Clayton Rosati, Ph.D.

Profile:

I am a geographer.  Before I knew what geography was, I grew up in Linden, Virginia, played drums in a few bands, and occasionally showed paintings and drawings in local art shows.  My academic studies appear to be rather nomadic but have always been focused on cities, culture, and economic development.  I received my B.A. in African American Studies and Political Science from Syracuse University, interested in poverty, class politics and American race relations.  After working for a literacy organization in Warrenton, VA for a year, I returned to Syracuse for a M.A. in Sociology, focusing on urban political economy, culture industries, and cultural theory.  While back at Syracuse, I realized that geography pulled all of my interests together in innovative ways.

In Geography, I studied political economy, globalization, urban culture industries, and particularly the role of technology and the built environment in the production of mass cultural forms.  My current book project focuses on New York City, MTV and the control and mobilization of urban spaces and infrastructure for the production of global forms of cultural authority.

Fundamentally, I am interested in issues of social justice and the ways in which relations of cultural production, through technology and industry, often work against justice projects. I have served in leadership positions for several anti-racist organizations and am also a musician, having worked in many community arts projects in the Syracuse and Washington, DC areas.

Education:

Ph.D. Syracuse University, Geography
M.A. Syracuse University, Sociology
B.A. Syracuse University, African American Studies and Political Science

Selected Courses Taught:

Intro to Media & the Information Society
Introduction to Critical Thinking (Honors)
Privacy, Dissent, and the Surveillance Society
Media Industry & Events (Political Economy of Media)
Media, Place, and Power (Media Geographies)
Critical Studies of Media (Grad)
Philosophical Foundations of Communication (Grad)

Writings:

Google Scholar Page

Select Representative Works:

Books:

Rosati, Clayton. (Under Contract). Times Square’s Last Peepshow: Television, The City, and the Rise of the Interactive Age. University of Georgia Press. https://ugapress.org/series/geographies-of-justice-and-social-transformation/

Atkinson, J. and Rosati, Clayton. (2020). Alternative Spaces/Transformative Places: Democratizing Unruliness in an Age of Austerity. Peter Lang. https://www.peterlang.com/document/1057163

Articles:

Rosati, Clayton, James, Aju, & Metcalf, Kathryne (2023). "Data plantation: Northern Virginia and the territorialization of digital civilization in 'the Internet Capital of the World.'" Online Media and Global Communication, 2(2), 199–227.

Rosati, Clayton. “Infrastructures of Obscenity: Total Request Live and Participatory TV Production in Action.” Cultural Geographies, May 25, 2022.

Rosati, Clayton. (Dec 2019). “Infrastructures of Feeling and the Right to the City” (research in brief). Asia Pacific Media Educator, 29(2), 251–258.

Rosati, Clayton (2012). "Guy Debord, ‘Gilded Poverty,’ and the Contemporary Crisis: On Marxism, Spectacle, and the Banality of Inequality." Culture, Theory, Critique 53(3): 339-363.

Rosati, Clayton. (2007). “MTV: 360o of the Industrial Production of Culture.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32 (4): 556-575.

Chapters:

Luthra, Aman and Rosati, Clayton. (2021). “Emerging issues in post-development for social justice: critical analysis of power, local place, and networks in globalization and post development.” In Srinivas Melkote (Eds.) Handbook of Communication and Development. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Rosati, Clayton. (2017). “Spectacle and the Singularity: Guy Debord and the ‘Autonomous Movement of Non-Life.” In Emiliana Armano and Marco Briziarelli (Eds.) The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord In The Context Of Digital Capitalism. University of Westminster Press.

Rosati, Clayton. (2012) “Media and the Democratization of Privation: Towards New Communicative Geographies of Anti-Poverty.” Srinivas Melkote (Ed.) Development Communication in Directed Social Change: A Reappraisal of Theories & Approaches. Asian Media Information and Communication Center.

Selected Public Scholarships:

Remembering Micere Githae Mugo, 8/3/23. Reading of "Intellectuals or Imposters." A Poem by Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo from her book "My Mother's Poem and Other Songs". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5y7BfXdA54

Author Page for Versopolis Review ( The European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture is a pan-European online literary magazine.) https://www.versopolis.com/author/254/clayton-rosati"Mental Wage-Slavery," Counterpunch (2012)

Visual Interventions Editor, Human Geography (https://www.hugeog.org/home/HG)