The nation state is central to Canadian television, but does thinking TV through the nation account for the complex ways that citizens negotiate identity through television? The city, like television, consolidates tensions with the local, the national, and the global. The reception of CBC’s Coronation broadcast (1953), an early moment for television in the city of Toronto, suggests that television mobilizes publics in excess of “the nation.” This working paper will sketch a history of televisual publics and production in Toronto as a way of challenging the primacy of national television discourse.

Thursday, March 9, 2006
Presenter: Helmut Klassen
PhD candidate in Communication & Culture

“The Project of the City from the Perspective of Space”

From the perspective of reexamining the conditions of the imaginative production of the contemporary city, this paper dialectically examines Surrealist literary work (Breton’s Nadja) and Constructivist cinema (Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera) as modern expressions of subjective and objective imagination.

Thursday, February 2, 2006
Presenter: Christopher Smith
PhD candidate in Communication & Culture

“Remapping Urban Addiction: Towards a Social Geography of Substance Abuse and/in the City of Toronto”

Jacques Derrida asks: “what do we hold against the drug addict?” Tracing the historical relationship between addiction, modernity and the city, this paper sets out to analyze representations of the (visible, street-level) addict in urban discourse by examining recent debates surrounding “harm reduction” and the establishment of a “safe/supervised [drug] consumption site” in the city of Toronto.

Wednesday, November 30
Presenter: Saara Liinamaa
PhD candidate in Social & Political Thought

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Presenter: Mervyn Horgan
PhD candidate in Sociology

“Strangers and Divided Consciousness”

This paper will approach theories of strangerhood that see the experience of being a stranger as one of the central experiences of modernity, and so also, the city (from Simmel, DuBois, and Schutz through to Gilroy and Bauman). The primary focus will be on the fissures in consciousness that characterize some of these formulations of the stranger, particularly in the context of racial and national particularism.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Presenter: Nicholas Balaisis
PhD candidate in Communication & Culture

This paper explores film technique in Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s film Ten. It argues that Kiarostami’s method, and his particular use of the car, draws attention to the way bodies are shaped and structured affectively by their immediate environment.