Casey Kelly, professor in the Department of Communication Studies, will give the talk "On Melancholia and White Pain" on October 5 in the City Union Swanson Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed via Zoom. Register here for the livestream.
The talk continues this year's CAS Inquire program theme of "Pleasure and Pain." Kelly will examine the dominant media narrative that President Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory was a reflection of white working class pain—physical and economic—rather than nativism and xenophobia. He will explore the racialized and classed schemas we draw from to make sense of and prioritize whose pain matters in U.S. public culture and how psychoanalytical theories of pain and melancholia explain the emergence of rhetorics of white victimhood.
Kelly's research interests in rhetoric, critical media studies, and cultural studies include representations of masculinity, whiteness, and race/racism.
The first talk of the series, "Pain and Pleasure in Philosophy" by Joseph Mendola of the Department of Philosophy, is available on Mediahub.
