ezra winton

Dropping and learning

This is what has taken me so many years to learn: Fight the addictive proclivity toward saying “yes” to every request, as well as to my own ideas for constantly new projects. Ack. I’ve recently had to say no to writing an article on Media Democracy – an honour really, and it sucks that I have no time. I’ve also postponed guest lecturing in a undergraduate class on Canadian film. I’ve indefinitely postponed the “Terrorism(s)” conference and film festival. And yet, where do the days go… On my plate still:…read more

Oct.29

Revisiting the Cyborg Manifesto

Posted by ezra in Academix

On Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s Donna Haraway’s journey to cultural and feminist studies is a circuitous one – having earned a degree in Zoology and Philosophy and later a PhD from Yale in Biology. Along the way Haraway has always pushed for critical interrogations of the relationship that humans have with our surrounding environment, other animals, and each other. Her 1972 doctoral thesis examined the role of metaphor and masculine bias in developmental biology, and her work has continuously applied…read more

Oct.17

Activating Imagination: Stepping Away from the SUV

Posted by ezra in Broadsides

We would do well to imagine a world of peace, harmony, equality and compassion. We would do better to snap ourselves out of our daydream between white privileged rituals and act on our dreams. The human condition has no colour, and certainly the negative aspects of our condition exist throughout the spectrum of ethnicity. But I maintain, it is North America driving the SUV. It is North America peering endlessly into the digital, each day, each night, as reality TV and FaceBook and other pleasures of electronic communication consume the…read more

Oct.13

Finally, the media gets it (almost) right

Posted by ezra in Cinema Politica

The Montreal Mirror printed a story today about a recent screening of a Cinema Politica film at Concordia that I helped organize. While the piece does make me sound like some raving, volatile activist freak, hats off to Patrick Ljtenyi, for printing my quote on the ILLEGAL OCCUPATION of Palestinian land by the Israeli government. It’s the first time any media has had the chutzpah to include the descriptor “illegal” in my quote. Shalom! From the Mirror (it’s short, so instead of linking, I’m reprinting…hopefully they don’t sue me): ConU…read more

Oct.11

Neoliberalism, Big Brothers, Coops, and the Canada Council

Posted by ezra in Academix, Cinema Politica, Personal Travails, World Inc.

Neoliberalism: My PhD is keeping me busy with 250+ pages of reading per week, but I’m immensely enjoying it. The program at Carleton is what I had hoped for – four of us students in a small classroom with one professor engaging deeply with the material we’ve read for a good three hours. We just finished a great book by Armand Mattelart (pictured at left) called “Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture.” Here’s my Favorite quote from this excellent historical reading of the field of communication: As we have already…read more

Oct.05