no. 2

As Chicago Goes, So Goes the Nation?

Beginning the second round of our Policing and the Media roundtable, Brendan Kredell considers how the McDonald killing fits into a history of police violence in Chicago and across the nation.

The Past Remains Present

In this Policing and the Media entry, Joy Bivins explores the vulnerability of young black bodies and contrasts the legacies of Emmett Till and Laquan McDonald.

A Private Grief Made Public

In this post in our Policing and the Media roundtable, Margaret Schwartz considers how spectacular police violence imperils the right to grieve in private.

Framing a Shooting (and a Movement)

In this entry in our Policing and the Media roundtable, Steve Macek explores the backstory of the Laquan McDonald shooting and the different ways that Chicago media outlets covered the story.

Policing and the Media: An Introduction

Among the thirty seven people shot by police in 2014, it is Laquan McDonald’s death that has catalyzed public reaction; thanks to the existence of video documentation, we can see what happened with our own eyes. This seemingly simple observation belies a much more complex set of issues regarding the relationship between policing and media in the contemporary moment. With this roundtable, we seek to investigate those in some greater detail.

Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image

Moving-image installations and media architecture have recently given renewed currency to established notions of dispositif, apparatus, and spectatorship. These concepts have allowed for new inquiries into the relationships among screens, viewers, and space in the urban context. In this Polished Panel, the participants use close analyses of peripheral practices of projection to illuminate the centrality of architecture to spectatorial experience.

Methodologies of Race and Space

Mediated cityscapes often reinforce the stigma associated with devalued areas and the underprivileged, yet can also undermine dominant perceptions and counter misrepresentations of place. In this Polished Panel, the participants map that tension that emerges between real and represented places, using a spatial approach to race to trace formal and industrial practices that create meaningful linkages among spaces, places, and bodies.

Mapping Urban Horror

Of all popular film genres, horror perhaps makes the most consistent and flexible use of space. This use maps out landscapes of power, repression, and displacement. In this Polished Panel, the participants propose to use horror as a map of gentrification and its spectre of racialized violence.

Syllabus: Cinema and the City

What are the best practices for introducing students to the complex of film and urbanism? Does that change depending on who the students are, or what the instructor is working on? In this installment of On Teaching, Nathan Holmes presents two different "Cinema and the City" syllabi that he prepared five years apart for use in two distinct institutional contexts.