Month: May 2022

“Phantasies of Safety”

Stephanie Palazzo | PhD Candidate, Comparative Human Development

Discussant: Briel Kobak | PhD Candidate, Anthropology

Wednesday, June 1, 4:30pm – 6:00pm CST

Location: Zoom

(Meeting ID: 995 2954 1260, Passcode: 959281)

To receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper or for the zoom link, please email zarrington@uchicago.edu

Paper Abstract:

This chapter follows the rise and fall of industries in Middletown, Pennsylvania, and how the good life they promised brought with it its own national ideals of safety, security, and community in the late 1960s to 70s that remained long after the plants shuttered. It builds on the previous chapter, “Future Promised,” which explored how Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant’s physical infrastructure was a product of 20th century world-building and optimism. This chapter turns attention to how in the 21st century even as these physical infrastructures become ever less practical in their states of decommissioning, the normative horizon of capitalist progress remains alive and well in everyday life. It is a story of how the past affectively and materially lingers in the present landscape of industrial and residential buildings that have been repurposed, abandoned, swept away in floods, and leveled to make space for a future that leaves many of Middletown’s residents unsettled. Within this context, I track the past in the things my interlocutors attach to—library cards, nuclear cooling towers, tasers, skeleton keys, patented toys, and the stories of the town—not only as objects of both harm and desire, but also a cluster of phantasies that quietly inhabit, even haunt, everyday life. More specifically, they are phantasies of safety, the leftover material and affective attachments that are cobbled together to offer a sense of safety and security in the present when the good life erodes.

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*This convening is open to all invitees regardless of vaccination status and, because of ongoing health risks to the unvaccinated, those who are unvaccinated are expected to adopt the risk mitigation measures advised by public health officials (masking and social distancing, etc.). Public convening may not be safe for all and carries a risk for contracting COVID-19, particularly for those unvaccinated. Participants will not know the vaccination status of others, including venue staff, and should follow appropriate risk mitigation measures.

“Knowing with the Enemy: Discernment Practices in Conspiracy Theory Research”

Winston Berg | PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science

Discussant: Anna Berg | PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology

 

Wednesday, May 18, 4:30pm – 6:00pm CST

Location: Haskell 101 and Zoom 

(Meeting ID: 995 2954 1260, Passcode: 959281)

To receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper or for the zoom link, please email zarrington@uchicago.edu 

Paper Abstract: 

In this chapter I discuss the formalized practices employed by anonymous researchers on 8chan’s /qresearch/ subforum as they monitor and interpret current events, share theories and produce conspiracy theory material for dissemination on other platforms. Based on computer-mediated ethnographic encounters with a range of “anons”, I suggest that participants’ motives and relationships to the claims of conspiracy theory vary with their institutional context. In support of this claim I examine the interplay of computerized, coded institutions with the formal “code” of conduct employed by research forum participants and the informal norms of anon forum culture, elaborating how these institutions enable decentralized conspiracy theorists to coordinate and collaborate while deferring questions of theory and belief. Specifically, I focus on two interrelated practices of discernment on the boards. First, anonymous participants socialize new users and enforce the limits of legitimate participation by teaching the skills necessary to discern authentic participants from “motivated agents” and other interlopers. Second, participants systematically identify information items as candidates for belief and doubt through practices of identification and provocation.

*This convening is open to all invitees regardless of vaccination status and, because of ongoing health risks to the unvaccinated, those who are unvaccinated are expected to adopt the risk mitigation measures advised by public health officials (masking and social distancing, etc.). Public convening may not be safe for all and carries a risk for contracting COVID-19, particularly for those unvaccinated. Participants will not know the vaccination status of others, including venue staff, and should follow appropriate risk mitigation measures.

“Eastman Kodak and the Chemoaesthetics of Whiteness, or Film as a Material Fantasy of Race”

Ali Feser | Harper Schmidt Fellow & Collegiate Associate Professor

Discussant: Rebecca Journey | Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences

*Wednesday, May 4, 5pm – 6:30pm CST

Location: Haskell 101 and Zoom 

*Please note the change in time.

To receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper or for the zoom link, please email zarrington@uchicago.edu

 

Paper Abstract: Founded in 1880 in Rochester, New York, Eastman Kodak was the second largest chemical company in the U.S., and it is said to have produced eighty percent of all the film stock in the world. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, Kodak produced much more than film; they also manufactured the American Dream of the white, middle class, heteronormative “good life.” Mass mediated images shot on Kodak film gave visual form to national fantasies with their archetypal subjects and landscapes. Through instruction manuals and advertisements, Kodak crafted photography into an essential practice for imaging and reproducing the family, and they made it possible for consumers to image themselves within these collective fantasies.

I argue that these fantasies of the capitalist good life issues from the chemical structure of film and the organizational forms of labor at Kodak’s factories in Rochester. There, Kodak’s social welfare programs–intended to dissuade workers from unionizing– shaped the life experiences and aesthetic dispositions of Kodak workers. Workers, in turn, applied this regime of sensuous knowledge to the design of photographic technologies; they inscribed into cameras and emulsion and reproduced in Kodak ads a morally saturated way of seeing that normalized whiteness as the color of the “good life.”

As such, this essay draws from forty months of ethnographic, archival, and visual research in Rochester to theorize how the chemoaesthetics of Kodak film became a normative template for how to see the world. It juxtaposes the history of the invention of Kodachrome film with the story of George Eastman’s support of eugenics research. It narrates how the dreamspace of film was shaped by the white homogeneity of Kodak’s workforce and the ideology of “family” that anchored Kodak’s paternalistic order of industrial capitalism.

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*This convening is open to all invitees regardless of vaccination status and, because of ongoing health risks to the unvaccinated, those who are unvaccinated are expected to adopt the risk mitigation measures advised by public health officials (masking and social distancing, etc.). Public convening may not be safe for all and carries a risk for contracting COVID-19, particularly for those unvaccinated. Participants will not know the vaccination status of others, including venue staff, and should follow appropriate risk mitigation measures.