Media &
Communication
Geography
A Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers
AAG Annual Meeting Keynote Address _
2020 and 2021 Keynotes
Due to the ongoing effects of COVID-19, the AAG Annual Meetings are being held virtually in 2020 and 2021. The Media and Communication Geography Specialty Group will not be holding Keynote Events during the virtual AAG Annual Meetings.
2021 Annual Meeting, April 7-11
Online Event
2019 Keynote Featuring Ian MacKaye
Punk and DC: The Media & Communication Geography Specialty Group presents: A Conversation with Ian MacKaye
Friday, April 5, 2019
Washington 1, Marriott, Exhibition Level
Ian MacKaye, a Washington DC native, is among the most influential, interviewed, and critically acclaimed, figures in American punk history. He is known worldwide as a performer and songwriter (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Embrace, The Evens) as well as the co-founder of Dischord Records, a label devoted to DC regional punk music active for almost four decades. He will be joining us to discuss the geography and history of the DC punk/hardcore movement, the role of independent "folk labels" like Dischord, and his career in music. Audience questions will be welcome.
The discussion will be led and moderated by Dr. Tyler Sonnichsen, Lecturer at the University of Tennessee and author of Capitals of Punk: Paris, DC, and the Circulation of the Urban Underground.
The conversation with Ian MacKaye will be followed by the presentation of the Media and Communication Geography Specialty Group Awards.
2018 Keynote Featuring Dr. Helen Morgan-Parmett
Department of Theater, University of Vermont
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Borgne Room, Sheraton, 3rd Floor
(immediately following the Media and Communication Business meeting)
This year we are pleased to announce that the keynote will be conducted by Dr. Helen Morgan-Parmett. Dr. Morgan-Parmett comes to the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting from the Department of Theater at University of Vermont where she is the Edwin W. Lawrence Endowed Professor of Forensics and an Assistant Professor in the department. Her work focuses on critical media studies where she explores the roles the media plays in struggles of economic, social, and political power. More specifically she engages with media production and urban spaces, identifying race and ethnicity in contemporary and historical contexts. Her recent work, Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television, uses New Orleans as a site to illuminate such political topics.
The address will be entitled: “Race, place, and New Orleans in Film and Television.” Frequently promoted for its uniqueness, as a cultural melting pot, the northernmost Caribbean city, or the place where laissez les bon temps rouler, New Orleans appears to hold a special place in the cultural imaginary of not only the United States but also, increasingly, the globe. In this talk, Morgan-Parmett takes stock of some of the ways in which media culture and practice, and particularly film and television, has helped to shape these discourses of New Orleans historically and the ways in which more recent shifts in the city’s post-Katrina cultural economy have implicated the industrial conditions of media in the city as well as its global representation. She considers especially these broader medial conditions in the context the city’s histories of racial struggle, antagonism, and resistance, and suggests that New Orleans is an important site for understanding the fault lines on which contemporary practices of global film and television intervene into what are, ultimately, very local struggles.
Dr. Morgan-Parmett's talk will be followed by discussion and the presentation of the annual Media and Communication specialty group student awards.
2018 Annual Meeting, April 10-14, 2018
New Orleans, LA
2017 Keynote Featuring Dr. Tom Conley
Departments of Visual & Environmental Studies and Romance Languages,
Harvard University
Saturday, April 8, 2017
10:00-11:40
Tremont, Marriott, First Floor
For a Geography of Doubt
For historians of science working in the wake of Canguilhem and Kuhn, the onset of the seventeenth century brings an unparalleled epistemic shift from a logic of analogy that had guaranteed “the order of things” to a regime of representation, in which “signs” are removed from what the signify. Formerly mixed and meshed in matter, gaining autonomy, language begins to impose a distance between what is said and what is seen. In this presentation, in a study of maps and spatial narratives, I would like to discern, at the threshold of the modern age —circa 1600-1650—a regime of creative doubt infusing geography and cartography. The plan is to study contradictions inhering between form and execution of a body of maps (principally in France) and to relate them to the geographical tenor of philosophers—Descartes and Pascal—who reflect on space and place in their meditations.