10/10/2023 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Ehrlicher Room (3100 North Quad)

Trans Studies in the Virtual Age: A Conversation and Q&A with Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone and Cassius Adair

Join us for an event with academic and performance artist Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone, who is commonly credited with founding the field of transgender studies, and Cassius Adair, who studies the intersection of digital media history and transgender studies. Stone and Adair will be in conversation about how trans people and identities intertwine with technology in the past, present and future, and will take questions from the audience. Stone will also discuss the forthcoming documentary film Girl Island, directed by Marjorie Vecchio, which chronicles Stone's many lives, including being "a sound engineer for Jimi Hendrix, a lesbian separatist, founder of trans studies, and the goddess of cyberspace."

Speaker bios:

Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone is professor emerita of communication at the University of Texas, Austin; founding core faculty and Wolfgang Kohler professor of media and performance studies at the European Graduate School; senior artist at the Banff Centre; University of California Humanities Research Institute Fellow; and occasional hell-raiser at the University of California, Santa Cruz and other institutions of higher learning. She was a Sundance Institute invitee, a member of the Bell Laboratories Special Systems Exploratory Group, conducted research on the neurological basis of vision for NIH, and was the director for ten years of the International Conferences on Cyberspace. She is a recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from the State of California, City of Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz Diversity Center; and is the author of numerous publications in the fields of science fiction, neurology, vision, architecture, new media, and anthropology, including "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto", a founding text for the academic discipline of Transgender Studies.

Cassius Adair is an audio producer, writer, and researcher from Virginia. Currently, he is an assistant professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City.

Previously, he has been a visiting assistant professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and a Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) with an affiliation at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. He is also a research fellow at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory at the University of Toronto and an outside member of the Precarity Lab at the University of Michigan.

His audio production and narrative editing work spans multiple media and genres. Recent roles include production for the SiriusXM podcast Sounds Gay, with editor JT Green and host Sarah Esocoff, and consulting and editorial for KCRW’s Bodies, Wondery’s Twin Flames and Harsh Reality, Science Friday, Call to Mind, and a yet-to-be-released NPR series. From 2020-2021, he was the lead producer and showrunner of Transcripts, a production of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project. He has provided editorial consulting for fiction projects, including Brit Bennett’s #1 New York Times Bestseller (and Mariah Carey and Noname reading list pick!) The Vanishing Half. His documentary work has been honored in numerous venues, including the Third Coast International Audio Festival. With Tuck Woodstock, he is a co-founder of Sylveon Consulting.

Adair holds a PhD from the University of Michigan. His writing appears in American Quarterly, American Literature, Avidly, The Rumpus, Make Literary Magazine, Nursing Clio, Misadventures Magazine, Semiotic Review, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. He is a coauthor of the experimental scholarly book Technoprecarious (MIT, 2020) and is currently writing a book about transgender people and the Internet.

This talk is co-sponsored by the U-M School of Information, the U-M Center for Ethics, Society and Computing, the U-M Digital Studies Institute and the U-M Institute for Research on Women & Gender.