Wednesdays, 5-7pm, KIN 205 (Nash Lecture Theatre, formerly K2.31).
Semester 1
28 September 2026 (Monday, 5pm, Bush House SE 1.05 (Lecture Theatre 4)
Neta Alexander (Yale University):
“The Right to Speed Watch”
https://filmstudies.yale.edu/people/neta-alexander
Chair: Daniel Mann
In Interface Frictions (2025), Neta Alexander examines how seemingly convenient digital features—from autoplay and playback speed to refresh and night mode—reshape our bodies. She develops the concept of “digital debility” to describe the slow, often invisible ways interfaces can push users to ignore their bodily needs. Focusing on Chapter 2, this book talk traces the history of speed watching, which emerged partly through accessibility practices by blind media consumers. Challenging the familiar narrative that speed watching is simply a symptom of the attention economy, this chapter centres blind users to ask what becomes visible when accessibility is treated not as an accommodation but as a source of media innovation. Speed watching, Alexander argues, offers a different history of digital media—one in which disabled users have helped shape how we watch, listen, and experience time.
Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Yale University, bringing together film and media, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. Her first book, Failure (Polity, 2020), co-authored with Arjun Appadurai, examines how Silicon Valley and Wall Street profit from breakdowns and forgetfulness. Her second book, Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies (Duke University Press, 2025), analyzes ubiquitous features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and Night Shift to theorize the bodily consequences of interface design.
7 October 2026
Rachata Sasnanand (King’s College London):
“Considering the Tele-Thanatological Machine: Necropolitics and Drone Warfare”
In her book, The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti recounts the media spectacle surrounding Muammar Gadddafi’s death. Remarking on the world media’s focus on the brutality of the Libyan colonel’s execution—the supposed inhumanity of the images transmitted of his beaten, bloodied body—Braidotti points to the relatively unnoticed bombing of his convoy. The bombing, which was carried out by French fighter jets and an American Predator done, encapsulates what Braidotti terms “the posthuman aspects of contemporary warfare.”1
Indeed, if the images of Gaddafi’s body signified a relinquishing of humanity, then the simultaneous razing of his convoy affirmed that signification: humanity had in effect out-sourced death to substitute, machine bodies that can carry out kill orders from across continents. In the new war order, one need not be present—let alone look an enemy eye—to deal death. These machines—what Braidotti refers to as “tele-thanatological machines”—illuminate the contours of a different state of political existence: not an existence of sovereignty, self-determination, and the right to life and the pursuit of happiness, but rather one of non-life, marked by the constant pursuit of mere survival. Occupying the understory of biopolitical life, Achille Mbembe refers to this political existence as “necropolitics,” or “necropower.”2
Taking Crispin Sartwell’s assertion that politics constitute not only a regime of policy, laws, and governance, but also the aesthetic expressions of that regime—what he terms the “artpolitical”—this paper asks: what might constitute the artpolitical regime of necropolitics?3 What might its aesthetics look like? To return to Braidotti’s initial observation, it may very well look like footage captured by military drones. Examining Éléonore Weber’s There Will Be No More Night (2020), this paper considers the entanglements of posthumanism and necropolitics in contemporary drone warfare, asking how the aesthetics of drone footage mediates and abstracts the human figure, and in turn confers upon the subjects of its gaze the status of combatant and enemy. In doing so, it argues that the aesthetics of drone footage both enable and perpetuate the necropolitical exercise of power performed by the nations who deploy these tele-thanatological machines.
https://www.lahp.ac.uk/student/rachata-sasnanand/
Chair: Sarah Cooper
Followed by drinks reception
18 November 2026
Julia Szivak (University of Nottingham):
“In/visible grit and glamour: white background dancers as transnational labourers in
the Bollywood industry”
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/clas/departments/culturalmediaandvisualstudies/peo
ple/julia.szivak
Chair: Sarah Niazi
2 December 2026
Daniel Fairfax (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt):
“Third Cinema as World System”
https://imacsite.net/people/daniel-fairfax/
Chair: Sarah Cooper
9 December 2026
Pablo La Parra Pérez (Filmoteca de Catalunya):
“In Practice: Notes on the Archival Life of Films from the Filmoteca de Catalunya”
https://www.cccb.org/en/w/participants/pablo-la-parra-perez
Chair: Erika Balsom
Semester 2
27 January 2027
Sergio Rigoletto (University of Groningen):
“Anna Magnani, Speculative History and the Global Popular”
https://rug.nl/staff/s.rigoletto/?lang=en
Chair: Jeff Scheible
10 February 2027
Viviane Saglier (University of St Andrew’s):
“Between Anticolonialism, Socialism, and Feminism: The Filmed Interview in 1980s
Algerian Television”
https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/persons/viviane-saglier/
Chair: Rosalind Galt
24 February 2027
Juan Antonio Suárez (University of Murcia):
“Material Memory in Queer Experimental Film”
https://portalinvestigacion.um.es/investigadores/332053/detalle
Chair: Elena Gorfinkel
21 April 2027
Jyoti Mistry (University of Gothenburg):
“Archival Reconfigurations as Performative Images”
https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-stag/jyotimistry
Chair: Nobunye Levin
28 April 2027
Book event (King’s College London):
Rosalind Galt, Lawrence Napper, Sarah Niazi, Catherine Wheatley
Followed by drinks reception