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I am an Associate Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY’s Department of Communication. My empirical research and theoretical work centers on media, memory, and political violence with a focus on future imaginaries and memory cultures in relation to environment, space, and security. 

I am the author of Homegrown: Identity and Difference in the American War on Terror (NYU Press, 2018) and co-editor of ISIS Beyond the Spectacle (Routledge, 2018). My work has appeared in Media Theory, Communication Theory, Memory Studies, Security Dialogue, Journalism and Journal of Experimental Psychology, among others.

CURRENT PROJECTS

I examine the infrastructures imagined, designed, and built for the purpose of either bringing about desired futures or weathering the arrival of those feared in the midst of climate change. 

I argue these media- and environment-specific social practices produce complex, nonlinear relations to time, which in turn structure public understandings of contentious pasts, orientations to the present, and practices of witnessing. 

#environmental_media #memory_studies #STS

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Landscapes of Tomorrow

I situate dispersed/stochastic terrorism against the backdrop of digital phatic culture. The project brings together Roman Jakobson’s notion of phatic communication and Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil alongside media scholarship to rethink the communicative and functional nature of political violence in the digital age.

#political_violence #ritual_communication #security_cultures

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Phatic Violence

I am also a (now occasional) percussionist/composer.

Contact: pszpunar [at] albany.edu

 

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Dual Ph.D., Communication and Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

B.A., Political Science, University of Waterloo

Adv. Dip., Composition, Humber College

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