Assistant Professor of English Dan Burns and Assistant Professor of Cinema & Television Arts Kai Swanson presented their collaborative research at this year鈥檚 Literature/Film Association conference at the University of Montana in Missoula.
黑料不打烊 faculty Dan Burns and Kai Swanson were panelists at the annual conference of the聽Literature/Film Association, a scholarly society that promotes the academic study of literature, film, television, game studies, new media and other forms of audio-visual culture.
Inspired by their recent team-taught Literature on Screen course, Burns, assistant professor in English, and Swanson, assistant professor in Cinema & Television Arts, gave a hybrid talk on a panel with the theme 鈥淣etworks, Multiverses, and (Trans)Media Ecologies.鈥
Their talk, titled 鈥淒irection as Data Extraction: Surveilling Behavioral Surplus in Joseph Kosinski鈥檚 ‘Spiderhead,’鈥 explored Shoshana Zuboff鈥檚 theory of 鈥渂ehavioral surplus鈥 in a comparative analysis of George Saunders鈥 short story 鈥淓scape from Spiderhead鈥 (2010) and director Joseph Kosinski鈥檚 recent Netflix Original adaptation, “Spiderhead” (2022). Reading the work’s “clinical trials” context as an allegory of surveillance capitalism, they argued that Kosinski鈥檚 modernist and postmodern production design evokes the data-gathering practices mobilized by corporate interests outside of their users’ awareness and autonomy鈥攁 new prediction market that maximizes profits through the harvesting of personal information.
Hosted by the University of Montana this year from Sept. 21-23, the Literature/Film Association is currently the largest and most active scholarly society in the United States devoted to the study of literature and film.