Niall Flynn

I have previously completed a research project on subtitling and film experience (unpublished MA thesis, University College Cork, 2012). I argue that subtitling is not only a linguistic aid through translation, but that it also plays an affective role in film experience. I compare the series of negotiations required by subtitled films (between text + audiovisual image) to those required by Deleuze’s cinema books (between theories of film + philosophy). Negotiation between different discursive and formal registers structures these experiences. It becomes a mode of experience through which viewers feel, as much as read, subtitles.

Further reading in cultural theories and philosophy have led to my interest in the broader processes at work in cultural forms such as art, communication, and media, beyond narrow text-based and case-bound contexts. (See book reviews.)

My current research, as PhD candidate in Lincoln School of Film & Media, brings media-ecological perspectives to bear on the theme of interdisciplinary research. Media-ecological thinking stresses the dynamism, materiality, and entanglements of mediation; it is concerned with processes rather than objects. What these perspectives can contribute to the debate on interdisciplinarity relates to their methodological insights: as a pre-methodical sensibility, which emphasises reflexive and transverse thinking, media ecologies enable heuristic forms of research. In the face of disciplinary crisis, media-ecological research is characterised by speculation, empowerment, and emergence, and is not bound to traditional disciplinary limitations. It imagines a politics of the future.