Pam Brown

New School for Social Research, Sociology, Graduate Student

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Pamela Brown holds her undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Dartmouth College, a Master of Arts in Media Studies from The New School, and is currently a doctoral student in Sociology at The New School for Social Research.

Pam is also an activist who was a founding member of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and Strike Debt, and has been involved in campaigns and writing projects including the student debt pledge of refusal, the Debt Resistors Operations Manual, the Rolling Jubilee, and Shouldering the Costs, a public service report on debt and Hurricane Sandy.

Currently, Pam is a member of the national planning committee of the US Social Forum and an organizer of the People’s Investigation of Wall Street. She writes a column on the Tidal Magazine blog entitled Melting Into Air which can be found at tidalmag.org.
Supervisors: Paolo Carpignano, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, and Jeff Goldfarb
Phone: 347-875-7450

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Muqtedar Khan

University of Delaware

S B Rodriguez-Plate

Hamilton College

Andreas Umland

National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

Alisa Perren

The University of Texas at Austin

Tomasz Zarycki

University of Warsaw

Jayson Harsin

The American University of Paris (AUP)

Microsoft Research

Deakin University

Lancaster University

University of Notre Dame (Australia)

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Papers by Pam Brown

Dissonance: Time, Trauma & the Cinematic Re-memory of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The proliferation of the moving image over the last hundred years has created a moment where film... more The proliferation of the moving image over the last hundred years has created a moment where film theory has become inseparable from sociological theory. Theories of visuality, labor, culture and political economy have coalesced around the realization that the moving image not only carries cultural codes, but also fundamentally impacts consciousness and structures thought. Critical to this understanding are observations about the relationship between technology and narrative storytelling to memory and time. But what happens when represented emotion is so great that it resists being managed in this way? The films REwind and In My Country, which both take the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of post-apartheid South Africa as their subject matter are examples of what happens when represented events are so traumatic that cinematic narrative fails to contain them. In this paper I argue that, when unresolved social trauma confronts cinematic representation, form is exposed, revealing underlying social aims and the function of cinematic mediation toward organizing emotional affect toward labor in the context of neoliberal capitalism. It is in grappling with this confrontation that filmmakers choose between hegemonic structures that attempt to maintain social order, but fail artistically, or counter hegemonic representations that fail commercially.

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Constructing Memory in the Absence of History: Embodying Conflicting Narratives at Historic Brattonsville

There are many valid vantage points from which to view African-American history, however, one per... more There are many valid vantage points from which to view African-American history, however, one perspective that has not been fully explored is the interlocking connection between memory, history and narrative representation. The struggle over the loss of history, and the struggle to create memory have come to the fore in the post-civil rights era movement toward a new African-American identity that can be fully incorporated into American society. The desire to create a collective self-image that simultaneously incorporates African-Americans as full members of American society, yet acknowledges the horror of past history has necessarily entailed conflict over forgetting and remembering. Ground zero for the materialization of this form of "contested remembrance" is the plantation museum. Many plantation museums offer "living history" programs where volunteers dress in period attire and "interpret" history for visitors, making complex connections between the interpreter's present being and historical past. These complicated and conflicting dynamics came to the surface in 2005 when slave interpreters at Historic Brattonsville, a plantation and living museum in South Carolina, reinterpreted their roles. The following paper explores how conflict plays out over contested narratives as they engage history and memory, and as they necessarily manifest in representational forms at Historic Brattonsville. By perceiving narrative as the process by which memory and history mix and become legible, and also as naturally tending toward stasis and reification, we can better understand why the radical action of the interpreters failed to produce change.

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Moving the Net Neutrality Debate Forward by Changing the Conversation

The recent Comcast case involving their use of “network management” practices to block peer-to-pe... more The recent Comcast case involving their use of “network management” practices to block peer-to-peer file transfers has challenged the FCC to uphold their Internet Policy Statement, and has called attention to the issue of codifying net neutrality principles once again. In spite of the FCC’s enforcement of this policy, Comcast has continued to test its boundaries, even objecting to the FCC’s authority to regulate the Internet at all. Thus far, the net neutrality debate has centered on business and technological concerns, leaving the subtext of this conversation rarely examined or challenged. The paper argues that although refuting anti-neutrality arguments on both practical and philosophical grounds is necessary, the underlying neoliberal framework to this debate necessitates a fundamental shift in the conversation. The ongoing Comcast case and the opportunity of new American leadership make this a critical time to pose important value-driven arguments that center on ideals of democracy, commons and progress.

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The Failure of Culture Jamming: Resistance in a Postsocial World

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The Material Force of Story

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Balancing Acts: Self-Employment in the Age of Knowledge

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Talks by Pam Brown

The Neoliberal Vision

Over recent years, the American conversation has shifted from concern over equality to concern ov... more Over recent years, the American conversation has shifted from concern over equality to concern over freedom. The turn toward ideals of freedom and individualism has been termed “neoliberalism.” Most research on this transition focuses on the political and economic conditions associated with neoliberalism, and not on the relationship between this transition and the revolutionary change our media environment has undergone simultaneously. The paper argues that although accounts that seek to understand neoliberalism as a part of an ongoing ideological debate between conservatives and liberals are partially true, these accounts fail to provide a satisfying explanation of why these ideas have resonated so strongly at this time. By perceiving the moving image as the foundation of a fundamentally different mode of production, and by perceiving neoliberalism as an outgrowth of the breakdown of the historic relationship between labor and capital, we can understand neoliberalism as a change to social ethic associated with new technology.