Lisa Parks is Beaverbrook visiting scholar this term. She will be visiting McGill on 3-17 March 2009. On 12 March, she will give a public talk, in collaboration with the AHCS Speaker Series at 5h30pm, in Lecture Arts, W215.
"Digging into Google Earth: An Analysis of the ‘Crisis in Darfur’ Project"
The goal of this essay is to develop a series of critical questions for engaging with Google Earth layers and the kinds of historical and geographic knowledges they are used to produce. Like global newscasts, Google Earth interfaces appropriate satellite imagery to represent world historical events, yet they differ in that the field of representation has been opened in an unprecedented way to geographically dispersed users with various vantage points, social backgrounds and political interests. The essay moves from a discussion of specific uses of Google Earth for “humanitarian” purposes concentrating upon the crisis in Darfur, Sudan and proceeds to offer a detailed critique of the Google Earth layer using four categories of analysis: 1) the shifting role of satellite image; 2) the temporality of the interface; 3) the practice of conflict branding; and 4) the practice of information intervention. The project builds upon earlier work on satellite imaging and world politics and critiques of disaster capitalism, and suggests that a “Google Earth effect” may overtake the “CNN effect.
Bio: Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Chair and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she is also an affiliate of the Departments of Art and Women’s Studies and serves on the Executive Committee on the College of Creative Studies. Her research explores uses of satellite, computer and television technologies in a transnational context. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke University Press 2005) and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press 2003) and Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007). She has published essays in numerous books and journals and is also co-producer of media arts projects such as Experiments in Satellite Media Arts with Ursula Biemann (2002), Loom with Miha Vipotnik (2003), Postwar Footprints (2005), and Roaming (2008). Parks is director of the Global Cultures in Transition research initiative for the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB. She is currently writing two new books--Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies and Coverage: Media Space and Security after 911, and is co-editing a book called Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures with James Schwoch.