Daniel McFadden defended his doctoral dissertation, "Accident In Media: Imagining Complex Interactivity", on Thursday, August 22, 2024. The committee consisted of Brian Price (supervisor), Meghan Sutherland, James Cahill, Nadine Chan, exam chair Judith Taylor, and external examiner Greg Siegel (University of California, Santa Barbara).
We asked Daniel about his work, as well as his plans for the future.
“Accident in Media” takes as its central concern the representation of accidents in film and television. Much of the literature that has studied the accident (and the relationship of accidents to media) has done so under the auspices of the accident’s relationship to modern technology (and how the accident arises from the unforeseen failure of technology). This project, in contrast, seeks to explore a different facet of the accident: how the representation of accidents can give us new, sensuous understandings of the conditions that give rise to events that we interpret as accidents, and how mediation can provide us with ideas about the basic phenomenological structures of the accident. Encountering the representation of the accident is a phenomenologically rich experience, and I am concerned with how representations of the accident can prompt self-aware reflection on the finitude of human beings, both in our limited perception and knowledge, as well as the limited capacity we have to predict and control the outcomes of events. Thus, I am interested in how images of the accident might be existentially useful and transformative for our self-understanding of being-in-the-world.
To have completed this dissertation is the culmination of many years of work, driven by the care and attention of those that have helped and guided me. To this end, I am boundlessly grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Brian Price, who has been an unfailing champion of my work and trusted advisor. I also want to thank my committee members, Dr. Meghan Sutherland and Dr. James Cahill, as well as my examiners and dear colleagues. Finally, an infinite thanks to all of those people in my life who provide me love and support—without you, nothing is possible.
I am excited to continue pursuing my scholarship; to bring elements of this project to fruition as publications, as well as to continue delving into topics phenomenological, political, and aesthetic.
His supervisor, Brian Price, had this to say about Daniel's dissertation:
Congratulations to Dr. Dan McFadden, who has successfully defended a brilliant dissertation, Accident in Media: Imagining Complex Interactivity! The dissertation rather ingeniously relies on representations of accidents in film and television in order to dislodge our tendency to understand accidents as bearing a necessary, if not original, relation to modern technology. McFadden shows, moreover, how the moving image helps us to understand the complexity of causality in ways that best other forms of explanation. In this way, Dan has not only made an important contribution to studies of the media accident, but has introduced a new role for moving image media in philosophies of causality and existential philosophy.
Congratulations, Dr. McFadden!
