Networked Reenactments - Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell (Paperback)

Since the 1990s, the ways that knowledge is created and used have changed. "Flexible knowledges," collaborative experiments across specialized communities of practice, have become increasingly important. By analyzing reenactments, Katie King highlights some of the challenges, and pleasures, posed by experiments in flexible knowledges. Focusing on science-styled TV programs, such as NOVA's "Secrets of Lost Empires" series, and museum exhibitions, including "Science in American Life" at the Smithsonian, she describes how scholars, curators, historians, television producers, authors, journalists, hobbyists, and others were compelled to work together to communicate complex technical knowledge across multiple media platforms. With limited authorial control, they sought to reach widely differing local audiences, and to do so against a background of national interests, changing technologies, the dynamics of globalization, and the restructuring of the knowledge, culture, and entertainment industries. King points to elements common to the more successful reenactments: fine-grained analysis; attention to multiple perspectives and scales, from the visual to the temporal; and the participation of audience members engaged affectively and imaginatively. Based on her assessment of the recent past, King posits the emergence of a feminist posthumanities.