Crisis Media, or Some Afterthoughts on Documentary’s Expanded Fields | Presented by Jihoon Kim

This talk offers some afterthoughts on Jihoon Kim’s recent book Documentary’s Expanded Fields in relation to his current book project entitled Crisis Media: Expansion of Media in the Precarious 21st Century. This project develops the concept of ‘crisis media’ as an array of media practices and formations that function as both to cause and to respond to various regional and planetary crises encompassing climate change, civil wars and protests, extraction of resources and labor, and the epistemological and ontological crises imposed by the computational forms of control and governmentality. He argues that a crucial aspect of ‘crisis media,’ more than their ambivalent relationships to nature and the human, lies in the ways that they fundamentally challenge what media are and how they work, and that it is in this sense that they must be considered as ‘media-critical,’ or, marking a turning point in thinking of the concept and existence of media. In delineating the three aspects of ‘crisis media,’ I also present a set of preliminary thoughts on the broader implications that they have to the concepts of truth, evidence, and agency that underlie both traditional and emerging forms of documentary cinema.

 Jihoon Kim is professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University. He is the author of Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018/16. Currently he is finalizing Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1982-2022, the first English-language monograph on the subject, as well as Crisis Media: Expansion of Media in the Precarious 21st Century.  

Date/Time: April 11, 2023 at 6 pm

Location: SFU Harbour Centre Room 1800

Contact ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details.