Body Issues, Surveillance, and the Photographic Gaze/Glance: A Cultural Forms Discussion

 

Randolph Lewis is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A former Contributing Writer for The Brooklyn Rail, he is the author of three books on documentary film and/or indigenous media — Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America, Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Artist, and Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native Ground. He is also co-editor of a book series on Native film for the University of Nebraska Press, and co-producer (with Circe Sturm) of the documentary film, Texas Tavola: A Taste of Sicily in the Lone Star State. He is currently writing a book about contemporary surveillance culture in the US as well as serving as editor of The End of Austin, a journal about urban melancholy which can be found at www.endofaustin.com.

Craig Campbell is Assistant Professor of Cultural Forms and Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. His Intermedia Workshop is a teaching and research studio located in the SAC Building (www.metafactory.ca/intermedia).  Craig  is one of the founders of the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective (www.ethnographicterminalia.org). His research is concerned with ethnographic and documentary images. In particular he has been exploring the possibility for failed, defaced, degraded, manipulated, and damaged images to activate interpretive fields typically unacknowledged in conventional ethnographies and histories. This intermedia and aesthetic approach pushes the sensuousness of the world back into an intellectual and scholarly understanding of it. His ethnographic, historical, and regional interests include: Siberia, Central Siberia, Indigenous Siberians, Evenki, Evenkiia, Reindeer hunting and herding, Travel and mobility, Socialist colonialism, early forms of Sovietization, and the circumpolar North. His website is: www.metafactory.ca.