Guest Seminar 29th Feb UCC Cork

5 Feb 2016

Public Screens, Public Cultures: Screen Cultures in Cairo, London and Shanghai by Professor Chris Berry, King’s College London- 12pm, CACSSS Seminar Room. 

What does it mean to be “in public”?

Increasingly, being in public means being amongst screens. Not long ago, moving image screens were confined to domestic space in the form of the cathode ray set or to the movie theatre in the form of the silver screen. Today, potentially, they are everywhere. But, as this comparison of the deployment of moving image screens in public spaces in Cairo, London and Shanghai reveals, in fact they are concentrated in specific spaces and have specific uses. Taking selected transport hubs, retail and recreation sites, and exhibition spaces in each city as key research sites, I argue that contemporary screen culture is deployed as part of the recalibration of public culture under different configurations of neoliberalism in the different cities in question.