Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell by Katie King (forward by Donna Haraway), Duke University Press:

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 were honed by television producers, curators, hobbyists, fans, and even scholars. As King describes how transmedia storytelling is produced across media 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?

Contents

Foreword / Donna Haraway ix
Preface. What Are Reenactments in This Book? xv
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction. A Thick Description amid Authorships, Audiences, and Agencies in the Nineties 1
1. Nationalities, Sexualities, and Global TV: Highlander, Xena, and Meanings of European Union 21
2. Science in American Life: Among the Culture Warriors 59
3. TV and the Web Come Together 129
4. Scholars and Intellectual Entrepreneurs 203
Conclusion. Toward a Feminist Transdisciplinary Posthumanities 273
Notes 301
Bibliography 335
Index 351

“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

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.