Student Voices

Light Wins: Commercial Placemaking and Public Screens

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In this essay, Kyle Winkel, a student at Indiana University, considers the ways in which advertisers utilize light art and technology as a way to captivate increasingly desensitized passerby in public screen spectacles in urban Hong Kong.

Shiny Diversions

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In this essay, Myalisa Miroballi, a student at Indiana University, discusses the ways in which screen culture pervades the streets of Hong Kong and Shanghai in ways that constitute the cities as aspirational global consumer hubs.

Public Screen Culture in Modern Hong Kong

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In this essay, Cara Singell, a student at Indiana University, discusses the varying degrees of "publicness" of contemporary public screens in Hong Kong, suggesting that screens vary from "partially-obsolete publicness," "semi-publicness," to "true/pure publicness."

The Spectacle of Screen Environments

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In this essay, Kyle McClarney, a student at Indiana University, explores the ways in which public screens become "integrated spectacles" in their environments in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Ruins, Representation, and the Right to the City

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In “Ruins, Representation and the Right to the City,” Spencer Cunningham provides a deft summary of the ongoing discussion surrounding the redevelopment of the City of Detroit, exploring the aesthetics (or, rather, the aestheticization) of the city’s urban ruins, and the contradictory forces of gentrification that continue into the present day.

Urban Topographies of Global Imagination

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In “Urban Topographies of Global Imagination,” Josh White investigates the geographical dimensions of global governance and its disjunction from the imaginaries of global communion that appear in contemporary popular culture, including the television program, Sense8. White’s analysis includes a critical examination of Michel Foucault’s “heterotopias.”

Infrastructural Inequalities and Digital Divides

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In “Infrastructural Inequality and Digital Divides,” Kortnee Tilson navigates through the dense theoretical content of Manuel Castells’ work on networked societies, and provides an evaluation of his insights for questions of power, inequality and access in connection with digital infrastructures.

The Challenges (and Rewards) of Teaching Media Infrastructures through Popular Culture 

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Joshua Synenko introduces the papers featured in the inaugural issue of the Student Voices section. In it, he explains the context for his course, Contemporary Topics in Media Studies, where he had his students focus on the relationships between media and urban geography with a particular focus on urban infrastructures and geomedia. He provides brief overviews of the student work featured in the section.