Research Seminar - Close Encounters of the Hermeneutic Kind: UFOs as More-than-Human Media

Close Encounters of the Hermeneutic Kind: UFOs as More-than-Human Media

Presented by: Dr Adam Dodd

Date: Friday 21 March 2025
Time: 12:00noon to 1:00pm
Location: Online via Zoom and in-person at the Writers Studio (Level 6, Michie Building)

Abstract

“The meanings of these events, in other words, often have to be drawn out, thought through, translated, and finally integrated into public culture through conversations, texts, images, and books… Such experiences require our attention and intention, our cocreation. In a word, they must be interpreted.” – Jeffrey Kripal, How to Think Impossibly (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

This seminar presentation summarizes my forthcoming essay of the same title, to be published in UFOs Here and Now: 21^st Century Perspectives (Eds. William Dewan, Alison Fields and Daniel Wojcik, Syracuse University Press, 2026). It charts my ongoing attempt to simultaneously (re)think media and the UFO in ways oriented by the pursuit of meaning and process, rather than data and definitions. I am not attempting to explain what UFOs are or even what they could be. Instead, I am reflecting on what might happen, and what might be happening, when we think about, and think with UFOs in ways that consciously avoid anthropocentric constructs. By focusing on the how rather than the what, I am trying to illuminate an interplay of consciousness, culture, and the unknown. In this sense, I take a phenomenological approach to “the UFO experience” – an experience comprising, I argue, much more than merely “seeing UFOs.” I will outline what “more-than-human media” could mean in the context of UFO studies specifically, and media studies more broadly, examining Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) as my primary textual example.

Presenter

Dr. Adam Dodd is Teaching Associate in Communication and Media Studies at the School of Communication and Arts, UQ. His current research interests are focused on phenomenological and anthropocentric aspects of communication, media, and modernity pertaining to the environment, the nonhuman, and the more-than-human. His book, Beetle, was published by Reaktion (London) in 2016.