Useful TV Standing Seminar

Facilitating the exchange between scholars interested in television’s application as a useful tool, rather than a mass medium.

Since spring 2023, The Useful Television Standing Seminar (organized by Anne-Katrin Weber, University of Lausanne, and Markus Stauff, University of Amsterdam) aims to facilitate the exchange between scholars interested in television’s application as a useful tool, rather than a mass medium. The examples range from military and industrial applications of television technology to its operational use in medicine, science, or sports. We partly build on older debates in film studies (e.g. non-theatrical cinema; useful film) and want to bring television into this debate. Looking at useful television requires to broaden and to complicate our understanding of what media do and how they do it. Additionally, it contributes to an alternative genealogy of “digital media”. The seminar organizes two or three meetings per semester for which we invite guest speakers, discuss the participants’ work in progress or new and old publications that seem of relevance.

Upcoming Seminars: 

5 November 2026 Dylan Mulvin (London School of Economics), Rage as trace medium – Stanley Milgram and the CBS experiment

Known now for the ethically dubious and often cruel experiments they conducted, social psychologists of the 1960s and 70s were also possessed by an interest in the study of film and television

In 1969, Stanley Milgram began a secret collaboration with CBS’s Office of Social Research. The result was an episode (“Countdown”) of the hit drama Medical Center with three distinct endings. Airing the different endings for different audiences across the United States, Milgram attempted to trace memetic reenactments of violence and abuse from the episode in the public. In essence, the CBS experiment enrolled millions of American viewers in a social experiment on the effects of mediated anger and transformed the living room into a de facto laboratory.

Drawn from archival research in Milgram’s papers at Yale University, this presentation analyses how social psychologists of this period saw anger as a force, animating the formation of human subjectivity within complex media ecosystems. In experiments like Milgram’s the transmission of anger became something like a trace medium, a substance through which the social might expose itself.

The archival excavation of the Milgram CBS experiments, exposes the ways anger, frustration, and psychological research were intricately knotted in the media environments of the 1960s.

14 January 2027: Maria A. Velez-Serna, independent scholar

During the 1980s, the Colombian public service broadcaster, Inravisión, produced a wide range of “educational and cultural” programmes targeted at different audiences. These included series intended to supplement formal distance learning for adults who had not completed their basic schooling, programmes for pre-school and school-age children, and series discussing general interest topics with an informative approach. This talk will offer a preliminary approach to some of these materials and stories, with a dual focus on the role of women and the emergence of environmental concerns in educational television. Many of the creative personnel and crew for these programmes were women, some of whom went on to have relatively long careers in the public television sector. I am interested in the institutional and creative affordances of educational television for women’s media work, and their influence in the inclusion of environmental education within the sector’s remit.

16 February 2027: Hanna Surma, Making Broadcast Television Useful: Self Videos in Life Intervention Television (2005-2015)

This presentation examines how Life Intervention Television mobilizes self-videos (such as video diaries and other first-person recordings) as tools for self-surveillance, self-management, and, ultimately, self-transformation. Focusing on the remediation of video practices, aesthetics and imaginaries associated with psychotherapy and other forms of “useful” video, it argues that broadcast television (in this specific genre) draws on the purported capacity of video to constitute the self as something that can be worked on in order to render its ‘interventions’ plausible, effective, and legitimate. Self-videos thus function not only as technologies for governing the self within these programmes, but also as a means through which broadcast television, in the early 2000s, itself acquires the appearance of usefulness and agency.

For online participation, please register here: