Digital Democracies Institute

ICA Conference - Javier Ruiz-Soler and Wendy Chun
2021-05-27 08:00 - 2021-05-31 17:00 UTC | Online
Wendy Chun moderates a panel at ICA on How Conspiracies Work: National and International Approaches to Trust, Mistrust, and Authenticity
Chairs
Javier Ruiz Soler, Simon Fraser U, CANADA
Moderator
Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser U, CANADA
Participants
Beyond Verification: Authenticity and Mis/Disinformation
Javier Ruiz Soler, Simon Fraser U, CANADA
Locating COVID-19 Conspiracies in South Africa and Nigeria
Iginio Gagliardone, Wits U, SOUTH AFRICA
This is Lebanon: Affective Motivations, Migrant Labor, and the Kafala System
Heather Jaber, U of Pennsylvania, USA
The Code, the Clock, and the QAnon Conspiracy Theory
Moira Weigel, Data & Society, USA
This panel analyzes conspiracies and misinformation, and how conspiracies become accepted as authentic. We present study cases on selected topics from different regions and discuss the common features of authenticity. Each one of the panelists will discuss the methods they have used in their research, or present alternative methods to study misinformation beyond fact-checking. This panel is focused on specific topics (COVID-19, QAnon, Wexit and the kafala system) in South Africa and Nigeria, United States, Canada, and Lebanon.

Jutta Treviranus talks to the Lab
2021-05-26 10:30 - 11:30 | Online
Jutta Treviranus is the Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) and professor at OCAD University in Toronto http://inclusivedesign.ca, formerly the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. The IDRC conducts proactive research and development in the inclusive design of emerging information and communication technology and practices. Jutta also heads the Inclusive Design Institute a multi-university regional centre of expertise on inclusive design. Jutta is the Co-Director of Raising the Floor International. She also established and directs an innovative graduate program in Inclusive Design. Jutta has led many international multi-partner research networks that have created broadly implemented technical innovations that support inclusion. These include the Fluid Project, Fluid Engage, CulturAll, Stretch, FLOE and many others. Jutta and her team have pioneered personalization as an approach to accessibility in the digital domain. She has played a leading role in developing accessibility legislation, standards and specifications internationally (including WAI ATAG, IMS AccessForAll, ISO 24751 , and AODA Information and Communication).

Wendy gives Keynote at Digital (Im)Materialities Conference
2021-05-25 09:30 - 11:00 | Online
Digital (Im)materialities is a student-run conference organized by the first-year MA Media Studies cohort at Concordia University in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal.
As the pandemic continues to rage, we approach one year of conducting much of our lives: personal, professional, academic, online. This transition has proven in turns frustrating, alienating, and humorous but, more saliently, it has highlighted myriad questions and challenges in the realm of communications and media studies. Given these considerations, our conference encourages a self-reflexive approach which takes advantage of the unique affordances of virtual gathering and challenges the notion of the virtual as ahistorical and non-spatial: a global conference for a moment of global crisis. This year has not only seen the mainstreaming of such platforms as Zoom and TikTok, but has reiterated the importance of longstanding lines of inquiry of Queer and Disability studies scholars whose work attends to the importance of digital community and accessibility. By bracketing the “im” in immaterialities, we hope to emphasize the dual nature of digitally mediated life during the pandemic: both the ephemeral and the durable; absence and presence. Though these aspects are inherent to virtual existence, they are highlighted during moments of crisis. While this conference is presented by the Communication Studies department, we wish to foster scholarship which bridges fields of study and provokes diverse ways of thinking through seemingly discipline-specific questions. As such, we hope to offer an arena for graduate scholars, research-creators, and artists to critically engage with the issues of the moment, offer solutions and connect with fellow thinkers to both mourn what has been lost during the pandemic and to celebrate the unique possibility for reimagining the status quo.

Digital Media Workshop: White Supremacy, Affect, and Digital Culture
2021-05-24 14:00 - 16:30 | Online
The Digital Media Workshop will be hosting Christine Goding-Doty and Tara McPherson on May 24 for a panel about White Supremacy, Affect, and Digital Culture, moderated by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.

Christine Goding Doty, Visiting Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges – Christine Goding-Doty is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Previously, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There she was a member of the 2018-2020 cohort of Mellon Fellows convened around the theme “Truth, Fact, and Ways of Knowing.” Dr. Goding-Doty received her PhD in African American Studies from Northwestern University in 2018. In the course of her study she also spent three years in cotutelle at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Tara McPherson, Professor and Chair, Cinema & Media Studies, University of Southern California – Tara McPherson is Chair and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies. She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

Moderated by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Simon Fraser University – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.

Co-sponsored by the Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies Working Group, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies

Wendy is Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago - Lecture 2
2021-05-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Online
Since 2003, the Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professorship has been held by some of the world’s most renowned scholars. The CI Professor is in residence at the University of Chicago for an academic quarter, where he or she teaches a graduate seminar and offers two public lectures.
In Spring 2021 we are proud to welcome Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), and coauthor of Pattern Discrimination (2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.
Spring Seminar: Critical Data Studies
(with guest Carina Albrecht)
4/28 to 5/31: Mon. and Wed., 10:30am–1:20pm
The massive collection of data, we are told, changes everything. It’s allegedly the new oil, the new resource to be exploited, as well as the new hidden, “real” layer behind all media. It transforms the creative practice, public sphere, scholarship, and intimate relationships by making them “data-driven.” It raises the specter of absolute surveillance and vacuum-sealed echo chambers, all in the name of giving users the commodities, friendships, and security they really want. To explore the possibilities and limitations of the “data turn”––this course asks: what difference does the mass capture, storage, correlation, and analysis of data make to society, culture, media, ethics and politics? How does it affect fundamental concepts, such as reality, agency, identity, verification, and temporality? It will answer these questions by exploring four key terms, such as correlation, authenticity, recognition, and neighborhoods, from historical, critical theory, and technical perspectives. It will also encourage students to contribute to the burgeoning field of Critical Data Studies by exploring and experimenting with unusual interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborations.
Interested students must send a paragraph stating their interest to Critical Inquiry at cisubmissions@gmail.com.
Public Lectures

Public Lecture 2: Critical Data Studies
Data, we’re told over and over again, defines the twenty-first century. It’s allegedly the new oil, the new resource to be exploited, as well as the new hidden, “real” layer behind all media. It raises the specter of absolute surveillance and vacuum-sealed echo chambers, all in the name of giving users the commodities, friendships, and security they really want. To displace these visions, this talk addresses the possibilities for cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaboration and investigations. It will take as its case study “neighborhoods.”
Friday, 21 May, 6pm CST: Sign up for the virtual event here.

Thinking With | David Theo Goldberg | Tracking capitalism and the technologies of the racial
2021-05-20 09:00 - 11:00
We invite David Theo Goldberg, a scholar whose deep thinking about race and critical race theory (which examines how legal frameworks create, but can also correct injustices based on race), has informed and accompanied counter-colonizing thinkers such as Philomena Essed, Achille Mbembe, and Gloria Wekker. Goldberg will be in conversation with: Rokhaya Diallo; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun; and Nishant Shah, moderated by Wayne Modest.
On the event of Goldberg’s forthcoming publication on Dread: The Politics of Our Time, as part of both our Thinking With and Race, Racism, Antiracism – What can/should museum do?, we invite Goldberg to return, through his most recent critical approaches, to a question for which one of his books is titled: Are We All Postracial Yet? (2015).

Luciana Parisi speaks to the Institute
2021-05-19 10:30 - 11:30 | By zoom
Details tbd

Kavita Philip talks to the Lab
2021-05-12 10:30 - 11:30 | Online
Kavita Philip is President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures as Professor of English with the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures. She was previously Professor of History & Informatics (by courtesy) at UC Irvine. She is author of Civilizing Natures (Rutgers University Press), and co-editor of five volumes curating interdisciplinary work in radical history, political science, art, activism, gender, technology studies, and public policy.
Diverse articles and public writing engage with colonial history, postcolonial studies, histories of environment and technology, feminist activism, and science fiction studies. Forthcoming books include Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction: The Pirate Function and Decolonization (under contract, MIT Press).

Wendy is Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago - Lecture 1
2021-05-07 16:00 - 17:30 | Online
Since 2003, the Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professorship has been held by some of the world’s most renowned scholars. The CI Professor is in residence at the University of Chicago for an academic quarter, where he or she teaches a graduate seminar and offers two public lectures.
In Spring 2021 we are proud to welcome Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), and coauthor of Pattern Discrimination (2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.
Spring Seminar: Critical Data Studies
(with guest Carina Albrecht)
4/28 to 5/31: Mon. and Wed., 10:30am–1:20pm
The massive collection of data, we are told, changes everything. It’s allegedly the new oil, the new resource to be exploited, as well as the new hidden, “real” layer behind all media. It transforms the creative practice, public sphere, scholarship, and intimate relationships by making them “data-driven.” It raises the specter of absolute surveillance and vacuum-sealed echo chambers, all in the name of giving users the commodities, friendships, and security they really want. To explore the possibilities and limitations of the “data turn”––this course asks: what difference does the mass capture, storage, correlation, and analysis of data make to society, culture, media, ethics and politics? How does it affect fundamental concepts, such as reality, agency, identity, verification, and temporality? It will answer these questions by exploring four key terms, such as correlation, authenticity, recognition, and neighborhoods, from historical, critical theory, and technical perspectives. It will also encourage students to contribute to the burgeoning field of Critical Data Studies by exploring and experimenting with unusual interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborations.
Interested students must send a paragraph stating their interest to Critical Inquiry at cisubmissions@gmail.com.
Public Lectures

Public Lecture 1: Beyond Verification: Authenticity and Mis/Disinformation
That fake news has affected recent political events in the US and abroad has become a truism; the sense that combating fake news entails more than fact checking and verification similarly has become accepted wisdom. So how do we understand and respond to fake news? This talk will map out different approaches to fake news in diverse disciplines/sectors, and outline a response that focuses on understanding why and how users find information to be true regardless of its facticity. Framing fake news as an intermedial narrative, it will outline an approach based in dramatic/literary conceptions of authenticity.
Friday, 7 May, 6pm CST: Sign up for the virtual event here.

Monthly Institute Team Meeting
2021-05-05 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-04-07 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-03-03 12:00 - 12:30 | Online
The Institute meets monthly to exchange updates on projects and share ideas.

Jodi Byrd presents to the Institute
2021-05-05 10:30 - 11:30 | By zoom
Indigenomicon.

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Associate Professor of English and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Byrd is the author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and their work has appeared most recently in Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and in Joanne Barker’s Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Duke UP, 2017).

Anna Engelhardt & Niels Ten Oever talk to the Institute
2021-04-28 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Niels ten Oever: The quantum state of topological infrastructure reconfigurations: the case of 5G
Niels is a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance’-project at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a research fellow with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights at the European University Viadrina and an associated scholar with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. His research focuses on how norms, such as human rights, get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in the Internet infrastructure through its transnational governance.
Niels tries to understand how invisible infrastructures provide a socio-technical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities.

Anna Engelhardt: Spectral Volumes of Russian Cyber Warfare

Anna(b. 1994, Kostroma, Russia) is a media artist, researcher, and writer based in London. Her main interests are the (de)colonial politics of algorithmic and logistical infrastructures in post-Soviet space. Anna is currently conducting her PhD on the electromagnetic infrastructure of Russian cyber warfare at Queen Mary, UoL, under the supervision of Laleh Khalili and Elke Schwarz. Anna’s recent projects include: Machinic Infrastructures of Truth (2020), an inquiry into the production of verification systems, presented at Transmediale as a part of ‘Adversarial Hacking’ symposium; Adversarial Infrastructure (2019), an investigation of how the Russian Crimean Bridge functions according to principles of adversarial machine learning, presented at Ars Electronica Kepler’s Gardens, 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Mute Magazine. She has recently took part at Recursive Colonialism, AI & Speculative Computation symposium with her research on racialised topologies of Russian logistics. With Sasha Shestakova, Anna is a co-founder of the Distributed Cognition Cooperative.

EDI in AI Workshop
2021-04-26 - 2021-04-27
After several exceptional months have passed, we started replanning for the EDI in AI workshop in consultation with the Quebec government: Hoping for a COVID19 recession by early next year, we aim to hold the EDI in AI workshop on 26th and 27th of April 2021 in Montreal.

The aim of this workshop activity is to identify potential collaboration priorities in research in equity, diversity and inclusion in AI under the upcoming Horizon Europe Programme (HEU 2021-2027), in order to boost EU-Canada STI collaboration activities in the area. The meeting will consist of a day for policy discussion and identification of common priorities and foresighting, and a second day for the identification of potential ways forward and mechanisms for cooperation by funding decision-makers (joint programming, twinning, program alignment etc.).

Spry Memorial Lecture - Changing the Spectrum: Race, media and building democracy in Canada.
2021-04-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Online
The Spry Memorial Lecture has a long history of tackling key issues facing Canadian media and its role in the national conversation. For the 2021 event, Spry joins with Media Democracy Days and the Digital Democracies Institute to bring together leading figures in Canadian media in conversation about race, media and building democracy in Canada.
Our panelists Desmond Cole and Tanya Talaga, along with moderator Candis Callison, will consider recent attention over the escalation of commentary on the representation of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour; the structural challenges that currently impede calls for greater diversity; and discuss how institutions and platforms can foster a more constructive dialogue. At a time when violent events internationally, nationally, and locally are making headlines on a frequent basis, the urgency of this panel is incontestable. Not to be missed!
Register here for links
Part of Towards Equity, SFU Public Square’s 2021 Community Summit Series.

Kara Keeling talks to the Institute
2021-04-21 12:30 - 14:00 | Online

Wendy at National Humanities Center at AI and the Humanities Conference
2021-04-14 10:30 - 14:00 | Online
Wendy will be presenting a keynote at the conference on “How Has Artificial Intelligence Challenged the Boundaries of Humanistic Thinking,”

Kate Crawford talks to the Institute
2021-04-07 15:30 - 17:00 | Online
Prof. Kate Crawford is a leading scholar who has spent the last decade studying the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She holds the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, is a senior principal researcher at MSR, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. Her new book, The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (available here for pre-order) explores the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and energy to labor and data, and reveals how AI systems have saturated political life and depleted the planet.
She will be discussing the themes of her book with Wendy Chun. Wendy is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute where researchers investigate themes of mis- and disinformation, authenticity, and counterspeech, amongst many others. The conversation will be a wonderful opportunity to hear two leading academics discuss issues that are crucial to our time, with repercussions pertinent to our lives, both online and in our communities. Don’t miss it.
Click here to register [Attendees will also receive a flyer for 25% off when they order the book on registration]

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup speaks to the Institute
2021-03-31 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
The politics of data (re)use

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. Her research is concerned with the politics of digital infrastructures and her current interests include the ethics of data reuse, content moderation and digital sustainability. She is the author of The Politics of Mass Digitization, published with MIT Press in 2018, and co-editor of the book Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press 2021) and (W)archives (Sternberg Press 2021).

Wendy at the New Materialist Informatics Conference at University of Kassel, Germany
2021-03-25 09:00 - 10:30 | Online
Wendy will be presenting a keynote at the conference entitled “Authenticating Figures: Algorithms and the New Politics of Recognition”
What does recognition mean in an era of pervasive data capture and automatic pattern detection? Tracing the historical move from “pattern discrimination” to “pattern recognition”, this talk unpacks the logic and politics of recognition at the core of systems designed to automatically identify and classify users. It argues for the centrality of the humanities in understanding how we have become characters in a drama called “Big Data”.

Solveig Suess & Asia Bazdriyeva talk to the Institute
2021-03-24 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Environmental Machines, Datified Earths
The presentation will depart from the method of Geocinema, which is to examine infrastructures of earth-sensing data as forms of cinema. Drawing on their recent fieldwork on the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China and their subsequent documentary, Making of Earths (2020), Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva will speak on the techniques of earth sensing, vast resource extraction, and present day demands aimed towards battling a future of climate change. While simple sets of data are accrued from geological to techno-political formations, they translate into the many versions of Earths. These large-scale imaging operations feed back and circulate across scales of the body, the apparatus, the landscape.

Geocinema (Asia Bazdyrieva (UA), Solveig Qu Suess (CH/CN)) is a collective that explores the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Based in Berlin and Kyiv, their practice has been concerned with the understanding and sensing of the earth while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. Their work has been shown internationally, including their first solo show Making of Earths at Kunsthall Trondheim Norway (2020) and group shows such as Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe (2020-21) and Re-thinking Collectivity at Guangzhou Image Triennale (2021). They have given lecture-performances at the Ashkal Alwan Beirut, ICA London, HKW Berlin, NYU Shanghai, Matadero Madrid and have taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, FAMU Prague, Central Saint Martins London among others. They were 2018–19 Digital Earth Fellows and have been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020).

Wendy presents at Indiana as CAHI Distinguished Scholar Series
2021-03-18 15:30 - 17:00 | Online
Wendy will be presenting on ‘Roadblocks as Opportunities: Working Across Disciplines to Counter Polarization and Mis-Information’
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun will join CAHI’s Distinguished Scholar series. Her work in Critical Data Studies is timely and crucial: she pushes us to heed the power of algorithms and big data in fostering discrimination and misinformation, and offers tools for countering these trends.
Chun’s talk will outline projects led by Simon Fraser University’s Digital Democracies Institutes that analyze and counter the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” and mis/disinformation by integrating research in the humanities, social and data sciences. In particular, the talk will discuss how moving from factuality to authenticity opens avenues into understanding the spread of “fake news.”

Ani Maitra talks to the Institute
2021-03-17 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Ani Maitra is associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Colgate University. His teaching and research interests span the fields of postcolonial and diaspora media cultures and gender and sexuality studies. His essays have appeared in edited volumes and journals like Camera Obscura, Continuum, differences, Film Quarterly, Jindal Global Law Review and World Records. Maitra is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
Maitra’s talk will be based on his book Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern University Press, 2020). In this book, Maitra calls for an urgent reevaluation of identity politics as an aesthetic maneuver regulated by capitalism. A dominant critical trend in the humanities, Maitra argues, is to dismiss or embrace identity through the formal properties of a privileged aesthetic medium like literature, film, or even the performative body. In contrast, he demonstrates that identity politics becomes unavoidably real and material only because the minoritized subject is split between multiple sites of mediation—linguistic, visual, and digital—while remaining firmly tethered to capitalism’s hierarchical logic of value production. Only in the interstices of media can we track the aesthetic conversion of identitarian difference into value, marked by the inequities of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference 2021
2021-03-17 - 2021-03-21 | Online
The Society’s annual conference provides a forum for scholars and teachers of film and media studies to present and hear new research; to provide a supportive environment for networking, mentoring, and collaboration among scholars otherwise separated by distance, language, or disciplinary boundaries; and to promote the field of cinema and media studies among its practitioners, to other disciplines, and to the public at large, in part through public recognition of award worthy achievements and other significant milestones within the field.
Each Spring the Society announces the location of the next conference and calls for proposals for open call papers, panels, workshops, and screenings. Members and registered website users can post calls for papers and panel and workshop announcements to the Conference Bulletin Board to solicit presenters. Online submission forms are available in June for paper, panel and workshop abstracts, bios, and bibliographies and film synopses.

Wendy presents at Brown University - Terranova and Ahmed
2021-03-15 09:00 - 10:00 | By zoom
Wendy will be presenting to Ariella Azoulay & Bonnie Honig’s class on Modern Culture & Media on Terranova and Ahmed at Brown.
Closed to class members only.

Left and Right, or Being who/where you are - Performances
2021-03-13 13:00 - 2021-03-17 00:00 | Online
Performance Dates & Registration
March 13 – tickets and registration here
Please note: Participants will need Chrome and a laptop or desktop to be able to access the performance (no mobile or iPad access possible). For the best experience, we also recommend the use of headphones throughout the performance.
Description
In this time of intense divisions, a left partisan and a right partisan speaking with each other seems like an impossible conversation – or, at least, a conversation that is impossible to have meaningfully on certain so-called “hot-button” topics and complex realities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or immigration.
This devised, interactive online multimedia performance stages scenes that feature such conversations … performed by both human actors and bots. The human and machinic actors play different characters that embody, complicate, and deconstruct different types of performative, prescribed political identities on the left-right spectrum (approached with a US-focus but through a transnational lens). These political identities are shown to be not static or unalterable, rather, the result of relational, performative processes that occur over time and with technology. Theatrically playing with(in) these processes, Left and Right aims to call forth more capacious ways of being – and being political.
Presented by Brown Arts Initiative. Free and open to the public. Registration required.
Credits
Concept & Directing: Ioana B. Jucan
Text: Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Marcela Mancino, Fabiola Petri, Ioana B. Jucan, Melody Devries
Actors: Marcela Mancino, Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Fabiola Petri
Digital Design and Development: Tong Wu, Nuntinee Tansrisakul & Yuguang Zhang
Theatrical Design: Marcela Mancino
Bot Design: Roopa Vasudevan
Bot Concept: Roopa Vasudevan, Anthony Burton
Choreography: Adriana Barza
Sound Design: Peter Bussigel
Production Manager: Madeline Greenberg
Dramaturgy: Melody Devries
Performance Consultants: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alex Juhasz, and the Beyond Verification Team associated with the Digital Democracies Institute (SFU)

Kishonna Gray talks to the Institute
2021-03-10 12:30 - 14:00 | By zoom
Title for Kishonna’s talk is her new book: Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming

Sarah T. Roberts presents to the Institute
2021-03-03 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Judging Themselves: Facebook as Extrastate Sovereign (and Why We Should Worry).
In this brief and nascent talk (followed by lively collective discussion), Professor Sarah T. Roberts (UCLA) will offer an analysis of what Facebook is _really_ up to with its Oversight Board, and what the activation of that body reveals about Facebook’s vision of itself in the world. Spoiler alert: the vision is nothing short of a combination of soft power (Nye) _and_ extrastate sovereignty (Ong; Easterling), and _that_ is nothing short of ominous.

Alberto Toscano talks to the Institute
2021-02-24 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory. He studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research, University College Dublin and the University of Warwick, from which he received his PhD in 2003.
He is the author of three monographs: The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (2006), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010), and (with Jeff Kinkle) Cartographies of the Absolute (2015). He edited The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics with Lorenzo Chiesa, and has translated several works by Alain Badiou, as well as Antonio Negri, Furio Jesi and Franco Fortini. He is currently working on two book projects, the first on tragedy as a political form, the second on philosophy, capitalism and ‘real abstraction’. He is also preparing two multi-volume edited collections, a Handbook of Marxism (with Bev Skeggs and Sara Farris) and Alain Badiou: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (with Ray Brassier).
He has sat on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory since 2004, and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books.
