Activité
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.
Stay tuned for our next seminar season!
For online participation, please register here:
Past presentations:
3 May 2023: Susan Murray (New York University), ’How to See Where You Can’t Look’: Vision and Early CCTV
5 September 2023: Hannah Spaulding (University of Liverpool), ”The Control Center of the Home”: Surveillance, Useful Television, and American Postwar Domesticity.
21 November 2023: Renée Winter (University of Vienna), Working on the Self – Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Uses of Video
21 February 2024, John Wyver (University of Westminster), Useful television in Britain in the interval of uncertainty, 1928-1939
2 May 2024: Yvonne Zimmermann (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Films that Work Harder / The Power of Flow
11 October 2024: Ira Wagman (Carleton University), Scenes of Television Instruction in 1950s Montreal
7 November 2024: Maximilian Brockhaus (University of Vienna), Broadcasting and Building Minds: From radio to television in Austrian and European Schools (1924-1955)
20 November 2025: Marie Sandoz (University of Lausanne), Television at the Swiss Stock Market. Data Flow and Money Flow in the Electronic Age
9 December 2025 : Guilherme Machado (University of Lausanne), Digital simulation of work: from training technology to the imagined future of actual workplaces via television
21 January 2026 : Michael Darroch (York University), Toronto’s 1960s TV Campus: Crisis Planning for 20th Century New Media Education
