Publications
Selected recent articles
* indicates graduate students & research scientists working under my supervision
Pereira, G.*, I. Bojczuk*, & L. Parks. (Forthcoming). “WhatsApp Disruptions in Brazil: A content analysis of
user and news media responses, 2015-2018.” Global Media and Communication Journal.Parks, L. (Forthcoming). "Global Networking and the Contrapuntal Node: The Project Mercury Earth Station in
Zanzibar, 1959-64," Journal for Media and Cultural Research (ZMK, Germany).Parks, L. (Forthcoming). “Vertical Mediation at Standing Rock,” LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape
Architecture.Parks, L. & R. Thompson*. (2020). “The Slow Shutdown: Information and Internet Regulation in
Tanzania from 2010 to 2018 and Impacts on Online Content Creators.” International Journal of
Communication, 14, 1-21.Parks, L. (2020). “Field Mapping: What is the ‘Media’ of Media Studies?" Television and New Media, 21(6), 642-649.
Graydon, M.*, & Parks, L. (2020). ‘Connecting the unconnected’: a critical assessment of US satellite Internet services. Media, Culture & Society, 42(2), 260-276.
Parks, L. (2019). Televisual epistemologies and beyond. Journal of Visual Culture, 18(2), 234-249.
Parks, L. (2019). Dirty Data: Content Moderation, Regulatory Outsourcing, and The Cleaners. Film Quarterly, 73(1), 11-18.
Parks, L. (2019). Mediating Animal-Infrastructure Relations. In Boucher, M. P., Helmreich, S., Kinney, L. W., Tibbits, S., Uchill, R., & Ziporyn, E. (Eds.), Being Material (pp. 144-153). MIT Press.
Books
Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror
Lisa Parks (2018)
In the post-9/11 era, media technologies have become increasingly intertwined with vertical power as airwaves, airports, air space, and orbit have been commandeered to support national security and defense. In this book, Lisa Parks develops the concept of vertical mediation to explore how audiovisual cultures enact and infer power relations far beyond the screen. Focusing on TV news, airport checkpoints, satellite imagery, and drone media, Parks demonstrates how "coverage" makes vertical space intelligible to global publics in new ways and powerfully reveals what is at stake in controlling it.
Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual
Lisa Parks (2005)
In 1957 Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, dazzled people as it zipped around the planet. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than eight thousand satellites orbited the Earth, and satellite practices such as live transmission, direct broadcasting, remote sensing, and astronomical observation had altered how we imagined ourselves in relation to others and our planet within the cosmos. In Cultures in Orbit, Lisa Parks analyzes these satellite practices and shows how they have affected meanings of “the global” and “the televisual.” Parks suggests that the convergence of broadcast, satellite, and computer technologies necessitates an expanded definition of “television,” one that encompasses practices of military monitoring and scientific observation as well as commercial entertainment and public broadcasting.
Edited collections
Life in the Age of Drone Warfare
Edited by Lisa Parks & Caren Kaplan (2017)
This volume's contributors offer a new critical language through which to explore and assess the historical, juridical, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of drone technology and warfare. They show how drones generate particular ways of visualizing the spaces and targets of war while acting as tools to exercise state power. Essays include discussions of the legal justifications of extrajudicial killings and how US drone strikes in the Horn of Africa impact life on the ground, as well as a personal narrative of a former drone operator. The contributors also explore drone warfare in relation to sovereignty, governance, and social difference; provide accounts of the relationships between drone technologies and modes of perception and mediation; and theorize drones’ relation to biopolitics, robotics, automation, and art. Interdisciplinary and timely, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare extends the critical study of drones while expanding the public discussion of one of our era's most ubiquitous instruments of war.
Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures
Edited by Lisa Parks & Nicole Starosielski (2015)
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.
Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.
Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures
Edited by Lisa Parks & James Schwoch (2012)
Down to Earth presents the first comprehensive overview of the geopolitical maneuvers, financial investments, technological innovations, and ideological struggles that take place behind the scenes of the satellite industry. Satellite projects that have not received extensive coverage—microsatellites in China, WorldSpace in South Africa, SiriusXM, the failures of USA 193 and Cosmos 954, and Iridium—are explored. This collection takes readers on a voyage through a truly global industry, from the sites where satellites are launched to the corporate clean rooms where they are designed, and along the orbits and paths that satellites traverse. Combining a practical introduction to the mechanics of the satellite industry, a history of how its practices and technologies have evolved, and a sophisticated theoretical analysis of satellite cultures, Down to Earth opens up a new space for global media studies.
Planet TV: A Global Television Reader
Edited by Lisa Parks & Shanti Kumar (2003)
From the 1967 live satellite program "Our World" to MTV music videos in Indonesia, from French television in Senegal to the global syndication of African American sitcoms, and from representations of terrorism on German television to the international Teletubbies phenomenon, TV lies at the nexus of globalization and transnational culture.
Planet TV provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field. Organized thematically, the volume explores such issues as cultural imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, ethnicity and cultural hybridity. These themes are illuminated by concrete examples and case studies derived from empirical work on global television industries, programs, and audiences in diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts.