Networked Reenactments

How Television, Museums, and Universities Tried to Find Audiences in the Nineties

Katie King
Associate ProfessorWomen's StudiesUniversity of MarylandRead Bio

Some knowledge engineers claim that the 20 disciplines that came into being in 1900 fractured into 8000 specialized topics in science alone ninety years later. Reenactments were among the experiments in communication across knowledge worlds that began to take particular form in the nineties. Science-styled television documentary forms, internet repurposings, museum exhibitions, and academic historiographies worked hard to shape an array of cognitive sensations accessed, skilled and displayed by new technologies. These experiments became epistemological melodramas of identity, national interests, and global restructuring that tried to solve the tricky mapping problems of addressing many audiences simultaneously.

Katie King is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her interdisciplinary scholarship is located at the intersection of feminist technoscience studies, cyberculture and media studies, and LGBT Studies. Her first book was “Theory in its Feminist Travels: conversations in U.S. women’s movements.” She has two others in progress now, “Speaking with Things,” an introduction to writing technologies, and the other, “Networked Reenactments,” flexible knowledges under globalization.

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