Atmospheres of Violence
Harvard Film & Visual Studies Graduate Conference
May 3–5, 2023
The graduate program in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University is pleased to announce Atmospheres of Violence, a conference that asks: in a world teeming with images of brutality and destruction, how can we look away from spectacular violence and toward the atmospheres that produce its representations?
Schedule
Wednesday, May 3, 2023
6:00–8:00 PM | Colectivo Los Ingrávidos Artist Keynote + Film Program
8:00–10:00 PM | AFVS End of Year Reception
Thursday, May 4, 2023
10:30 AM–12:15 PM | Panel 1: Mediating Trauma and Materializing Abolition in the US Carceral State
- Panel Chair: Valerie Werder, PhD Candidate, Film and Visual Studies, Harvard University
“Abolition and Faith: Embodying the Sacred in Migrant Liberation Narratives”
- Dr. Itzel Corona Aguilar, PhD in Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University
“Seeing Just Another Girl About to Set It Off: Witnessing as a Catalyst for State Resistance”
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Dominique Young, PhD Candidate, English, University of Maryland
“Traumatic Media: Fanon, Milieus, and Carceral Technology”
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Haden Smiley, PhD Student, Anthropology, Harvard University
1:30–3:15 PM | Panel 2: Negative Forensics and Climate Media
- Panel Chair: Max Bowens, PhD Candidate, Film and Visual Studies, Harvard University
“Burning Aesthetics: Dissidence and the Pyrocene in present-day Iran”
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Yohana Ansari-Thomas + Hermine Demaël, Masters of Architecture Students, Princeton University
“Machinic Genres of Seeing: Clarity and Deception in Post-Lens Techno-Atmospheres (Or, On the Perversity of Enhancement)”
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Andrea Avidad, PhD Candidate, Cinema Studies, New York University
“Towards an Abolitional Meteorology”
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Dr. Harshavardhan Bhat, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ohio State University
“Forensic Dust and Its Counters”
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Julia Huggins, PhD Candidate, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
4:00–5:30 PM | Keynote Lecture: “Listening in Refusal of Counterforensic Violence,” Pooja Rangan
Friday, May 5, 2023
10:00–11:30 AM | Panel 3: Colonial Legacies in East and Southeast Asia
- Panel Chair: Shaowen Zhang, PhD Candidate, Film and Visual Studies, Harvard University
“A Study on the Origins of “Ear Training” in the Modernization Period of Korea: Japanese Music Education and Military Training”
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YoungEun Kim, PhD Candidate, Film & Digital Media, University of California Santa Cruz
“Fighting the Invisible Enemy: The Production of China’s Gas Warfare Defense Knowledge and Technologies (1927-45)”
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Jiayi Li, Master’s Student, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University
“Flight’s Frictions: Surfacing Airport Ecologies in the British Empire”
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Marcus Yee, PhD Candidate, History, Yale University
11:45 AM–1:10 PM | Panel 4: Contending with Opacity
- Panel Chair: Julia Sharpe, PhD Candidate, Film and Visual Studies, Harvard University
“Verberations from the Foley Stage”
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Dr. Emilija Talijan, Research Fellow, St. John’s College, Oxford University
“La tierra habla”
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Anaís Córdova-Páez & Daniela Delgado Viteri, Artist Collective
“Rhetoric of War: Ekphrasis as Imaginary Documentary in Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain”
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Michelle Chow, PhD Student, English, Yale University
2:30-3:50 PM | Panel 5: Thresholds of Regulation in Media Environments
- Panel Chair: Mahan Moalemi, PhD Candidate, Film and Visual Studies, Harvard University
“‘It is only a piece of paper, sir!’”
- Shikhar Goel, PhD Student, Media, Culture & Communication, New York University
“‘Insecure Atmospheres’: A Psychosocial Approach to Art Museum Securitization in the United States”
- Sila Ulug, PhD Candidate, Art History + Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago
“From ‘Landscape’ to ‘Streets’: Nakahira Takuma in the Ryūkyū Islands, 1973-1977”
- Lucy Fleming-Brown, Master’s Student, Arts Studies & Curatorial Practices, Tokyo University of the Arts
4:15–5:45 PM | Keynote Lecture: “Classifying Clouds: Atlases of Atmospheric Violence in the Pacific,” Yuriko Furuhata
All keynotes and screenings will take place in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Theatre; panels will take place in room B-04.
Atmospheres of Violence is sponsored by the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University with support from the Harvard University Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities.