Zizi Li, Ph.D.

Cool cool love that

It Starts With a Whisper A celebration of the strength, wisdom, beauty and humour of Native women; of Native culture and people, surviving and thriving.

A collection of environmental films made by Indigenous filmmakers that I've screened in Ecocinema over the years (shared today for obvious reasons):

1. It Starts with a Whisper (Shelley & Gronau Niro, 1993) vucavu.com/en/cfmdc/199...

I am so grateful to all of those people who spend their lives struggling for a better world for all of us.

Cannot agree more 💜✨

If you've written a book or many or are writing one now, what a cool fucking thing you are doing. I hope you bask in how awesome it is that you had ideas and thoughts and worked on them for years to develop them into words others can understand. Like that's some sorcery shit. Fuck AI, THIS is magic.

Spectator Special Issue: The Amateur Reconsidered: Media, Labor, Publics (Volume 46.2 Fall 2026) The category of the “amateur” has long been marked by instability. Etymologically linked to love (amator), the amateur historically signified passion and connoisseurship, yet in modern usage it has oscillated between devotion and dilettantism. This semantic tension has shaped how amateur practice has been positioned within aesthetic discourse, labor history, and the formation of the public sphere. Cinema and media studies has repeatedly returned to amateurism to both dismiss it and laud its critical and creative possibilities. Accounts of home movies and small-gauge film cultures once considered them part of the marginalia of personal or domestic life, but scholarship has since demonstrated their aesthetic, social, and historical significance. Scholarship, including Patricia Zimmermann’s foundational work, has situated amateur media within broader institutional and discursive frameworks, from the formation of aesthetic norms in clubs and contests to the intersections of labor history, expertise, and the public/private divide. Simultaneously, amateur practice has been examined as a counter-aesthetic and an alternative mode of production, as in Maya Deren’s “Amateur Versus Professional” (1959), which framed amateur film as resistant to the industrial logics of Hollywood. Yet amateurism has also been understood as politically mobilized: Soviet avant-garde circles and interwar Japanese movements such as Prokino envisioned the amateur as a figure of collectivism, workers’ culture, and social transformation. These diverse trajectories indicate that amateurism has never been a singular phenomenon, but rather a contested and heterogeneous category that both reflects and unsettles the boundaries of cultural production and consumption.

At a moment when digital platforms both amplify non-professional production and intensify regimes of credentialization, amateurism demands renewed critical scrutiny. How might the consideration of amateur practice illuminate shifting conceptions of authorship, expertise, and creativity? In what ways does amateurism negotiate or contest the professionalization of cultural life? And how might the figure of the amateur reframe our understandings of mediation, publicness, and the politics of work and play? This special issue of Spectator seeks contributions that interrogate amateurism as a theoretical and historical category across media forms and cultural contexts. We welcome essays that draw from diverse archives and methodologies, including studies of amateur film and video, domestic and vernacular media, digital platforms, and transnational amateur practices. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: Histories and theories of amateur media Digital platforms and amateur media Amateur media in a transnational/global context The politics of amateurism The aesthetics of amateur media Leisure, hobbies, audienceship, and labor Home movies Fandom Preservation and archival practices regarding amateur media Pedagogical approaches to amateur media Book reviews of recent scholarship examining amateur media Deadline for Submission: December 1, 2025 Spectator is a biannual publication by the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Division of Cinema & Media Studies. Manuscripts to be considered for publication should be sent to: Issue Editor: Wakae Nakane USC School of Cinematic Arts 900 W. 34th St. Suite 320 Los Angeles, CA-90089 wnakane@usc.edu

CFP — “The Amateur Reconsidered: Media, Labor, Publics”
Spectator Special Issue (Volume 46.2 Fall 2026)

Essay submissions due December 1, 2025.

See images with alt text here and in thread for CFP details. 1/

Adopt A Station - Rescue Public Media Help preserve independent journalism and community programming across America by adopting a public media station. Congress has voted to rescind public media's funding.

Here's a link to adopt public media stations whose funding got axed: adoptastation.org

Such a fascinating conversation about the finances of academic publishing - highly recommend to anyone looking to publish a book (or designing grad seminars - uploading PDFs of books undermines to the whole ecosystem!)

Cover of Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry by the Capacitor Collective

Our new book, Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry, is out today!

Use the code DIGI-WORKERS-HOMIE on the @commonnotions.bsky.social site for a 25% discount

Yes yes. Very strange.

Alice Wong on Instagram: "ID: Yellow background with black text "This is Alice's friend Sandy Ho, posting. Per Alice's wishes, this message is being shared at the time of her passing. Hi everyone, it ... 423 likes, 73 comments - alicatsamurai on November 14, 2025: "ID: Yellow background with black text "This is Alice's friend Sandy Ho, posting. Per Alice's wishes, this message is being shared at the t...

I don’t want to formulate words yet, but my friend Alice Wong, @sfdirewolf.bsky.social of the Disability Visibility Project, has passed.

Here are the words she left behind:
www.instagram.com/p/DREMDNBjnq...

It’s been a minute…I’ve been busy learning to surf…but I’m back 🤪

Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts Call for Papers Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the ArtsA Special Issue of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts

Call for Papers!

"Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts"-a special issue of Poetics, coedited with @jticona.bsky.social + Angèle Christin

www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/pla...

To remove media from historical contexts is a disservice to studying the cultural, economic, and political moments which shape the ways information is shared and interpreted.

The study of media means we must feel toward the past before we move forward.

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

🚨 Join us, in collaboration with the BTS Critical Reader and GYOPO, on August 17th in LA to celebrate our first print issue!

✨Stop by for boba, snacks, panels, a dance workshop, and the opportunity to purchase our inaugural issue in print! RSVP now to save your spot: givebutter.com/bangtanremixed

Nice little surprises at Fushimi Inari: i encountered one kitty on my way climbing up Mt Inari, and another kitty on my way down 😻😻

Black cat named coco

Meet Coco in Kyoto 🐈‍⬛🇯🇵

So happy to wake up early on the sweet Coast to watch this epic match and support Coco 🎾💜✨

Coco Gauff checking if there's anything inside the Roland Garros trophy

i would've done the same thing lmao

Meet my new neighborhood cat friend: Midnight 🐈‍⬛💜✨

🐈‍⬛ 🐈‍⬛ 🐈‍⬛

Sorry that role is taken by me already 😂 you can be a backup recorder

Sign me up for these neighborhood cat meetings / gatherings 🙋🏻‍♀️

Today’s kitty encounter 🐱✨

Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. The fullest day I know of begins with taking a portrait of a stranger in the middle of nowhere by 10 a.m. I do this while …

"When I’m... walking[,] I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment... now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom... that you can access your deepest creative wells."

We ended with Miyazaki's epic 1997 Princess Mononoke to discuss environmentalism, animism, and the Anthropocene. Also thinking about the power of animation, of storytelling, and the importance of media as a tool of imagining beyond our current way of life.

In Week 13, we continued with Alex Rivera's 2008 critical sci-fi film Sleep Dealer. We talked about borderland, technology, labor, extractive systems of operation, geopolitics, critique of capitalism and neocolonialism.

For Week 12, we watched Med Hondo's 1979 satirical musical West Indies. Streamed the entirety in class through Criterion Channel. Hopefully a physical release is coming soon and more film studies educators will incorporate this film in classes.

Two napping cats: one is orange, the other is largely white.

End of April timeline cleanse