Useful Television Standing Seminar

Since spring 2023, The Useful Television Standing Seminar (organized by Anne-Katrin Weber, University of Lausanne, and Markus Stauff, University of Amsterdam) aims to facilitate the exchange between scholars interested in television’s application as a useful tool, rather than a mass medium. The examples range from military and industrial applications of television technology to its operational use in medicine, science, or sports. We partly build on older debates in film studies (e.g. non-theatrical cinema; useful film) and want to bring television into this debate. Looking at useful television requires to broaden and to complicate our understanding of what media do and how they do it. Additionally, it contributes to an alternative genealogy of “digital media”. The seminar organizes two or three meetings per semester for which we invite guest speakers, discuss the participants’ work in progress or new and old publications that seem of relevance. (Full list of past events here.)

For online participation, please register here: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/wiRndwb1eQ  

The Useful Television Standing Seminar 2026/27

Thursday, 5 November, 5pm CET 

Dylan Mulvin: Rage as trace medium – Stanley Milgram and the CBS experiment 

Known now for the ethically dubious and often cruel experiments they conducted, social psychologists of the 1960s and 70s were also possessed by an interest in the study of film and television. In 1969, Stanley Milgram began a secret collaboration with CBS’s Office of Social Research. The result was an episode (“Countdown”) of the hit drama Medical Center with three distinct endings. Airing the different endings for different audiences across the United States, Milgram attempted to trace memetic reenactments of violence and abuse from the episode in the public. In essence, the CBS experiment enrolled millions of American viewers in a social experiment on the effects of mediated anger and transformed the living room into a de facto laboratory.  

Drawn from archival research in Milgram’s papers at Yale University, this presentation analyses how social psychologists of this period saw anger as a force, animating the formation of human subjectivity within complex media ecosystems. In experiments like Milgram’s the transmission of anger became something like a trace medium, a substance through which the social might expose itself. The archival excavation of the Milgram CBS experiments exposes the ways anger, frustration, and psychological research were intricately knotted in the media environments of the 1960s. 

Dylan Mulvin is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Drawing on methods from media studies, Science and Technology Studies, gender studies, and disability studies, Mulvin investigates the intersecting history of culture and technology, and the ways media artefacts encode and crystallise assumptions about human perception, emotion, and behaviour. In other words, he studies the ways people make the stuff that we take for granted and what happens when it all falls apart. He is the author of Proxies: the Cultural Work of Standing In (published open access with MIT Press). https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/dylan-mulvin  

Thursday, 14 January, 5pm CET 

María A. Vélez-Serna: Environmental topics and women’s careers in Colombian educational television 
 
During the 1980s, the Colombian public service broadcaster, Inravisión, produced a wide range of “educational and cultural” programmes targeted at different audiences. These included series intended to supplement formal distance learning for adults who had not completed their basic schooling, programmes for pre-school and school-age children, and series discussing general interest topics with an informative approach. This talk will offer a preliminary approach to some of these materials and stories, with a dual focus on the role of women and the emergence of environmental concerns in educational television. Many of the creative personnel and crew for these programmes were women, some of whom went on to have relatively long careers in the public television sector. I am interested in the institutional and creative affordances of educational television for women’s media work, and their influence in the inclusion of environmental education within the sector’s remit. 

María A. Vélez-Serna is the author of Ephemeral Cinema Spaces (2020) and has published on cinema history, non-theatrical exhibition practices and sponsored media in Colombia and Scotland. 

Tuesday, 16 February, 5pm CET 

Hanna Surma: Making Broadcast Television Useful: Self Videos in Life Intervention Television (2005-2015) 

This presentation examines how Life Intervention Television mobilizes self-videos (such as video diaries and other first-person recordings) as tools for self-surveillance, self-management, and, ultimately, self-transformation. Focusing on the remediation of video practices, aesthetics and imaginaries associated with psychotherapy and other forms of “useful” video, it argues that broadcast television (in this specific genre) draws on the purported capacity of video to constitute the self as something that can be worked on in order to render its ‘interventions’ plausible, effective, and legitimate. Self-videos thus function not only as technologies for governing the self within these programmes, but also as a means through which broadcast television, in the early 2000s, itself acquires the appearance of usefulness and agency. 

Hanna Surma is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Her research interests are Reality Television, Self-Media, as well as Streaming Video (Production) Cultures. 

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2025-2026

The Useful Television Standing Seminar, Autumn 2025

For online participation, please register here: https://forms.office.com/e/wiRndwb1eQ

Marie Sandoz: Television at the Swiss Stock Market. Data Flow and Money Flow in the Electronic Age

20 November 2025, 17h CET 

Marie Sandoz is a Post-Doc researcher in the SNSF-funded five-year research project Operative TV: Audiovisual Closed-Circuits from the Military to the Classroom (1930s-1990s) at the University of Lausanne. Her work focuses on the media history of infrastructures, logistics, photography and public service television. Her latest publications deal with the history of satellite communication or “vertical images”.

Guilherme Machado: Digital simulation of work: from training technology to the imagined future of actual workplaces via television

9 December 2025, 17h CET 

Guilherme Machado is a Junior Lecturer and postdoc researcher at the University of Lausanne’s department of Film History and Aesthetics. His research deals with the visual culture of labor and the epistemological implications of visual technologies used to control the production and circulation of labor-related knowledges. He co-edited a volume on Tacit Cinematic Knowledge. Approaches and Practices and published on the role of media in vocational training.

Michael Darroch: Toronto’s 1960s TV Campus: Crisis Planning for 20th Century New Media Education   

21 January 2026, 17h CET  

Michael Darroch is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University. He co-edited Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban with Janine Marchessault (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), an interdisciplinary collection that situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies. Funded research projects through the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council have included archival explorations of neglected members of the Toronto School, and more recently (2019) Edgy Media: On Borders, Migrations, Media Studies and Media Arts which facilitated the 4th iteration of the international touring exhibition Feedback: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts;  Sensing Borders: Mapping, Media and Migration (2020-2025); and Distributed Networks: Media Archaeologies of Educational TV and Communication Studies in Canada, 1945-1975 (2021-26).