Shannon Mattern, Author at Public Seminar

Education

Where Does The Time Go?

Documenting the struggles of professorial obligations

January 17, 2019 • by Shannon Mattern

In recent months I’ve met with a number of advisees and freshly-PhD’d job candidates and junior scholars who’ve wanted to talk about the day-to-day responsibilities of a faculty member. I will humbly acknowledge that I’m seen as someone who’s fairly productive, and who puts a lot of energy into her ...

Making Knowledge Available

The media of generous scholarship

March 22, 2018 • by Shannon Mattern

A few weeks ago, shortly after reading that Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, had made over €1 billion in profit in 2017, I received notice of a new journal issue on decolonization and media.* “Decolonization” denotes the dismantling of imperialism, the overturning of systems of domination, and the founding ...

The Ever-Expanding Field of Media Studies

Ideas for understanding the mediated world

March 5, 2018 • by Shannon Mattern

While poetry and prose, motion pictures and maps, listicles and landscape paintings, audiobooks and animated GIFs have all been reduced to “content” on our screens, the mechanisms that deliver that content to us are now revealing their own complexity. Substrates and filters and cables, we have come to see, possess ...