Lisa C Young
Biographic Data
| ID | 129731 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa C Young |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa C |
| FAMILY NAME | Young |
| SIGNATURE | YOUNG L C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carleton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4318-8552 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Adopting the watermelon: The history and acceptance of a novel fruit into North American Indigenous foodways
Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives in North America are working to reconnect communities with their heirloom seeds and ancestral foods. Understanding the history of these seeds and foods is an important part of this process of reconnecting. In this article, we examine the history of the introduction of dessert watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) into North America by weaving together archeological, ethnohistorical and early anthropological inform…
All In
This article situates the recent explosion of online and app-based sports betting within longer histories of datafication and financialization in sports business and culture. The author tracks four histories in which media technologies and financial logics dissolved previously stable sporting events, athletes, and results into aggregations of data and derivatives that could be leveraged and wagered on. Photography established feelings of confiden…
A History of the Idea of Speaking into the Air: A Conversation with John Durham Peters
The following is a conversation that took place between John Durham Peters (JDP) and the editors of this special issue, Chris Russill (CR), Hannah Dick (HD), and Liam Cole Young (LCY) on November 18, 2021. The conversation transcript has been edited for clarity
Introduction: Into the Air
In this introduction to the Into the Air special issue of Media Theory, the editors reflect on the resonances and rhythms of John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999). We consider what was in the air at the time of the book’s original publication, and during our time assembling this special issue. Drawing on publication and marketing materials from the book, as well as work in cultural studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, we ex…
Colonization’s Logistical Media: The Ship and the Document
On the Mediality of Two Towers: Calgary—Toronto
This article uses the CN Tower and Calgary Tower to explore how the architectural form of the tower possesses a number of characteristics we typically associate with media technologies. To appreciate what we call “tower-mediality,” we start first with a brief discussion of the scholarly literature on towers, highlighting that while much is said about towers’ symbolic value, little attention has been devoted to thinking of these forms in material …
Salt: Fragments from the History of a Medium
This essay explores histories of common salt, sodium chloride, using concepts and methods from media theory. It contributes to research on media and environment and the general 'material turn' taken across the Humanities. I conceive of salt as what Peters calls an 'elemental' medium so as to show, first, the imbrication of naturally-occurring substances in the operations and supply chains of digital culture. Second, the many lives salt has lived …
The McLuhan-Innis Field: In Search of Media Theory
Background This article uses archival material to revisit the intellectual and professional relationship between Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Analysis The author suggests four concepts by which to approach questions of influence, collaboration, legacy, and the emergence of intellectual “fields.” Each offers a different view than an analogous term more frequently employed in narratives of intellectual history and legacy. These concepts ar…
Emergence and Empire: Innis, Complexity, and the Trajectory of History by John Bonnett
Innis’s Infrastructure
The work of Harold Adams Innis offers important contributions to the recent “infrastructural” turn in media, communication, and cultural studies. While Innis’s late communication studies texts are widely read, few outside Canada engage with his earlier economic histories and the “dirt research” (fieldwork) that produced them. The early texts offer the clearest presentation of Innis’s infrastructural orientation. The author traces the development …
Networks of Ceramic Exchange: Comparing Homol'ovi Pueblo III Pithouse and Pueblo Communities
In the northern Southwest, archaeologists generally examine the pithouse-to-pueblo transition as a sequential change, with pueblos replacing pithouses by A.D. 1000, and argue that it reflects a fundamental reorganization of farming communities. However, in some areas, such as Homol'ovi in northeastern Arizona, pithouses continued to be inhabited into the second millennium A.D. This article examines whether the differences in the organization of p…
Eating Serial: Beatrice Lindsay, Vegetarianism, and the Tactics of Everyday Life in the Late Nineteenth Century
This paper derives from research I conducted in the archives of the Vegetarian Society, in Manchester, in October 2011 on the figure of Beatrice Lindsay, a graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, who, in 1885, became the first female editor of the Society’s journal, the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger. In addition to her position as editor, Lindsay contributed a monthly column on “New Foods” in which she displayed her fluency with sci…
Cultural techniques: Grids, filters, doors, and other articulations of the real
Cultural Techniques and Logistical Media: Tuning German and Anglo-American Media Studies
Theories of Kulturtechniken ('cultural techniques') have been vigorously debated in the German media theory milieu since the turn of the millennium. Multiple, often competing conceptualizations of this slippery term (and its exemplars) have emerged as Kulturtechniken morphed into its current, most theoretically sophisticated incarnation (see Geoghegan; Winthrop-Young, "Kultur"). Though only now beginning to percolate in Anglo-American media studi…
Un–Black Boxing the List: Knowledge, Materiality, and Form
This article examines “the list” as a material form, attempting to foreground its integral yet often overlooked role in human communication, administration, and thought. Taking a media materialist approach, the article first presents a brief history of the list that examines certain contexts in which it has been operative. Secondly, it presents a case study from the field of popular music (Bob Mersereau’s Top 100 Canadian Singles) to demonstrate …
Files, Lists, and the Material History of the Law
This article reviews Cornelia Vismann's 2008 book Files: Law and Media Technology. In addition to an overview of Vismann's media materialist approach to the study of the law, it provides both a consideration of her relationship to Friedrich Kittler's media theory and a more focused examination of certain functional writing entities that might extend Vismann's genealogical approach. It is suggested that a closer analysis of one such entity, the li…
The Value of Cracked Pots: Ceramic Mend Holes in Northern Arizona
Archaeological analyses of value in ancient societies often focus on rare or exotic artifacts. This paper takes an alternative approach by examining value in ceramic vessels, a commonly found domestic item. Mend holes are used to identify which vessels the inhabitants of two 12th century A.D. sites in northern Arizona deemed valuable enough to repair. This analysis shows that distance from manufacturing area was not the only factor used to make d…
Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest: Proceedings from the Workshop "Resource Stress, Economic Uncertainty, and Human Response in the Prehistoric Southwest" Held Feb…
Logistic Mobility and Expedient Technology: A Response to Sullivan
Lithics and Adaptive Diversity: An Examination of Limited-Activity Sites in Northeast Arizona
Upham (1984) proposes that prehistoric populations frequently oscillated between mobile and sedentary adaptive strategies and then uses this idea to reinterpret abandonments in the American Southwest. In areas where limited-activity sites are common, he argues that many of these sites represent the remains of hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary agriculturalists. This paper suggests that differences in lithic technology provide a better method …
The Thermal Properties of Textured Ceramics: An Experimental Study
The hypothesis is tested that the greater exterior surface area of textured vessels increases the rate of heating, during food preparation, as compared to vessels with smoothed exterior surfaces. Experiments are performed on replicated corrugated bowls, a particular type of exterior texturing commonly found in the prehistoric SW United States. The experiments show that corrugated vessels do not heat at a faster rate than comparable plain ware pot…
A Preliminary Analysis of Temporal Changes in the Homol'ovi III Chipped Stone Assemblage
This preliminary analysis of the Homol'ovi III chipped stone assemblage describes the lithic technology used at this site and examines temporal changes in a sample of the assemblage. The shift from a year-round to a seasonal habitation of the site is used to explain changes in the proportion of certain artifact types. Other temporal differences, such as a marked increase in the proportion of obsidian, are argued to reflect the process of aggregat…
The Thermal Properties of Textured Ceramics: An Experimental Study
The hypothesis is tested that the greater exterior surface area of textured vessels increases the rate of heating, during food preparation, as compared to vessels with smoothed exterior surfaces. Experiments are performed on replicated corrugated bowls, a particular type of exterior texturing commonly found in the prehistoric SW United States. The experiments show that corrugated vessels do not heat at a faster rate than comparable plain ware pot…
Salt: Fragments from the History of a Medium
This essay explores histories of common salt, sodium chloride, using concepts and methods from media theory. It contributes to research on media and environment and the general 'material turn' taken across the Humanities. I conceive of salt as what Peters calls an 'elemental' medium so as to show, first, the imbrication of naturally-occurring substances in the operations and supply chains of digital culture. Second, the many lives salt has lived …
The Value of Cracked Pots: Ceramic Mend Holes in Northern Arizona
Archaeological analyses of value in ancient societies often focus on rare or exotic artifacts. This paper takes an alternative approach by examining value in ceramic vessels, a commonly found domestic item. Mend holes are used to identify which vessels the inhabitants of two 12th century A.D. sites in northern Arizona deemed valuable enough to repair. This analysis shows that distance from manufacturing area was not the only factor used to make d…
Cultural Techniques and Logistical Media: Tuning German and Anglo-American Media Studies
Theories of Kulturtechniken ('cultural techniques') have been vigorously debated in the German media theory milieu since the turn of the millennium. Multiple, often competing conceptualizations of this slippery term (and its exemplars) have emerged as Kulturtechniken morphed into its current, most theoretically sophisticated incarnation (see Geoghegan; Winthrop-Young, "Kultur"). Though only now beginning to percolate in Anglo-American media studi…
Innis’s Infrastructure
The work of Harold Adams Innis offers important contributions to the recent “infrastructural” turn in media, communication, and cultural studies. While Innis’s late communication studies texts are widely read, few outside Canada engage with his earlier economic histories and the “dirt research” (fieldwork) that produced them. The early texts offer the clearest presentation of Innis’s infrastructural orientation. The author traces the development …
Lithics and Adaptive Diversity: An Examination of Limited-Activity Sites in Northeast Arizona
Upham (1984) proposes that prehistoric populations frequently oscillated between mobile and sedentary adaptive strategies and then uses this idea to reinterpret abandonments in the American Southwest. In areas where limited-activity sites are common, he argues that many of these sites represent the remains of hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary agriculturalists. This paper suggests that differences in lithic technology provide a better method …
Networks of Ceramic Exchange: Comparing Homol'ovi Pueblo III Pithouse and Pueblo Communities
In the northern Southwest, archaeologists generally examine the pithouse-to-pueblo transition as a sequential change, with pueblos replacing pithouses by A.D. 1000, and argue that it reflects a fundamental reorganization of farming communities. However, in some areas, such as Homol'ovi in northeastern Arizona, pithouses continued to be inhabited into the second millennium A.D. This article examines whether the differences in the organization of p…
A Preliminary Analysis of Temporal Changes in the Homol'ovi III Chipped Stone Assemblage
This preliminary analysis of the Homol'ovi III chipped stone assemblage describes the lithic technology used at this site and examines temporal changes in a sample of the assemblage. The shift from a year-round to a seasonal habitation of the site is used to explain changes in the proportion of certain artifact types. Other temporal differences, such as a marked increase in the proportion of obsidian, are argued to reflect the process of aggregat…
All In
This article situates the recent explosion of online and app-based sports betting within longer histories of datafication and financialization in sports business and culture. The author tracks four histories in which media technologies and financial logics dissolved previously stable sporting events, athletes, and results into aggregations of data and derivatives that could be leveraged and wagered on. Photography established feelings of confiden…
Logistic Mobility and Expedient Technology: A Response to Sullivan
A Preliminary Analysis of Temporal Changes in the Homol'ovi III Chipped Stone Assemblage
This preliminary analysis of the Homol'ovi III chipped stone assemblage describes the lithic technology used at this site and examines temporal changes in a sample of the assemblage. The shift from a year-round to a seasonal habitation of the site is used to explain changes in the proportion of certain artifact types. Other temporal differences, such as a marked increase in the proportion of obsidian, are argued to reflect the process of aggregat…
The Thermal Properties of Textured Ceramics: An Experimental Study
The hypothesis is tested that the greater exterior surface area of textured vessels increases the rate of heating, during food preparation, as compared to vessels with smoothed exterior surfaces. Experiments are performed on replicated corrugated bowls, a particular type of exterior texturing commonly found in the prehistoric SW United States. The experiments show that corrugated vessels do not heat at a faster rate than comparable plain ware pot…
Logistic Mobility and Expedient Technology: A Response to Sullivan
Lithics and Adaptive Diversity: An Examination of Limited-Activity Sites in Northeast Arizona
Upham (1984) proposes that prehistoric populations frequently oscillated between mobile and sedentary adaptive strategies and then uses this idea to reinterpret abandonments in the American Southwest. In areas where limited-activity sites are common, he argues that many of these sites represent the remains of hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary agriculturalists. This paper suggests that differences in lithic technology provide a better method …
Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest: Proceedings from the Workshop "Resource Stress, Economic Uncertainty, and Human Response in the Prehistoric Southwest" Held Feb…
The Value of Cracked Pots: Ceramic Mend Holes in Northern Arizona
Archaeological analyses of value in ancient societies often focus on rare or exotic artifacts. This paper takes an alternative approach by examining value in ceramic vessels, a commonly found domestic item. Mend holes are used to identify which vessels the inhabitants of two 12th century A.D. sites in northern Arizona deemed valuable enough to repair. This analysis shows that distance from manufacturing area was not the only factor used to make d…
Un–Black Boxing the List: Knowledge, Materiality, and Form
This article examines “the list” as a material form, attempting to foreground its integral yet often overlooked role in human communication, administration, and thought. Taking a media materialist approach, the article first presents a brief history of the list that examines certain contexts in which it has been operative. Secondly, it presents a case study from the field of popular music (Bob Mersereau’s Top 100 Canadian Singles) to demonstrate …
Files, Lists, and the Material History of the Law
This article reviews Cornelia Vismann's 2008 book Files: Law and Media Technology. In addition to an overview of Vismann's media materialist approach to the study of the law, it provides both a consideration of her relationship to Friedrich Kittler's media theory and a more focused examination of certain functional writing entities that might extend Vismann's genealogical approach. It is suggested that a closer analysis of one such entity, the li…
Eating Serial: Beatrice Lindsay, Vegetarianism, and the Tactics of Everyday Life in the Late Nineteenth Century
This paper derives from research I conducted in the archives of the Vegetarian Society, in Manchester, in October 2011 on the figure of Beatrice Lindsay, a graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, who, in 1885, became the first female editor of the Society’s journal, the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger. In addition to her position as editor, Lindsay contributed a monthly column on “New Foods” in which she displayed her fluency with sci…
Cultural techniques: Grids, filters, doors, and other articulations of the real
Cultural Techniques and Logistical Media: Tuning German and Anglo-American Media Studies
Theories of Kulturtechniken ('cultural techniques') have been vigorously debated in the German media theory milieu since the turn of the millennium. Multiple, often competing conceptualizations of this slippery term (and its exemplars) have emerged as Kulturtechniken morphed into its current, most theoretically sophisticated incarnation (see Geoghegan; Winthrop-Young, "Kultur"). Though only now beginning to percolate in Anglo-American media studi…
Innis’s Infrastructure
The work of Harold Adams Innis offers important contributions to the recent “infrastructural” turn in media, communication, and cultural studies. While Innis’s late communication studies texts are widely read, few outside Canada engage with his earlier economic histories and the “dirt research” (fieldwork) that produced them. The early texts offer the clearest presentation of Innis’s infrastructural orientation. The author traces the development …
Networks of Ceramic Exchange: Comparing Homol'ovi Pueblo III Pithouse and Pueblo Communities
In the northern Southwest, archaeologists generally examine the pithouse-to-pueblo transition as a sequential change, with pueblos replacing pithouses by A.D. 1000, and argue that it reflects a fundamental reorganization of farming communities. However, in some areas, such as Homol'ovi in northeastern Arizona, pithouses continued to be inhabited into the second millennium A.D. This article examines whether the differences in the organization of p…
Emergence and Empire: Innis, Complexity, and the Trajectory of History by John Bonnett
The McLuhan-Innis Field: In Search of Media Theory
Background This article uses archival material to revisit the intellectual and professional relationship between Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Analysis The author suggests four concepts by which to approach questions of influence, collaboration, legacy, and the emergence of intellectual “fields.” Each offers a different view than an analogous term more frequently employed in narratives of intellectual history and legacy. These concepts ar…
On the Mediality of Two Towers: Calgary—Toronto
This article uses the CN Tower and Calgary Tower to explore how the architectural form of the tower possesses a number of characteristics we typically associate with media technologies. To appreciate what we call “tower-mediality,” we start first with a brief discussion of the scholarly literature on towers, highlighting that while much is said about towers’ symbolic value, little attention has been devoted to thinking of these forms in material …
Salt: Fragments from the History of a Medium
This essay explores histories of common salt, sodium chloride, using concepts and methods from media theory. It contributes to research on media and environment and the general 'material turn' taken across the Humanities. I conceive of salt as what Peters calls an 'elemental' medium so as to show, first, the imbrication of naturally-occurring substances in the operations and supply chains of digital culture. Second, the many lives salt has lived …
Colonization’s Logistical Media: The Ship and the Document
A History of the Idea of Speaking into the Air: A Conversation with John Durham Peters
The following is a conversation that took place between John Durham Peters (JDP) and the editors of this special issue, Chris Russill (CR), Hannah Dick (HD), and Liam Cole Young (LCY) on November 18, 2021. The conversation transcript has been edited for clarity
Introduction: Into the Air
In this introduction to the Into the Air special issue of Media Theory, the editors reflect on the resonances and rhythms of John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999). We consider what was in the air at the time of the book’s original publication, and during our time assembling this special issue. Drawing on publication and marketing materials from the book, as well as work in cultural studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, we ex…
All In
This article situates the recent explosion of online and app-based sports betting within longer histories of datafication and financialization in sports business and culture. The author tracks four histories in which media technologies and financial logics dissolved previously stable sporting events, athletes, and results into aggregations of data and derivatives that could be leveraged and wagered on. Photography established feelings of confiden…
Adopting the watermelon: The history and acceptance of a novel fruit into North American Indigenous foodways
Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives in North America are working to reconnect communities with their heirloom seeds and ancestral foods. Understanding the history of these seeds and foods is an important part of this process of reconnecting. In this article, we examine the history of the introduction of dessert watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) into North America by weaving together archeological, ethnohistorical and early anthropological inform…
Sociology (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Cybernetics and Technology in Society (4 works)