Wendy gives Keynote at Digital (Im)Materialities Conference

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.