February 20, 2019

Race, Place, and New Orleans in Film and Television

by Helen Morgan Parmett

In this post, Helen Morgan Parmett takes stock of some of the ways in which media culture and practice, and particularly film and television, has helped to shape discourses of New Orleans historically and the ways in which more recent shifts in the city’s post-Katrina cultural economy have implicated the industrial conditions of media in the city as well as its global representation.

February 28, 2018<March 2, 2018

The Urban Light Art Festival as Branding and Commons

by Annie Dell'Aria

In this Deep Dive, Annie Dell'Aria looks to Cincinnati's recent Blink light festival to explore how such illuminations are used to define cities and the urban experience for residents

September 15, 2017<September 17, 2017

The Truth is Outsourcing: Notes on the Post-Industrial Spaces of The X-Files

by Kirk Boyle

Kirk Boyle looks anew at The X-Files, finding in Mulder and Scully evidence of the coming of the post-industrial society.

December 28, 2016<May 17, 2022

There Goes the Neighborhood: CenturyLink Field and the Transformation of Seattle’s SoDo Neighborhood

by Helen Morgan Parmett & Kate Ranachan

In the latest installment in our Deep Dives series, Helen Morgan Parmett and Kate Ranachan explore the sports-centered redevelopment and rebranding of Seattle's SoDo neighborhood.

December 5, 2015<January 17, 2017

Rio de Janeiro Out of Synch

by Nilo Couret

As Rio de Janeiro celebrates its 450th anniversary, it conjures a narrative of citizenship and progress aligned with "civilizing" nationalism. Media ranging from online portals to photographic archives have been recruited to service this project. In this Deep Dive, Nilo Couret examines two documentaries that complicate its dominant narrative about the city.