Lisa Parks: ‘Media Infrastructures and Globalisation’

In this project, Parks critiques the tendency of global media research to privilege formalised national frameworks and corporate brands, capital concentrations, and unidirectional models of technological innovation and diffusion.

While it is essential to track those in power and try to understand their strategies and impacts, researchers often ignore most people’s everyday experiences with media technologies. 

Building on research on “invisible users” (Burrell, 2012) and “informal media” (Thomas & Lobato, 2015) Parks tries to expand critical vocabularies to account for the uneven material conditions, varied sociotechnical relations, and diverse epistemologies that shape people’s knowledge and experiences of media infrastructures in different parts of the world. 

People’s media experiences, Parks argues, demand more situated, phenomenological, and conceptual approaches that can help to bring forth the everyday social struggles, agencies, and creativities that are vital to understandings of media globalisation.

About the speaker

Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Globalisation (in progress), and co-editor of: Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, and Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures, among other books. She has been a PI on major grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department, and is committed to exploring how greater understanding of media and communication systems can assist citizens, scholars, and policymakers to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, social justice, and human rights. 

Parks directs the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at UCSB and is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

About the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy

The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy is an independent team of academic researchers at the University of Cambridge, who are radically rethinking the power relationships between digital technologies, society and our planet.