Friday, October 25, 2024 at 4:00 pm
FREE
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls present
A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
Mazzolini’s talk looks how the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident got situated in culture, via the film The China Syndrome, whose theatrical release preceded the accident by twelve days, and via objects such as cooling tower-shaped lamps and mugs circulated in the wake of the plant’s proposed re-opening. Though they seem clearly polemical and broadly kitschy respectively, the film and these ephemera were caught within tangles of misunderstanding. Mazzolini untangles these misunderstandings and uses them to frame rhetoric around energy consumption and production, and to argue for treating human attention as an energetic resource.
Elizabeth Mazzolini is currently at work on a book project called “American Toxic,” which offers a material history of communication about toxicity during three coincidental poisoning events: as American smoking rates peaked in the late 1970s, an industrial dump at Love Canal in New York was discovered, and the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania nearly melted down. “American Toxic” investigates, via these foundational events, how toxicity moves rhetorically through culture as well as physically through communities, circulating back and forth between discourse and bodies.