Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
| When: | Thursday, September 18th, 2025 |
| Time: | 6:00 pm — 8:30 pm |
| Location: | Richcraft Hall, 2228 (Conference Rooms) |
| Audience: | Alumni, Carleton Community, Current Students, Faculty, Professionals, Prospective Students, Staff |
The Communication and Media Studies program presents
The 16th Annual Attallah Lecture
The Moment of the Rage Room: Media, Purgation, and Politics
Presented by Dylan Mulvin
Associate Professor, London School of Economics
Thursday September 18 2025
Reception 6:00 pm
Lecture 7:00 pm
Richcraft Hall 2228
Named in honour of Paul Attallah (Mass Communication Program Head & SJC Associate Director, 1991-2005), the annual Attallah Lecture invites some of the brightest minds in communication and media studies to share their research and perspectives with the Carleton University community.
About the Lecture
We are said to be living in the “age of anger” where a bubbling rage pervades our contemporary societies, steaming off people regardless of nationality, political position, or subject position. We are also told that anger needs an outlet; if anger is not vented, it builds up and will explode – dangerously and unpredictably. Franz Fanon writes of what he calls “Collective Catharsis” declaring: “In every society, in every collectivity, exists – must exist – a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression can be released.” This talk takes up the “media of purgation” as techniques of losing control to gain control. The media of purgation allow us to interrogate relationships between anger, destruction, and catharsis and their roles in public life, especially in the ways that rage is understood as simultaneously dangerous and politically transformative.
About the Lecturer
Dylan Mulvin is an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics in the Department of Media and Communications.
Mulvin is a historian of media, technology, and culture. Drawing on methods from media studies, Science and Technology Studies, gender studies, and disability studies, he investigates the intersecting history of culture and technology, and the ways media artefacts encode and crystallise assumptions about human perception, emotion, and behaviour. In other words, Mulvin studies the ways people make the stuff that we take for granted and what happens when it all falls apart. He is the author of Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In (published open access with MIT Press) and is currently working on a monograph on the history of anger, art, and media titled Technologies of Rage.
Learn more about Mulvin on his website, dylanmulvin.com.