How media cultures and technologies shape the law

While many conversations around media and law focus on how law — and policy — shape media technologies and practices, Jennifer Petersen’s work has focused on the opposite: how media cultures and technologies shape the law. She’ll be discussing how she has addressed this relationship in her first book, Murder, the Media, and the Politics of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., which examined emotion and the formation of publics advocating for hate crimes laws, and in her second book, How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (forthcoming, Duke University Press), a history of how media technologies have shaped free speech law in the United States. The talk will cover the trajectory from the first book to the second, as well as the inspirations for each. She will also discuss the questions that the second book has posed around artificial intelligence and the law and how she’s addressing these questions in her current research.

Jennifer Petersen is an associate professor of communication at USC Annenberg and director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Science and Technology Studies. Her research encompasses media history, law, and conceptions of emotion and reason in communication history.

RSVP