Recently, Professor Merlyna Lim was invited by the University of Humboldt in Berlin to deliver a public lecture in which she was asked to “autobiographically reflect on [her] approach, locating [her] work in the larger fields and debates.” She was reluctant but eventually said yes!
So, in her attempt to help audience understand the multiple contexts she was speaking from/to, Lim visualized the complex ecology of her lived/research experiences in the graphic below. Some scholars from the audience commented that every researcher should have made this kind of graphic! One scholar said, “This is way better than a CV!” That’s probably right, no?
Title: Legally Brown: Living and Researching Media/Politics in the Critical Spaces”
Abstract:
How to study the intricate and complex relationship between media, politics, and society? How does this relationship change in the last two decades? From the analog to the digital, from the authoritarian system to semi-authoritarian and/or (transition to) democracy, from cybercafe to mobile phone, there have been multiple layers of change that are embedded in the trajectory of the field of media and politics. Juxtaposing scholarly and personal narratives, in this lecture Merlyna Lim presents a reflective and reflexive review of her field of research, namely (digital) media and politics, capturing both the mediatization of politics and the politicization of media. In her attempt to do so, Lim also hopes to unravel how political, intellectual, and personal narratives are intertwined and complementary to each other.
Slideshow: