chris-ingraham-feb-2023 - Institute - Communication

Dr. Chris Ingraham

Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. He is also on the core faculty of the U's Environmental Humanities graduate program, and faculty affiliate with the Global Change and Sustainability Center.

Thursday, February 9th | 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

LNCO 2120, Reading Room

Modularity, Plants, and Power

In this talk, Chris Ingraham shares his working thoughts about the ways modularity operates as a hierarchical structure valued for its presumed
efficiency and support of theoretically endless growth. Though modularity is often associated with business and systems-design literature, Ingraham explores its underacknowledged importance for critically-inflected materialist approaches to media theory and the environmental humanities. Moving between LEGOs, plant physiology, and the Great Exhibition of 1851, he'll underscore the complexity of ruling modularity out as a generative model of worldbuilding, while also suggesting that modularity can be understood fundamentally--and problematically--as a structure for maintaining power.