Since the 1990s, the knowledge, culture, and entertainment industries have found themselves experimenting, not altogether voluntarily, with communicating complex information across multiple media platforms. Against a backdrop of competing national priorities, changing technologies, globalization, and academic capitalism, these industries have sought to reach increasingly differentiated local audiences, even as distributed production practices have made the lack of authorial control increasingly obvious. As Katie King describes in Networked Reenactments, science-styled television-such as the Secrets of Lost Empires series shown on the PBS program Nova-demonstrates how new technical and collaborative skills are honed by television producers, curators, hobbyists, fans, and even scholars. Examining how transmedia storytelling is produced across platforms such as television and the web, she analyzes what this all means for the humanities. What sort of knowledge projects take up these skills, attending to grain of detail, evoking affective intensities, and zooming in and out, representing multiple scales, as well as many different perspectives? And what might this mean for feminist transdisciplinary work, or something sometimes called the posthumanities?

In this feminist cultural study of reenactments, Katie King traces the development of a new kind of transmedia storytelling during the 1990s, as a response to the increasing difficulty of reaching large audiences at a time where entertainment media and knowledge production were both being restructured. King ties this development to political and economic changes that have come with globalization and the affordances that have come from new media. In a series of chapters addressing specific forms - from television shows through museum exhibits to new media games and representation - she follows the shape of reenactments as they offer increasing affective and imaginative possibilities.

About the Author

Katie King is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women's Movements.

Reviews
"King... here offers a challenging, meandering take on feminist transdisciplinary posthumanities through the lens of networked reenactment--what one could think of as transmedia storytelling, experiments in communication, and/or epistemological melodramas.... Recommended." - S.E. Vie, CHOICE Magazine
"Theoretically rigorous, these books are also highly pragmatic in recommending activism for social justice.... King bases her argument on factually dense case studies organized in loose chronological order... [T]he organization works well to support historical analysis of a specific period... it is rewarding because her analysis is so trenchant." - Carol Colatrella, Postmodern Culture
"In this lively, thoughtful, and provocative book, Katie King traces the multiple layers and complex intertwined 'communities of practice' that assemble around such diverse discursive sites as television programs, academic classes and conferences, museum exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Networked Reenactments leaves the reader with a heightened sense of the possibilities, as well as the limits and dangers, of contemporary knowledge production, of the ways that we collectively make meanings and understand the heritage of the past in the present."-Steven Shaviro, author of Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society
"King... here offers a challenging, meandering take on feminist transdisciplinary posthumanities through the lens of networked reenactment--what one could think of as transmedia storytelling, experiments in communication, and/or epistemological melodramas.... Recommended." -- S.E. Vie * Choice *
"It is often the case that I read a book that inspires me to rethink a particular phenomenon. However, it is rare that a book challenges me to think differently about what it means to think. Katie King's Networked Reenactments accomplishes both things. It is, in significant ways, a very tough act to follow." -- Joy V. Fuqua * Women's Studies Quarterly *
"Theoretically rigorous, these books are also highly pragmatic in recommending activism for social justice.... King bases her argument on factually dense case studies organized in loose chronological order... [T]he organization works well to support historical analysis of a specific period... it is rewarding because her analysis is so trenchant." -- Carol Colatrella * Postmodern Culture *
"A well-researched and convincing series of arguments reminding us that our own esoteric expertise can connect us to many conversations that help us remain relevant in the creation and dissemination of knowledges." -- Jeanne L. Gillespie * Journal of American Culture *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822350729
Author Katie King
Format Paperback
Page Count 392
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 567g