Grad Prog at MCUK: introduced screening - "Preempting Dissent" (19/3)

Wednesday the 19th of March, The Egg, 3PM

Special Event: Dr Greg Elmer presents Preempting Dissent (2014)

The creative commons documentary Preempting Dissent (2014) builds upon the book of the same name written by Greg Elmer and Andy Opel. The film is a culmination of a collaborative process of soliciting, collecting and editing video, still images, and creative commons music files from people around the world. Preempting Dissent interrogates the expansion of the so-called “Miami-Model” of protest policing, a set of strategies developed in the wake of 9/11 to preempt forms of mass protest at major events in the US and worldwide. The film tracks the development of the Miami model after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, through the post-9/11 years, FTAA & G8/20 summits, and most recently the Occupy Wall St movements. The film exposes the political, social, and economic roots of preemptive forms of protest policing and their manifestations in spatial tactics, the deployment of so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and surveillance regimes. The film notes however that new social movements have themselves begun to adopt preemptive tactics so as not to fall into the trap set for them by police agencies worldwide: www.preemptingdissent.com

Greg Elmer is Bell Globemedia Research Chair and Professor of Media at Ryerson University where he heads the Infoscape Research Lab. Greg is currently visiting faculty fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Greg Elmer has published 7 books, including the co-authored book with Alessandra Renzi: Infrastructure Critical: Sacrifice at the Toronto G20 summit. He is currently working on a new book project that investigates the role that accounting practices and forms have played in the financialization of new media companies and users. He is also in preproduction for his next film DPRK 1989, a film that documents Canadian student participation in the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) in Pyongyang, North Korea.