Presented By: Modernist Studies Workshop
Chapter Workshop with Amanda Greene
Nick Morrison on Unsplash
Please join the Modernist Studies Workshop for a dissertation chapter workshop with Amanda Greene (English Language and Literature) on "Sousveillant Storytelling: The Situated Sense-Making of Mass Observation’s 'Subjective Cameras.'"
Chapter abstract: Through readings of the British Mass-Observation Movement's publications, practices, and films between 1937-9, this chapter redefines sousveillance as a habit of socially situated storytelling that is rooted in visual media imaginaries as opposed to a particular apparatus. Originally coined by Steve Mann to describe his pioneering experiments with wearable computing in the 1990s, sousveillance refers to a “gaze from below” that can balance hierarchies between the population and the surveilling state. While sousveillance is usually considered dependent on particular networked digital technologies (like cell phone cameras that can capture instances of police brutality and share them on social media), Mass-Observation’s strange hybrid artistic/anthropologic media experiment decades earlier exemplifies how this practice functions in a broader range of contexts and, above all, in less technologically dependent ways. The movement's work affirms everyday visual practices as vehicles of empowered storytelling by which individuals can enter into larger political communities of dissensus, and draws on contemporary interwar visual media forms as resources to enhance this vision. However, the movement's initiatives aimed to teach the population to actively, interpretively participate in their environment not by distributing devices, but by embracing the affective and socially situated distortions of their own “subjective cameras.” While this idealization of distorted narratives may seem dangerous in our current political landscape of "fake news," sousveillance brings individuals’ distortions into view not to create alternate realities but to recognize what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge” as the ethical center of individuals’ political agency within larger collectives.
Please email Aaron Stone (stoneaa@umich.edu) to RSVP and receive a copy of Amanda's chapter draft.
Chapter abstract: Through readings of the British Mass-Observation Movement's publications, practices, and films between 1937-9, this chapter redefines sousveillance as a habit of socially situated storytelling that is rooted in visual media imaginaries as opposed to a particular apparatus. Originally coined by Steve Mann to describe his pioneering experiments with wearable computing in the 1990s, sousveillance refers to a “gaze from below” that can balance hierarchies between the population and the surveilling state. While sousveillance is usually considered dependent on particular networked digital technologies (like cell phone cameras that can capture instances of police brutality and share them on social media), Mass-Observation’s strange hybrid artistic/anthropologic media experiment decades earlier exemplifies how this practice functions in a broader range of contexts and, above all, in less technologically dependent ways. The movement's work affirms everyday visual practices as vehicles of empowered storytelling by which individuals can enter into larger political communities of dissensus, and draws on contemporary interwar visual media forms as resources to enhance this vision. However, the movement's initiatives aimed to teach the population to actively, interpretively participate in their environment not by distributing devices, but by embracing the affective and socially situated distortions of their own “subjective cameras.” While this idealization of distorted narratives may seem dangerous in our current political landscape of "fake news," sousveillance brings individuals’ distortions into view not to create alternate realities but to recognize what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge” as the ethical center of individuals’ political agency within larger collectives.
Please email Aaron Stone (stoneaa@umich.edu) to RSVP and receive a copy of Amanda's chapter draft.
Nick Morrison on Unsplash
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