Marita Sturken (born 1957) is an American scholar, author, professor, and critic. [1]
Marita Sturken is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where she teaches courses on cultural studies, visual culture, popular culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. [2] She focuses primarily on visual culture and the politics of cultural memory in American culture. Before coming to NYU she was an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. She has published essays in Representations, Public Culture, Social Text, Afterimage, Journal of Visual Culture, Memory Studies, International Journal of Communication, American Ethnologist, History and Theory, and Positions, and was the editor of American Quarterly from 2003-2006.
She has a Ph.D. (1992) from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was a critic of independent film and video.
She is author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007), [3] and Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), and co-author of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001; Second Edition, 2009). While working as a critic in the 1980s she wrote a series of articles for Afterimage magazine documenting the early history of video art and community video. [4]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
Kitsch is a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naïve imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous or of banal taste.
Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. With the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the 20th century, mass production led to overproduction—the supply of goods would grow beyond consumer demand, and so manufacturers turned to planned obsolescence and advertising to manipulate consumer spending. In 1899, a book on consumerism published by Thorstein Veblen, called The Theory of the Leisure Class, examined the widespread values and economic institutions emerging along with the widespread "leisure time" at the beginning of the 20th century. In it, Veblen "views the activities and spending habits of this leisure class in terms of conspicuous and vicarious consumption and waste. Both relate to the display of status and not to functionality or usefulness."
Visual communication is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information which include signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, industrial design, advertising, animation, and electronic resources. Humans have used visual communication since prehistoric times. Within modern culture, there are several types of characteristics when it comes to visual elements, they consist of objects, models, graphs, diagrams, maps, and photographs. Outside the different types of characteristics and elements, there are seven components of visual communication: color, shape, tones, texture, figure-ground, balance, and hierarchy.
A comfort object, more formally a transitional object or attachment object, is an item used to provide psychological comfort, especially in unusual or unique situations, or at bedtime for children. Among toddlers, a comfort object often takes the form of a blanket or a stuffed animal, doll or other toy, and may be referred to by a nickname such as blankie.
Visual culture is the aspect of culture expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, media studies, Deaf Studies, and anthropology.
B. Ruby Rich is an American scholar; critic of independent, Latin American, documentary, feminist, and queer films; and a professor emerita of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz. Among her many contributions, she is known for coining the term "New Queer Cinema". She is currently the editor of Film Quarterly, a scholarly film journal published by University of California Press.
The term "trash culture" entered into common use in the West from the 1980s to indicate artistic or entertainment expressions considered to be of a low cultural profile but able to stimulate and attract the audiences. It refers to books, movies, TV shows, etc. characterized by poor taste, vulgar themes, and subjects chosen to attract the audience through shoddy, low-quality, and culturally impoverished content. In this sense, trash culture is defined as the validation of the voyeuristic sight of the middle class which approaches the popular culture as style of consumption.
Rea Tajiri is a Japanese American video artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter, known for her personal essay film History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991).
Douglas Thomas is an American scholar, researcher, and journalist. He is Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California where he studies technology, communication, and culture. He is author or editor of numerous books including Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically, Cybercrime: Security and Surveillance in the Information Age, Hacker Culture, and Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies. He has published numerous articles in academic journals and is the founding editor of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media.
In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze, in the figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by existentialist and phenomenologist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.
Matthias Megyeri is an artist and designer of security products, dubbed "placebo products" that mix cuteness with defensive design.
Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism is a bimonthly journal of contemporary art, culture, and politics. It publishes features, essays, local and international reportage, exhibition reviews, and book reviews with an emphasis on social dialogue, politically engaged artistic practices, and the role of the artist as cultural critic and curator.
Steve F. Anderson (1963) is Professor of Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Previously, he served as founding director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts and Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and an Associate Professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division. He co-edits the interdisciplinary electronic journal Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular and is the founder of Critical Commons, an online media archive and fair use advocacy network. He is author of the books Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images and Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. With Christie Milliken he is co-editor of the anthology Reclaiming Popular Documentary.
Lisa Cartwright is a scholar, author, professor and critic best known for helping to found the field of visual culture studies and for coauthoring Practices of Looking, a widely translated visual studies textbook with Marita Sturken that is regarded as one of the first comprehensive books in the field after John Berger's Ways of Seeing. In Practices of Looking, Cartwright and Sturken examine the complexity of the relationship between viewers and objects in a variety of visual media ranging from film and photography to advertising, painting, and printmaking. They pay especially close attention to the historical, social, and psychological conditions that help to constitute 'seeing' at any given moment.
Catherine Lord is an American artist, writer, curator, social activist, professor, scholar exploring themes of feminism, cultural politics and colonialism. In 2010, she was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.
James Lull is an American social scientist and author known for ethnographic research on the interaction between communications technology and culture. In addition to his academic career, Lull worked for many years as a media professional. His most recent scholarly work focuses on the decisive role of communication in human evolution.
Sheila Pinkel is an American visual artist, activist and educator whose practice includes experimental light studies, photography, conceptual and graphic works, and public art. She first gained notice for cameraless photography begun in the 1970s that used light-sensitive emulsions and technologies to explore form; her later, socially conscious art combines research, data visualization, and documentary photography, making critical and ethical inquiries into the military-industrial complex and nuclear industry, consumption and incarceration patterns, and the effects of war on survivors, among other subjects. Writers identify an attempt to reveal the unseen—in nature and in culture—as a common thread in her work.
Ann Luja Cvetkovich is a Professor and former Director of the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Ottawa. Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been the founding director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, launched in 2017. She has published three books: Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). She has also co-edited Articulating the Global and Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (1996) with Douglas Kellner, as well as Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (2010) with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds. Furthermore, Cvetkovich has co-edited a special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, entitled "Public Sentiments" with Ann Pellegrini. She is also a former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Annamarie Jagose.
Jean Carlomusto is a New York filmmaker, AIDS activist, and interactive media artist. She produced and directed HBO's Emmy nominated documentary, Larry Kramer in Love & Anger, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival. Her works have been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums and on television. She was an early pioneer in documenting the AIDS crisis. As the founder of the Multimedia Unit at Gay Men's Health Crisis, she created the television series Living with AIDS. She was a founding member of DIVA TV and a member of the Testing The Limits Video Collective.
Bridget R. Cooks is an American scholar, writer, curator, and academic. She is a professor who holds a joint appointment in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine.
