Call for applications: Summer Institute 2026 - Center for Global Culture and Communication

Impedance and Resistance
Opposing Forces in Media Aesthetics and Critical Technology Studies

The eighth annual Media Aesthetics Summer Institute, organized by the Rhetoric, Media, and Publics program at Northwestern University, will be held between Monday July 13 to Friday July 17 in person on Northwestern’s Evanston campus. The theme of this year’s summer institute is “Impedance and Resistance: Opposing Forces in Media Aesthetics and Critical Technology Studies.”

Our theme seeks to capture currents in recent scholarship attending to the stubborn realities – infrastructure, materiality, labor, cultural formations, and embodiments – that condition the production and consumption of media. In line with Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne’s proposal to center dismediation within media studies, this summer institute “embraces alienated or partial communication, reluctant technology adoption, targeted rather than wholesale rejection of mediation. Against the contemporary backdrop of ‘universal communication,’ it allows for minor and separatist media.” These studies push back against technological myths of inevitable adoption, instead exploring contentious sites of technological mediation – from firewalls to border walls, assistive technologies to AI assistants – where lived experiences, on-the-ground conditions, unruly desires, and human demands clash with normative technological standards.

“Impedance and Resistance: Opposing Forces in Media Aesthetics and Critical Technology” centers aesthetic and embodied experience in grasping the stakes of these contests. Does human perception matter at the level of the transistor or the algorithm? How does a circuit board signify? In the face of ascendant technologies like AI, must media scholars reevaluate disciplinary oppositions such as those separating aesthetic and textual analysis from inquiries into operations, formats, platforms, and hardware? Looking at both representations and their supports, we propose, in the words of Diana Flores Ruíz, to “attend to both the appearance of images and the mechanisms by which images impact sociotechnical infrastructures, supporting the reading of individual artifacts with a sense of their intended systemic function.”

In electrical engineering, impedance and resistance measure the properties of a component that attenuate, diminish, or delay a current; as general terms, impedance and resistance also evoke corporeal images of friction, debility, and conflict. By invoking these concepts in our title, we validate the notion that critique can speak the language of its object, seeking scholarship that goes deep under the hood of user interfaces, hardware designs, algorithms, and training sets, to treat the intricacies of technology with a care rarely afforded by the most ardent adopters. Our theme also figures contemporary media technology as an asymmetric battleground, in which the compulsory adoption of AI puts media and technology studies at the center of existential contests consuming higher education as a whole.

Institute Format and Application Process

The institute will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by visiting scholars and Northwestern faculty. This year’s visiting scholars include Diana Flores Ruíz (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington), Kyle Stine (Film and Media Studies, Johns Hopkins University), Mara Mills (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU), and Jinying Li (Modern Culture and Media, Brown University).

This year’s Media Aesthetics summer institute will also feature one or more screenings of thematically and historically relevant film and media works, to be hosted at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art.

The institute is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication. The CGCC will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging (single occupancy), and some meals (breakfast and lunch every day and two group dinners) for admitted students. Applicants should send a brief letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator, Prerna Khobragade (PrernaKhobragade2028@u.northwestern.edu). We will adopt a policy of rolling admissions. Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by Monday 18 May 2026. All inquiries should be directed to Prerna Khobragade.