By Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy As a burgeoning field of audiovisual analysis, videographic criticism allows film and screen studies scholars to analyze, dissect, and reimagine screen media in ways that promote insights previously limited by traditional modes of scholarship. Just as literary scholars produce written scholarship, film and screen studies scholars have […]
By Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy As a burgeoning field of audiovisual analysis, videographic criticism allows film and screen studies scholars to analyze, dissect, and reimagine screen media in ways that promote insights previously limited by traditional modes of scholarship. Just as literary scholars produce written scholarship, film and screen studies scholars have
In cities like Ann Arbor and Duluth, immigrant farmers are quietly building climate havens, cities of the future designed to withstand the storms of climate change. They are already laying the foundations of resilience through practices ranging from seed saving to mixed farming, sustaining both ecosystems and cultural identity. The term “climate haven” was introduced
Cyberpunk, as a subgenre of science fiction, speculates more about socioeconomics than it does technology. While imaginary gadgets of all sorts still populate cyberpunk settings, the genre predicates those settings upon worldbuilding features such as transnational monopolies and governments dominated by corporate interests, exaggerating the trends witnessed in our late-capitalist reality. As illustrated by the
Among the many issues within academia, one that is particularly frustrating for us in the humanities is the ways various institutional forces demand that our work fit into narrower and narrower categories. Within our disciplines we shrink into our fields, eras, methodologies, texts, claims, and politics, staking out smaller and smaller territories so that we
“There’s no chance anyone in authority approved this [excavation of a Nordic burial site],” complains Onmund, an NPC from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. “Our ancestors should be allowed to rest in peace.” As a Nord, himself, Onmund voices the sole objection to the College of Winterhold’s entry into Saarthal, a Nordic ruin and tomb.
Released in 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an RPG (i.e. role-playing game) whose impact on the video-gaming world cannot be understated. In it, you play as a custom character in a fictive Scandi world who discovers they are “dragonborn,” one who speaks the tongue of dragons and is fated to slay them and
On January 15th, 2025, the private aerospace company Firefly launched its first ever lunar lander aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. At my time of writing, the rocket is currently en route to the surface of the moon. This collaboration between Firefly and SpaceX is the latest example of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative,
“Humans,” art historian Glenn Peers contends, “have slipped into a modern faith in knowingness that thinks it exceeds the scale and complexity of our world…, blind[ing] us to other human possibilities.” The statement embodies the recent artworks of Pakistani multimedia artist Huma Bhabha in her 2024 exhibition entitled, “Welcome…to the one who came.” Primarily a
Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from
Babak Anvari’s 2022 film I Came By tells the disjointed story of graffiti artists Jay and Toby. Set in the contemporary United Kingdom, the story addresses colonialism, race, and the curious characteristics of modern, industrial societies in this follow-up to Anvari’s 2016 debut film Under the Shadow. In many ways, I Came By resembles recent
