Events & Calendars Technologies of Responsibility--Making Bystander Irresponsibility Visible in Social Media

On Thursday, March 22 at 4:30 p.m. in the Clark House at Amherst College, Carrie Rentschler, associate professor and William Dawson Scholar of Feminist Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and an associate of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University, will present a paper titled “Technologies of Responsbility-Making Bystander Irresponsibility Visible in Social Media.” This is the fourth presentation in a series of seminars that will take place this year on the theme “Law and the Visible.”

Rentschler is the author of "Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S." (Duke UP, 2011), and co-editor of "Girlhood Studies and the Politics of Place" (Berghahn Press, 2016). Her current research examines the history of the bystander as an agent of social change, feminist social media responses to sexual violence, campus activism against rape culture, and the role media infrastructures play in social movement activism.

To receive a copy of the paper which will examine the role digital bystander videos and their uploading onto video aggregation sites play in current conceptions of legal and moral responsibility for witnessing social violence, please email the LJST Department Coordinator at mlestes@amherst.edu.