Transmission in Motion

Seminar Blogs

“The Objectivity and Interactivity in New Media Pedagogy” – Liang Yue

Whenever a new communicative technology is invented, researchers and businesses are arguing its value in didactics. This is not only because media have long been playing an educational role in the history of civilization, but also because new media’s affordances are in line with the enthusiasm of the educational revolution in terms of further objectivity…

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“Reflections on the Center of Human-Centered Design” – Danny Steur

Artists make art, designers make everything else – or so Jon McKenzie announces, somewhat polemically, while discussing the Design Thinking central to his Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement (2019). This transmedial design practice, he writes, is “a method of human-centered design developed to tackle complex problems found in social and organizational contexts”…

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“A Different Look at Design Justice” – Polyniki Katrantsioti

After the last Transmission in Motion seminar, I felt inspired in thinking about the ways in which a digital community can offer back to the people that have been wronged, have had their rights violated, misunderstood, and eventually hurt by the media and the way they are portrayed. In a completely different case, the life…

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“True Interdisciplinarity” – Elena Roznovan

While the buzz word ‘interdisciplinary’ is used by many university programs today, what does interdisciplinarity really mean and what does it entail? If looked at closely the divisions amongst different fields of study within universities is still very prominent. Humanities to this day orient their methodologies of teaching and classroom proceedings in a seminar style….

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“Design, Un-design, Redesign” – Naomi Tidball

        “Systems of Oppression, Inequality, and Inequity are by design. Therefore, they can be redesigned.” Antionette Carroll, Founder of Creative Reaction Lab. In late January 2021, the Transmission in Motion Seminar was joined by Jon McKenzie, Lara Harvey, and Veronica Cinibulk from Cornell University. The event-seminar focussed on the emerging field of…

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“Transmedia as a new Future of Pivoting” – Justyna Jakubiec

As the present-day reality is in constant motion, so are practices serving various ways of knowledge production. Academic knowledge, with the help of some of its creators, tries to escape the boundaries that have already proven to be limiting. Certainly, that does not mean that the production of academic knowledge is somehow outdated – on…

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“The Role of Theory in Saving Lisa Montgomery” – Soyun Jang

To quote Jon McKenzie from this seminar, “theory is the problem, not the solution”, (McKenzie, Harvey, and Cinibulk 2021). Emphasizing the importance for the academy to engage with the world, McKenzie suggests that we merge critical thinking with critical design, “becoming cosmographer or co-designer of worlds” (McKenzie 2019). Critical design in this case extends media-making…

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“Why is a Platonic Binary Useful?” – Hannah Harder

It seems that Jon Mckenzie posits the gap between doxa and episteme as a productive negative space that can reveal new forms of knowledge. These terms differentiate between the entangled, contextual knowing that is placed against formal knowledge production. My studies in media, art and performance have shown that we can engage with meaning through…

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“On Civic Participation through Performative Protest” – Bernice Ong

In this session with Jon McKenzie, Lara Harvey and Veronica Cinibulk from Cornell University (January 27, 2021), we were introduced to the term Design Justice. This is an ongoing movement where communities and individuals would strategically use cultural performance forms to carry out activism work through persuasive, human-centered content. While the inherent positioning is one…

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“Episteme and Doxa: Addressing a Binary” – Floor Mijland

In a whirlwind of energy, Jon McKenzie started the 4th Transmission in Motion seminar on January 27th, 2021. Once his PowerPoint is shared, he is off: introducing himself, ‘Perform or Else’, the concept of design justice, and then he states the following: Doxa is ‘the world’ and episteme is ‘theory’, and theory is ‘the problem’….

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