Media@McGill is pleased to host Mimi Sheller who is Beaverbrook visiting scholar this fall. On 15 October, she will give a public talk, Infrastructures of the Imagined Island: Media, Mobility and Tourism, in collaboration with the AHCS Speaker Series and the department of geography, at 5h30pm, in Lecture Arts, W215 (map).
Sheller is the Director of the Mobilities Research and Policy Center Professor of Sociology, in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Description of the talk:
'Travel and leisure destinations, especially in the Caribbean, are being disembedded from national territories and repackaged as unique natural enclaves connected to global metropolitan media, transport, and communication systems. Through a discussion of Zaha Hadid's master plan for a new resort on Dellis Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands, this paper explores how state space, informational space, and tourist space are recoding and rescaling island space into newly mediated configurations that combine virtual and physical geographies. As Caribbean states and territories adjust to complex new infrastructures and architectures of software-supported mobility, they may prefigure processes of postcolonial urbanism that are restructuring private property, cyberspatial property, and state territory in other parts of the world.'
Bio: Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication, and founding Director of the new Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, and continues to hold a position as Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University (UK), which she co-founded and formerly co-directed. From 2005-2009 she was Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Swarthmore College; and in Fall 2008 she was a Visiting Fellow in the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. She was awarded her A.B. from Harvard University (1988, summa cum laude) in History and Literature, and MA (1993, with distinction) and PhD (1997) in Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research. She also held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for African and Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan. She has served as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies (UK), and has published articles in numerous journals in the fields of Caribbean Studies, Cultural Geography, and Social Theory. She is also on the editorial boards of Cultural Sociology and the International Journal of African and Black Diaspora Studies.
She is the author of Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Macmillan Caribbean, 2000), which was awarded the Choice Magazine Outstanding Book Award (2002), and Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge, 2003), which explored the mobilities of production and consumption in the transatlantic world. She recently completed a third book entitled Citizenship from Below: Caribbean Agency and Modern Freedom (forthcoming with Duke University Press). She is co-editor with John Urry of Mobile Technologies of the City (Routledge, 2006), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (Routledge, 2004), and a special issue of Environment and Planning A on “Materialities and Mobilities”.
Affiliation: Drexel University, Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University