Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Prof. Dr. Jeremy Stolow (Montréal)
It is an elementary observation that all social practices, including media practices, can only take place within their particular physical environments, and in conjunction with the specific objects, instruments, and technologies required to “make things happen.” What remains far less clear is what we mean by the word “material” and what sorts of agency we ought to ascribe to the things with which we are in traffic (including tools, resources, and physical constraints). Drawing upon several lines of inquiry into the study of technology and material agency – including actor network theory and media archaeology – this input paper and seminar discussion will explore possibilities for ethnographic research that attend to the complex of relationships among human actors, their perceptual embodiments, their instruments and tools, their material environments, and the larger discursive frameworks within which all such relations are made commonsensical, meaningful, or problematic. Our discussion will focus especially on some of the ways material and technological agency have been treated in the study of “religion and media,” an exploration that hopefully will provide instructive examples for the design of future ethnographic research.
Jeremy Stolow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. He works in the nascent, inter-disciplinary field of “religion and media”, to which he has contributed several projects, based on theoretical, textual, archival, and ethnographic research. These have included studies of Orthodox Jewish publishing and print culture, and of nineteenth-century Spiritualist uses of electrically-mediated communications technologies. Increasingly, Stolow's research interests have turned to questions about how religious experiences and forms of knowledge and practice are materialized — such as in objects used for ritual practice, study, or veneration — and in the ways different religious traditions “tune” the senses for the purposes of gaining knowledge, achieving piety, or in pursuit of other goals. A second area of research interest deals with the “supernatural” or “magical” dimensions of modern techno-scientific practice, and with the ways scientific knowledge and practice resemble “religious” or “magical” modes of knowing, doing, and perceiving things.
Recent Publications
2013: Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between. New York: Fordham University Press (forthcoming).
2012: “Le synthétique sacré. Réflexions sur les aspects matériels des textes juifs orthodoxes,” in: Terrain 59, 120–137.
2010: Orthodox By Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2008: “Salvation By Electricity,” in: Hent de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept, New York, Fordham University Press, 668–686.
2005: “Religion and/as Media,” in: Theory, Culture and Society 22/4, 119–145.
For more details, see www.jeremystolow.com