Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC)
School of Communication, Northwestern University
2025 Rhetoric, Media, and Publics Summer Institute
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208
In Person
July 21–25, 2025
The deadline for applications is June 22, 2025
Media Aesthetics VII Excluded Media
Michael Streicher Metzger (Pick-Laudati Academic Curator of Cinema and Media Arts, Block Museum, Northwestern University)
Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric, Media, and Publics, Northwestern University)
Graduate Student Coordinator:
Skylar Clark (Rhetoric, Media, and Publics, Northwestern University)
Contact: SkylarClark2026@u.northwestern.edu
Currents in media studies over recent decades have not only expanded the range of scholarly inquiries into once-marginalized historical and cultural subjects, but broadened our recognition of what constitutes media in the first place. Indeed, inherently decentralizing studies of the networks, industries, infrastructures, and ecologies of communication have reinforced and deepened the push to recover suppressed histories and offer alternatives to dominant frameworks and narratives; excluded subjects often come into view where the signatures of mediation are at their most dispersed.
Present challenges to academic inquiry along lines of difference and representation foreground the nature of exclusion as a form of mediation. How might the field of media studies respond to these challenges? Alongside the demand for a renewed commitment to studies that recover histories under threat of erasure, does this moment call for methodologies that attend to media’s silencing and occluding functions? How must we reexamine and extend the resources of media studies to confront the limits of visibility and the contemporary techniques of exclusion?
The theme of this year’s Media Aesthetics Summer Institute, “Excluded Media,” means to confront this dilemma. Participants will encounter scholarship that actively combats historical and contemporary suppression, proposes new methodologies, and reasserts the value of aesthetic apprehension against the withering effects of desensitization. At the same time, this convening will also encourage participants to confront the blind spots of media aesthetics that pose the greatest risk to the field’s continued growth.
Institute Format and Application Process
The institute will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by visiting scholars and Northwestern faculty. This year’s visiting scholars include Michael B. Gillespie (New York University), Cait McKinney (Simon Fraser University), Kartik Nair (Temple University), and Genevieve Yue (The New School).
The institute is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication. The CGCC will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging (single occupancy), and some meals (breakfast and lunch every day and two group dinners) for admitted students. Lodging will be available from July 20th through July 26th, so participants will be able to arrive a day before the summer institute begins and may leave the day after it ends.Applicants should send a brief letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator Skylar Clark. She can be reached by email at skylarclark2026@u.northwestern.edu. We will adopt a policy of rolling admissions. Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by Sunday June 22 2025.All inquiries should be directed to Skylar Clark.
Faculty Bios
Michael B. Gillespie is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. His research interests include black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. He is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016). The book recasts the idea of black film by posing new paradigms for narrative, aesthetics, historiography, intertextuality, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Instead of treating black film as strictly a category/genre or merely the reflection of lived experience, the book considers this cinema as a visual negotiation and irreconcilable tension between film as art and the idea of race. He is co-editor (with Lisa Uddin) of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His recent writing has appeared in Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, The Criterion Collection, ASAP/J, liquid blackness, and Ends of Cinema. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover and Shaft.
Cait McKinney is an associate professor in the School Communication at Simon Fraser University specializing in sexuality studies, media history, and activist media. Their research focuses on the mediated conditions in which queer people, especially activists, have taken up new computing and information technologies to serve their communities and movements. This work surfaces queer modes of technological use that show us alternative ways of understanding technologies and their politics and offers new media theories and methodologies that emerge from and can account for the knowledges of queer people. Cait is the author of I Know You Are, but What Am I? On Pee-wee Herman (Minnesota 2024) and Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke 2020), which won the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ studies. They are working on a new book, tentatively titled The Sex Lives of Data, which surfaces an original media history of queer digital disruption, a conceptual framework that describes how queer political values such as free sexual expression or justice for HIV+ people distill in specific formal, aesthetic, and technical practices online.
Kartik Nair is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University.
He is a scholar of popular cinema focused on the material life of genres, and his research interests include cinematic infrastructures, genre cinemas, and visual space in film. More specifically, his work explores the infrastructures that produce moving images, and how viewers experience those infrastructures as expressive screen forms. He is interested in how the sensuous storyworlds of global genres including action, superhero, multiverse, and horror films may mediate VFX software programs, non-linear editing platforms, and virtual reference databases. At the intersection of film art, production studies, speculative realism, media aesthetics, and phenomenological experience, this work develops a felt historiography of visual space as the site where the algorithmic and human agencies of digital cinema become perceptible. He is currently at work on his first book, Seeing Things, which explores material infrastructures of film production, censorship, and circulation by examining their spectral traces in Indian horror films of the 1980s. He is also a core editor of Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies.
Genevieve Yue is an associate professor of Culture and Media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, The New School. Her work revolves around experimental film and video, moving image art, documentary, film theory, media theory and history, and feminist film theory. She is co-editor of the Cutaways book series at Fordham University Press, a member of the October advisory board, and an independent film programmer. Her essays and criticism have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, MUBI Notebook Magazine, October, Representations, Reverse Shot, The Times Literary Supplement, World Records, and elsewhere. She is the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (2020), and is currently working on two book projects: one on trains and cinema, and the other on the material history of Hollywood.