Costelloe-KuehnMemo41

=Memo41: Draft Overview= See example in Aalok's proposal, and in Mike and Jeanette's proposal, remembering that this section of the proposal should articulate the entire proposal, in brief. In other words, nothing that comes after should seem surprising. The later sections just provide detail. The "Detailing a Proposal" template should help you conceive of the proposal as a whole.

How is an "overview" different from an "abstract?"

Articulating Media and Ecology in India and the U.S.: Experiments in Translation

This study will document and analyze emerging and experimental strategies combining old and new media to build capacity for addressing environmental issues. By conducting in-depth interviews and participant-observation, I will advance understanding of how trans(inter?)disciplinary collaborations are being forged and sustained between a variety of experts: film-makers, GIS mappers, web designers, people with various local knowledges, etc. The aim of "experimental environmental media" (EEM) is to develop a) lines of communication and collaboration between varied experts; b) collective knowledge production and circulation; c) innovative "demonstration" or "protest" tactics that go beyond negative critiques. EEM collectives draw together a multiplicity of perspectives to understand their complex and power-laden "environment" and then disseminate this knowledge, often with a juxtapositional, rather than linear, logic. AGEE QUOTE from ALI on TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY. New technologies, specifically those of "new media," are enabling and constraining the efforts of environmental justice advocates in myriad ways and my study will pay close attention to how the "technological grid" is shaping subjectivities ("affects?"), collectivites, and practices, giving rise to new possibilities and new challenges. Relatively inexpensive media and IT equipment has catalyzed a rapid growth in "independent" media production, but these technologies are also often produced through highly toxic procedures and are part of intensified exercises of surveilance and power in what Deleuze has called "control societies." This study aims to document and analyze the double-binds faced by EEM collectives in the United States and India, drawing out the local and specific double-binds that illuminate the contemporary global system and possible future trajectories. This study will contribute to the historical record of ways new media technologies have been adopted and innovated, within environmental social movements in particular, highlighting the emergence and sustenance of transdisciplinary collaborations with a multiplicity of expert This study will a) advance understanding of how social movements develop, focusing particularly on the mutual shaping of knowledge**,** ideology and (media) technological practice; b) contribute to the ethnographic record of media and art producers in different national contexts, documenting and analyzing how media producers carry out and conceive their collective work, its contexts and consequences, articulating new ideas about how both media and democracy should work; c) illuminate particularly promising points of intervention, offer practical recommendations for local practice and broader policies, and contribute to the refashioning of STS scholars as “public intellectuals” that can “speak out” on critical issues (Stevens 2008). Documentation and analysis of new media use in relation to environmental issues in India and the United States is important today because:
 * Information production and circulation is crucial for dealing with complex and critical environmental issues
 * Globalization produces both new threats and new possibilities for addressing these threats
 * There is an urgent need for innovation in new media practices and communities
 * “Development” and “modernization” are putting unprecedented ecological strain on relatively powerless communities in India.
 * “Old” media are in crisis. Increasing consolidation – especially since the Federal Communications Commission’s 2003 decision to drastically relax media cross-ownership rules – has produced a corporate media ecology that is more beholding to advertisers and powerful interests and less accountable to the wider public.