Sunday, 11 January 2026: 1:45 PM-3:00 PM
705 (MTCC)
- This panel explores how our contemporary cultural moment is fascinated with acts of recovering media, whether as specific mediums, sources, or pasts. Focused on a range of sources, this panel seeks to bridge the analog-digital divide that arises when technological and media pasts within the present, which tend to present these moments of clashing temporalities. However, by focusing on the long temporalities and afterlives of mediums such as photography, table-top roleplaying games (TTRPGs), and podcasts, this panel works to stitch these temporal joints, considering how these haunted and recovered mediums emerge out of specific histories and mindsets and not ghosts emerging from a cultural vacuum.
- We are in a moment obsessed with haunted and recovered media. Numerous films and franchises haunt the cultural zeitgeist through pastiche, parody, and endless remakes. The rise of the analog horror genre and aesthetic focuses on the uncanny nature of analog technologies within our digital present. Communities like r/lostwave and r/lostmedia on Reddit have gained immense cross-platform popularity with the search for songs like "Ulterior Motives,” which concluded in April 2024. Taking these together, this panel sees this current moment as a prime opportunity to explore the causes and histories behind this spirit of recovery that we find ourselves immersed within.
- This panel primarily draws its inspiration from hauntology and media archeology. Mark Fisher and Jacques Derrida highlight how photographic, videographic, and digital technologies are always already haunted in their abilities to capture and preserve the dead, but also in the case of Fisher to adopt the properties of old mediums such as tape crackle to highlight disjointed time. In A Geology of Media, Jussi Parikka highlights how with increasing technological production causing us to consume and discard technology at increasing rates, we find ourselves walking in and living alongside sedimented layers of our technological past. As such, the very mediums we use to capture and preserve the dead and dying themselves have not only the capacity to die but reemerge as ghosts. This panel works to bring these two fields, which often operate invisibly alongside one another into explicit dialogue.
- This panel will begin with opening remarks by the presider that shall not exceed seven minutes. The presider's job is to introduce the panelists and offer some remarks to help synthesize the presentations and set the tone for the discussion. Following this, each presenter will have fifteen minutes to present their paper with strictly enforced time. At the close, the presenter will offer concluding remarks 7 minutes in length to segue into the 15 minutes of discussion. As this is not a full response, I marked Jim Coby as a presider over respondent. However, he still has a significant role in framing the panel.
- Kit Bauserman's presentation highlights the formation of a regional gothic photography and practice centered on the blogging website Tumblr. They focus on placing the aesthetic into conversation with the practices of 19th and early 20th century salvage ethnographers, theorizing the aesthetic as recovering personal and cultural imagined regional pasts in the United States through dialogue with decayed and abandoned subjects. Drumlin Crape's presentation explores Welcome to Night Vale and how the radio show framed as podcast offers a view of the host Cecil Baldwin as a queer cyborg through his long-life and integration with technology. Crape centers queerness and monstrosity as a communal and not-isolating force brought together by this conversion of genres, technologies, and temporalities that emerge within the podcast's diegetic framing. Justin Wigard's presentation frames TTRPGs as haunted in the continual publishing of specific Dungeons and Dragons modules or the systems that become abandoned after their parent companies dissolve. Using these case studies, Wigard highlights how players, guides, and game mechanics render TTRPGS as fundamentally haunted.
- In forming this panel, I wished it to be formed of perspectives that did not focus too heavily on a singular media type, hence my selection of presentations on photography, podcasts, and TTRPGs, to avoid papers that tread too closely to one another, especially given the shared horror thread. As such, the presenters possess a range of training and backgrounds working in literature, comic and game studies, the digital humanities, new media, and queer studies. This panel also incorporates a range of positions and positionalities, including graduate students (Ph.D. Students and Candidates) and non-tenured faculty, centering more precarious academic voices. This panel is also comprised of two queer scholars, which features in their presentations with Crape focusing on queer subjects and Bauserman highlighting queer voices in the regional imaginaries they examine.
Organizer:
Kit Bauserman
Presider:
Jim Coby
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