Public Talk and Discussion, Tuesday, April 8, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM | Kresge Academic Building (Film & Digital Media Graduate Commons)
CDAR invites all to join us for a talk and discussion with documentary studies scholar Dr. Laliv Melamed. This event is co-sponsored by CDAR and the Film & Digital Media Department and is open to the public.
How can we explain decades of Israeli civil society’s consensus around a regime of oppression and impunity? What mediated attachments and disavowals mandate settler colonial violence? In this talk Laliv Melamed follows what she terms the private media complex to articulate the intimate channels through which state sovereignty is distributed, structured and internalized. A prerequisite to the current genocidal moment, Melamed analyzes the seamless paths of mundane violence in post-Oslo Jewish-Israeli public sphere.
| Dr. Laliv Melamed is a Professor of Digital Film Cultures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her research focuses on media and forms of governance in Israel-Palestine. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence, published by the University of California Press in 2023. Dr. Melamed serves on the editorial board of the Configurations of Film book series with Meason Press. With the break of what is known as the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 Melamed launched a series of vignettes in Social Text titled “Society for Sick Societies.” The essays set to dissect the malaise of contemporary societies through the lens of disability, disfunction and the quotidian, all traces of larger forces of global capitalism. In addition, she edited, together with Philipp Dominik Keidl, Vinzenz Hediger and Antonio Somaini, a collection of essays on media malleability during the pandemic, titled Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory (Meason Press, 2020). Additional collaborative works include “Screen Memory,” a special issue of International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society edited together with Lindsey Freeman and Benjamin Neinass (2013); a special issue of the journal World Records, together with Jason Fox, dedicated to documentary’s modes of organizing (2018); a collection of translated essays on documentary (in Hebrew), titled Truth or Dare, together with Ohad Landsman (Am Oved, 2021). Currently, she is working on a special issue on the intimacies of scale for the journal Feminist Media Histories together with Tess Takahashi and J.D. Schnepf, and a special dossier for the journal Discourse on operative images and their imaginaries together with Abe Geil. She has served on the governing council of Visible Evidence (2022-2024) and is on the journal World Records Advisory Board. In addition to her academic activities, Melamed has served as a senior programmer at DocAviv Film Festival and and has curated programs for The Left Wing film club in Tel Aviv and Oberhausen Film Festival. |