One of four faculty research clusters in Performance Studies. Each cluster offers a possible way for a student to focus their studies; students choose to work across the cluster range, and with a wide variety of faculty.
A study of the specific modes, forms, effects and interactions of various media including embodied media: film, photography, the visual arts, radio, television, music and sound, digital media, human and animal bodies, the internet, and the printed word. Mediated social performances and communications in their historical and theoretical contexts. Ethnographic documentation of media audiences including models of readership and spectatorship. Formal and philosophical approaches to media analysis, the construction of cultural hierarchies and taste, modes of production. Historically-based examination of critical junctures in the histories of media and technology.
This cluster of interest might attract the work of scholars working in a variety of media including graphic artists, creative writers, sound and new media artists, documentary film makers, and those who study a range of media forms including faculty in Theatre and Dance, English, Film Studies, Technocultural Studies, Languages, and Ethnic Studies. It is relevant to historians, political scientists and sociologists attending to issues of mediated representation as well as scholars of communication studies. It asks questions about identity and spectatorship that will speak to scholars of gender, race and ethnicity, as well as those focused on community formation. It allows for an interrogation of various forms of media as genres of performance.
The comparative axis of Performance Studies examines the mobilization of both disembodied and embodied media (including posthuman and cyborg bodies) within and across cultures (anthropological and aesthetic) in different times and spaces. In our contemporary context, new digital media and the internet are rapidly transforming modes of citizenship, social engagement, and political activism. But media transformation and cultural change have a long history. Media have always re-shaped modes of perception, subjectivities, identities, and political engagement. New radio and film technologies re-shaped political participation in 1930s and 40s Europe, just as amateur video productions are changing vernacular culture in contemporary Nigeria. The Interactive Medias cluster examines diversely mediated social performances and communications within a deep historical and critical framework. The critical perspectives entail a rigorous understanding of formal and philosophical approaches to media analysis, models of readership and spectatorship, the construction of cultural hierarchies and taste, the ethnographic documentation of media audiences and an understanding of modes of production. Thus, the theories, practices and methodologies of comparative media complement a historically-based examination of landmark, or critical, junctures in the histories of media and technology. From this core component comprising theories and histories of comparative medias, students can elect to specialize in a range of comparative media research and practice under the guidance of UC Davis faculty.