Barry MauerUniversity of Central Florida | UCF · Department of English
Barry Mauer
Ph.D.
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70
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 1999 - present
Education
September 1992 - May 1999
Publications
Publications (70)
John Rajchman asks, “In what ways have exhibitions, more than simple displays
and confi gurations of objects, helped change ideas about art, intersecting at particular
junctions with technical innovations, discursive shift s and larger kinds of
philosophical investigations, thus forming part of these larger histories?” This essay attempts to answer...
Aimé Césaire stated that colonialism “dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himse...
Citizen Curating aims for the emergence of a renewed urban and virtual public sphere, one that includes a framework for an operative fifth estate, the tools and materials for doing public history work, and access to officials who set public policy.
Professors' loyalty must be to their academic disciplines and not to state officials. Political interference in higher education corrupts the entire enterprise. Professors, and not state officials, know best how to govern research and teaching. The appropriate job of state officials, and of the Board of Governors, is to support free and open schola...
Some bad ideas get past a mind’s defenses and then hijack the mind’s immune system. These bad ideas recruit the mind’s defenses to protect themselves, even if that recruitment ends up harming the mind that hosts it. This process is similar to what happens with metastatic cancer, which spreads from one location in the body to a distant one. Metastat...
This book walks you through the process of conducting literary research while helping to refine your library skills. Along the way, we will draw from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Framework. According to the ACRL, “Research is iterative and depends upon asking increasingly complex or new questions who...
In 2020, the US Department of Defense elicited research that "would look at audience vulnerability to suasory discourses, as delivered by a variety of authentic and inauthentic actors and at methods to improve audience resilience to malign and deceptive information attacks" (DoD 2020, 48). This chapter argues that malign and deceptive information f...
This article explores the production, repurposing, and reception of the Miles Brothers’ A Trip Down Market Street through five iterations: the original Market Street print, filmed four days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, avant-garde filmmaker Ernie Gehr’s 1974 Eureka, Darryl Palmer’s 1995 experimental essay about Eureka, film historian D...
This book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, etc., including a contribution by Alain Touraine. From coloniality to pandemic, modernity can now repre...
The list serves mundane purposes such as groceries and to-dos, but it also serves as an invention process. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, first produced in 1975 and available in four editions, is an evolving list of over 100 instructions meant to help the creative person deal with common obstacles such as writer's block. In our meditation on the c...
Educators want their students to live healthy, ethical lives within a healthy, ethical society. But an enormous obstacle stands in the way: a right-wing cult that poses an existential threat to personal and collective well-being. This cult, tens of millions strong, blocks efforts to address all other major problems including climate change, racism,...
We base our political beliefs and behaviors not upon reality, but upon pictures in our heads. And some people, especially right wingers, are less likely to change the faulty pictures in their heads when ugly old reality intrudes. The results can be catastrophic.
I began the comic series Deadly Delusions in 2013 in response to the increasingly extreme and dangerous right-wing propaganda I had observed over the past several decades.5 My aim for the project has been to combine scholarship, maximal rhetorical force, and a punk do-it-yourself aesthetic. Deadly Delusions shifts away from debates about whether th...
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 at the
Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. this event challenges me to do my
duty as a citizen. citizenship, as Gregory Ulmer argues, requires testing
our values and behaviors against the sacrifices they entail, and then
testifying in the public sphere about the results of this process....
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. We may never know or understand what was in Mateen’s mind, but we can situate his attack within the history of eliminationism in America.
Islamist terrorism is just part of a larger phenomenon: right wing eliminationism. But despite centuries...
The Citizen Curator Project, established in 2014 in Orlando, encourages ordinary citizens to try curating for themselves and to approach the task as a form of public policy consultation. Curating as activism requires that we assume the identity of uninvited consultants who have witnessed catastrophe, deliberated about it, and wish to share our epip...
The " repulsive monument " is a textual genre invented by Gregory Ulmer. Repulsive monuments honor abject losses, which result from a collective's behaviors but are disowned by the collective. Though memorializing the leaders of the Confederacy—Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis—as Stone Mountain does, is certainly repulsive in t...
On April 18, 2017, David Neiwert presented a talk to the University of Central Florida titled “The New Age of Eliminationism in America: How the Internet Feeds Radicalization and Dehumanization.” The next
day, he sat down for a discussion with Dr. Barry Mauer, Interim Director of the Texts and Technology Doctoral Program and a codirector of the Cit...
Archiving is undergoing a grammatological shift that began with the invention of photography nearly two centuries ago. Walter Benjamin was the first to theorize the age of sampling, and he did so by drawing heavily on the work of the Surrealists. In his essay on Surrealism, he writes: “a collection is composed of objects wrenched out of their conte...
For the third time in three years, Republican state
legislators, backed by the NRA and ALEC (American
Legislative Exchange Council) are pushing a bill that
would allow guns on campus. The argument
supporting the bill is a mixture of myth and
misinformation. On the myth side: the claim that the
Second Amendment gives people the right to carry
guns a...
One of the central topics of study in the humanities is the question of ideology. There are many theories about what it is and how it works. One of the more significant of these theories comes from a French Marxist, Louis Althusser, in his 1970 essay, " Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation). " In it he argues t...
A humanities education aims to produce self-reflection, not only in the individual person (as in the Oracle's order to Socrates: "Know Thyself") but also at the institutional and the collective levels. At the heart of identity, whether of the person or institution, there are blind spots that prevent us from seeing how we have been shaped by ideolog...
Our species now has everything it needs to create a life of abundance and leisure for all people. Our computers and robots can automate nearly every task. We can produce enough energy from non-carbon-based sources to fulfill our needs without significantly harming the planet.
A glossary of key terms from Gregory Ulmer's book, Electronic Monuments.
A glossary of key terms from Gregory Ulmer's book, Avatar Emergency.
Censorship is not all bad! Free-speech idealists argue that the solution to bad speech(misinformation, lies, abusive language, etc.) is not censorship but more speech. But badspeech can, and often does, drown out the good.
Censorship Is Not All Bad. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297730211_Censorship_Is_Not_All_Bad [acce...
The world is in a state of real emergency. It’s time for educators to act by demanding a place at the table of public discourse. We must organize to repair public policies that are corrupt, our institutions, and our planet.
The repulsive monument, a genre created by Gregory Ulmer, samples heterogenous materials from archives and curates these materials in provocative ways. Such monuments are repulsive because they memorialize the abject: losses resulting from the collective’s behaviors but disowned by the collective. Repulsive monuments provide a platform for ordinary...
The more educated right wingers are, the more likely they are to reject science when it conflicts with their beliefs. This type of denial is called the “smart idiot” effect and it has deadly consequences.
A wise society looks after the well-being of its citizenry. In order for there to be a wise society, though, many or most of its citizenry also must be wise since they create the society. But the society must educate its citizens to be wise.
It’s a chicken-egg problem: Which comes first, the wise society or the wise citizenry?
Florida’s society o...
This chapter presents a method for teaching students in writing classes to make repulsive memorials, which reveal to us the repulsive origins and abject by-products of national identity formation. Barry Mauer, who is a professor of English and teaches in the Texts and Technology PhD program, has taught students to make memorials for the past twenty...
This comic form essay asks why denial is more prevalent among right wingers in America.
Public intellectuals are indispensable to a healthy and thriving
society, and intellectuals employed by public universities
have a greater responsibility to the public. To be a public
intellectual is to assume a responsibility to the truth. As Noam
Chomsky, public intellectual for over a half-century, stated,
“It is the responsibility of intellectu...
A presentation as part of an exhibit at the University of Central Florida for the NEA-Funded project, The Big Read, which focused on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Includes student work.
Many right-wingers believe they are the only real Americans and are persecuted by progressives, environmentalists, Muslims, atheists, minorities, foreigners, poor people, women, and gays—typically the least powerful people in America. This combination of grandiose and persecutory delusions creates the seeds of hatred, war, slavery and genocide. We...
Dangerous beliefs once limited to the fringe are now central to right wing political discourse.
The performance of identity involves impression management, social skills, and self-reflexivity. To perform identity in media environments involves writing our identities into being. Media environments have facilitated a new kind of selfhood—brand—in which we model our identities on celebrities. However, because brand identity has no ethical ground...
This essay assesses Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, 2004) to gauge documentary film’s capacity to restore the public sphere. What factors shape the making of news during times of war? How can viewers learn to navigate the competing media frames and narratives about war? How can dedicated documentarians make more democratic a public sphere that has be...
This essay explores the emergency posed by global biocultural diversity loss and the emergence of a new form of electronic monumentality, theorized by Gregory Ulmer in Electronic Monuments, and used here to address the biocultural diversity crisis. Like Ulmer, who created an agency - the EmerAgency - to produce electronic monuments, I have done the...
Gould’s work teaches us that listening can be as much an act of creation as composing, performing, or recording. Learning to listen properly, Gould argued, produces an experience of ecstasy and leads to spiritual good. This experience of ecstasy was, for Gould, an experience of passionate transcendence, a communion with the beyond.
Glenn Gould an...
We would like our students to come to class focused and ready to learn. But it's no secret that students often arrive distracted. If we add to the picture a teacher who is unfocused, we can expect an unproductive class. Most of us know when we're having a bad teaching day. Sometimes we have car trouble, feel under the weather, or have concerns abou...
"Clipography" is a neologism for a subgenre of Gregory Ulmer's "Mystory,"
a research method that links self-knowledge and disciplinary
knowledge (InternetInvention 79). Clipography uses the poetic "dream
logic" of pop-music video clips as its formal paradigm for doing academic
research. It draws the materials of the "popcycle" (Heuretics
195)—famil...
This article is the second part of on ongoing series about lost data. The first part, titled "Proposal for a Monument to Lost Data," sought to establish the growing impact of lost data and proposed the establishment of a monument as a healthy response to the problem. This article covers some of the same subjects but also considers steps to implemen...
When I was a graduate student, my professor told me that my writing style did not meet the standards for graduate-level writing. When I spoke to him about it, I admitted that my writing needed work but claimed I " had good ideas. " I will never forget his answer: " If your writing is not clear to your reader, you have no ideas. " He did me a favor....
As our society transfers its archives from print to digital media, an unintended consequence results; we lose a great amount of data. The effects of data loss can be profound; without access to vital data, our access to history may be severely diminished. Data loss threaten to undermine individual lives and major institutions. This essay discusses...
This essay is a manifesto for a cinematic/electronic media and cultural studies research method. I argue that
Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills were produced using such a research method and I adapt this method for
use within media and cultural studies.
Anti-speech advocates have made several arguments aimed at critics of the Iraq War. Many of these antispeech
arguments are enthymemes. If the purpose of these rhetors is to deceive others into accepting a
weak claim, then enthymemes are ideal forms because they hide the weakest parts of the argument. By
exposing their hidden premises, the parts tha...
This essay explores three approaches to “musical writing” from a course called “Writing
About Popular Music.” I designed the course with the help of Dr. Robert Ray while
finishing my Ph.D. at the University of Florida and continued to develop it with the help
of Li Wei of the music program at the University of Central Florida.
We describe two distinct distributed systems, MeasureMe and GeoPresence. As with all distributed software systems, these require support for communication, coordination, task distribution and persistent shared data. In this paper, we show how the tuple spaces paradigm provides the required communication and coordination, and how its use facilitates...
This essay describes an innovative film studies assignment in which students explore still photography and Hollywood cinema. The author and his freshman cinema studies students learned by doing—they created their own film stills after Cindy Sherman, employing frame analysis, semiotics, and Barthes's concept of the "third meaning" along the way.
http://www.enculturation.net/3_2/mauer/index.html. The goal of this essay is to explore the challenges posed to our sense-making apparatus by three stages in the life of "found photographs": their original context in the family photo album, their loss and discovery, and their recontextualization in the museum exhibit. Found photographs are media ar...
The day will come when "Monument 101" appears with "Argument 101" in the course schedules. Argument has provided the model for organizing and presenting information in literate culture for 2500 years. Argument has a memory function, a persuasion function, and an organization function. Our culture retains its accumulated wisdom in books written as a...