Mellichamp Lecture Series
in Global Civil Society
PRESENTS
Michael Curtin
Professor of Communication Arts & Director of Global Studies, UW Madison

"The Spatial Dynamics of Global

Media: Capital, Creativity, and

Cultural Variation"

Globalization poses significant challenges for the field of media studies since most scholarship continues to focus on national cinemas, national broadcasting systems, and an international cultural economy dominated by Hollywood. Today, however, with imagery flowing more freely across borders and with national media increasingly exposed to the challenges and opportunities of globalization, our understanding of media institutions is changing dramatically. In this presentation, Michael Curtin proposes a theory of “media capital” as a speculative device for interrogating the spatial dynamics of film and television industries. Moving beyond national frameworks, he explores why certain cities—such as Hong Kong, Lagos, Miami, and Mumbai—have emerged as principal nodes of an increasingly globalized and multi-centric cultural economy. Curtin outlines three core principles of media capital: logics of accumulation, trajectories of creative migration, and forces of socio-cultural variation. He contends that these principles offer important critical insights regarding the globalization of media, culture, and public life.

Michael Curtin, is Professor of Communication Arts and Director of Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently posted at Northwestern University where he is the Van Zelst Distinguished Visiting Professor of Communication. Curtin’s books include Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (1995), Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (2007), and Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization (forthcoming). He sits on the editorial board of eight scholarly journals, including global-e, Cinema Journal, Television and New Media, and the Chinese Journal of Communication. With Paul McDonald, he is co-editor of the “International Screen Industries” book series for the British Film Institute.