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.

The Useful Television Standing Seminar, Autumn 2025

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

21 January 2026, 17h CET  

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

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).