Abstract
Technologies for encoding and visualizing information, from the paperback novel to the digital map, far from critiquing culture and knowledge, provide us with superficial and indiscriminate information, such that a medium’s potential for increasing democratic participation, individual autonomy, and community sovereignty is related to ways that users can format, stylize, and interpret the representations of information. In a space as complex as the American city, the codes used to represent it reveal how the selective visibility of marginal spaces has both individual and socio-political implications for (resisting) control over the movement of urban bodies and identities. For instance, an urban “Media Avoidance Zone” like Gary, IN has diverged from its historically “quaint” popular representation in the score of The Music Man to monikers including “The Chernobyl-on-Lake-Michigan.” These MAZ’s are the representational spaces manufactured by mass media to foreground a neoliberal sensibility in its essentialized difference from the supposedly impoverished culture of the deindustrialized city. In contrast to popular representations, the Flowers For Gary project, Gloria McMillan’s All The Old Familiar Places, Thomas Frank’s Toxic Tour of East Chicago, and the Arts+Action Community Lab are aesthetically-situated instances demonstrating how MAZ-based visual narratives and discursivity does not merely condemn oppression and erasure, it negates the the stereotypes constructed as a foil to the ideal suburban citizen/audience of the media. Moreover, such works facilitate conversations between larger support networks and the MAZ for articulating human rights abuses engendered by rhetorically “red-lining” the MAZ’s creative element while rendering the urban damage imagery hypervisible.
Presenters
Mattius RischardAssistant Professor, English, Montana State University-Northern, Montana, United States Gloria McMillan
Research Associate, Dept of English, The University of Arizona, Arizona, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus: Critical Thinking, Soft Skills, and Technology
KEYWORDS
Media Avoidance Zone, Deindustrialization, Spatial Justice, State of Exception, Neoliberalism
