Scholars@Hallwalls: Elizabeth Mazzolini
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY 14202)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Join us for Scholars@Hallwalls! Complimentary wine and light fare are served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q+A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camaraderie and conversation, but you can also livestream the event via the Hallwalls website.
Elizabeth Mazzolini
The Power We Squander: Paying Attention to Three Mile Island
Mazzolini’s talk looks how the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident got situated in culture, via the film The China Syndrome, whose theatrical release preceded the accident by twelve days, and via objects such as cooling tower-shaped lamps and mugs circulated in the wake of the plant’s proposed re-opening. Though they seem clearly polemical and broadly kitschy respectively, the film and these ephemera were caught within tangles of misunderstanding. Mazzolini untangles these misunderstandings and uses them to frame rhetoric around energy consumption and production, and to argue for treating human attention as an energetic resource.
Elizabeth Mazzolini is currently at work on a book project called “American Toxic,” which offers a material history of communication about toxicity during three coincidental poisoning events: as American smoking rates peaked in the late 1970s, an industrial dump at Love Canal in New York was discovered, and the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania nearly melted down. “American Toxic” investigates, via these foundational events, how toxicity moves rhetorically through culture as well as physically through communities, circulating back and forth between discourse and bodies.
