Presented By: Digital Studies Institute
Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal Launch Party
Huan He, Rayvon Fouché, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Rianna Walcott, Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu
Celebrate the publication of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal with the DISCO Network and the Digital Studies Institute! Join us for the release of our new multi-authored monograph with seven of the book's fourteen co-authors.
Co-authors in attendance include Huan He (Vanderbilt University), Rayvon Fouché (Northwestern University), Jeff Nagy (York University), Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan), Rianna Walcott (University of Maryland), Remi Yergeau (University of Michigan), and Lida Zeitlin-Wu (Old Dominion University).
12:30 - 1:30 PM: Lunch with The Co-Authors
Join us for lunch and conversation with the co-authors of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal. Celebrate the book’s publication while discussing the themes and ideas explored in the monograph.
1:30 - 3:00 PM: Panel Discussion on Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal
Seven co-authors will discuss their new book and their research about how marginalized communities have navigated the tension between embracing and rejecting emerging technologies. The panel will also explore the collaborative writing process and how to reconfigure writing in the humanities into a collective practice.
3:00 - 4:00 PM: Workshop on Applying Technoskepticism to AI
In this interactive workshop, co-authors will guide participants in applying the principles of technoskepticism to current and emerging technologies, with a special focus on artificial intelligence.
Book Giveaway:
Free copies of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal will be provided to those who register to attend in person. Registration is limited to 60 attendees, so be sure to sign up early!
Accessibility Information:
This event will be hybrid, with both an in-person meeting space at the University of Michigan and an option to attend via Zoom webinar. CART captioning will be provided. If you need any additional accommodations, please contact Cherice Chan, DISCO Network Program Coordinator, at chericec@umich.edu. We encourage you to reach out as early as possible, as some accommodations may require advance arrangements.
Registration Information:
Registration is required for this event.
Register to attend in-person: https://myumi.ch/yp3RJ
Register to attend the Zoom webinar: https://myumi.ch/W5m4R
About Technoskepticism:
From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create.
This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.
Authors include David Adelman, André Brock, Aaron Dial, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Huan He, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Knight Steele, Rianna Walcott, Josie Williams, Kevin Winstead, M. Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu.
Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal is part of the Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media series published by Stanford University Press.
Technoskepticism is available now for pre-order: https://www.sup.org/books/media-studies/technoskepticism
About the Panelists:
Huan He is an Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan's Digital Studies Institute. Across his projects, his research explores how racial narratives, fictions, and tropes shape—and are shaped by—the world of information capitalism. These inquiries engage many fields, including Asian American literary and cultural studies, digital studies, and critical game studies. His current book project, The Racial Interface: Asian Racialization and the Dreams of the Digital, explores why Asian Americans have been racially associated with information technologies. Using literary, cultural, and archival texts, the book shows how Asian Americans have come to represent both the nightmare of alienation and the dream of disembodied freedom, two powerful fictions that shape our digital present. He is also pursuing a second research project at the intersection of race and digital gaming. His scholarly work appears/is forthcoming in Configurations, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, Media-N, and an anthology on Asian American game studies. He is also a poet, whose work can be found in Poetry, Sewanee Review, A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Rayvon Fouché holds a joint appointment as Professor of Communication Studies and Professor in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrative Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. He authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of the Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). He previously held faculty appointments in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the History Department and the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the American Studies program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Most recently he served as Division Director of Social and Economic Sciences within the Directorate of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the National Science Foundation.
Jeff Nagy is an Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Critical Data Studies in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Previously, he was a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he collaborated with scholars, artists, and policymakers to envision and build anti-racist and anti-ableist technological futures. He currently serves as faculty lead for Search Engines, a programming series at the University of Michigan centered around the arts, emerging technology, and social justice. He is a historian of computing and AI focused on the intersections between that history with disability and psychological and psychiatric science. He holds a PhD in Communication from Stanford University. His research has appeared in Just Tech, New Media & Society, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere.
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Culture, and the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since 1994, Nakamura has written books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies. These books include, Race After the Internet (co-edited with Peter Chow-White, Routledge, 2011); Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minnesota, 2007); Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002); and Race in Cyberspace (co-edited with Beth Kolko and Gil Rodman, Routledge, 2000). In November 2019, Nakamura gave a TED NYC talk about her research called “The Internet is a Trash Fire. Here’s How to Fix It."
Rianna Walcott is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, and a former DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow. An alumna of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP), Dr. Walcott earned her PhD in Digital Humanities at King's College London for her research on Black (and British) communication practices across social media platforms with different demographics, and how different social network service affordances influence how Black users interact. She combines digital research, Black feminist praxis, decolonial studies, arts and culture, and mental health advocacy in her work. Dr. Walcott founded projectmyopia.com, a LAHP-funded digital humanities and arts project that promotes inclusivity in academia and decolonised curricula, and was co-editor of 'The Colour of Madness', an anthology about mental health inequities faced by people of colour in Britain.
Remi Yergeau is Associate Professor of Digital Studies and English, and Associate Director of the Digital Studies Institute, at the University of Michigan. Their book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, was awarded the 2017 MLA First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. They are currently at work on a second book project about disability, digital rhetoric, surveillance, and (a)sociality, tentatively titled Crip Data. Active in the neurodiversity movement, they have previously served on the boards of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and the Autism National Committee (AutCom).
Lida Zeitlin-Wu is currently an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication & Theatre Arts and the Institute for the Humanities at Old Dominion University. She holds a PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley and was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. Dr. Zeitlin-Wu is an interdisciplinary Humanities scholar working at the intersection of media theory and history, STS, critical race studies, and visual and material culture. Originally trained in modern languages, she now researches the rationalization and commodification of sensory experience and personhood—particularly color—under technocapitalism. Her current book manuscript, How Color Became a Technology: The Making of Chromatic Capitalism, tracks the transformation of color from an ephemeral concept into a sophisticated technology, beginning with 19th-century mass standardization and culminating in today’s privatized digital landscape. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Visual Studies, Camera Obscura, Frames Cinema Journal, Adaptation, and elsewhere, and with Carolyn L. Kane, she is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press, 2025).
About the DISCO Network:
The DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network is a consortium of investigators working to envision a new anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future. With funding support from the Mellon Foundation, the DISCO Network works collectively to provide mentoring and networking opportunities for BIPOC and disabled scholars, develop interdisciplinary undergraduate courses about the intersection of identity and technology, publish open-access research on topics of digital social inequalities, and host public programming to build the field of race, gender, disability, and technology studies.
Housed within the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, we consist of four labs across three universities: the Digital Afterworlds Lab (PI: Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan), the Humanities and Technoscience Lab (Co-PI: Rayvon Fouché; Northwestern University), the Digital Accessible Futures Lab (Co-PI: M. Remi Yergeau, University of Michigan), and the Black Communication and Technology Lab (Co-PI: Catherine Knight Steele, University of Maryland-College Park). Each lab functions both independently and as part of the broader network, engaging in research and dialogue about the intersections of digital technology, race, disability, gender, sexuality, and liberation.
Co-authors in attendance include Huan He (Vanderbilt University), Rayvon Fouché (Northwestern University), Jeff Nagy (York University), Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan), Rianna Walcott (University of Maryland), Remi Yergeau (University of Michigan), and Lida Zeitlin-Wu (Old Dominion University).
12:30 - 1:30 PM: Lunch with The Co-Authors
Join us for lunch and conversation with the co-authors of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal. Celebrate the book’s publication while discussing the themes and ideas explored in the monograph.
1:30 - 3:00 PM: Panel Discussion on Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal
Seven co-authors will discuss their new book and their research about how marginalized communities have navigated the tension between embracing and rejecting emerging technologies. The panel will also explore the collaborative writing process and how to reconfigure writing in the humanities into a collective practice.
3:00 - 4:00 PM: Workshop on Applying Technoskepticism to AI
In this interactive workshop, co-authors will guide participants in applying the principles of technoskepticism to current and emerging technologies, with a special focus on artificial intelligence.
Book Giveaway:
Free copies of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal will be provided to those who register to attend in person. Registration is limited to 60 attendees, so be sure to sign up early!
Accessibility Information:
This event will be hybrid, with both an in-person meeting space at the University of Michigan and an option to attend via Zoom webinar. CART captioning will be provided. If you need any additional accommodations, please contact Cherice Chan, DISCO Network Program Coordinator, at chericec@umich.edu. We encourage you to reach out as early as possible, as some accommodations may require advance arrangements.
Registration Information:
Registration is required for this event.
Register to attend in-person: https://myumi.ch/yp3RJ
Register to attend the Zoom webinar: https://myumi.ch/W5m4R
About Technoskepticism:
From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create.
This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.
Authors include David Adelman, André Brock, Aaron Dial, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Huan He, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Knight Steele, Rianna Walcott, Josie Williams, Kevin Winstead, M. Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu.
Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal is part of the Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media series published by Stanford University Press.
Technoskepticism is available now for pre-order: https://www.sup.org/books/media-studies/technoskepticism
About the Panelists:
Huan He is an Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan's Digital Studies Institute. Across his projects, his research explores how racial narratives, fictions, and tropes shape—and are shaped by—the world of information capitalism. These inquiries engage many fields, including Asian American literary and cultural studies, digital studies, and critical game studies. His current book project, The Racial Interface: Asian Racialization and the Dreams of the Digital, explores why Asian Americans have been racially associated with information technologies. Using literary, cultural, and archival texts, the book shows how Asian Americans have come to represent both the nightmare of alienation and the dream of disembodied freedom, two powerful fictions that shape our digital present. He is also pursuing a second research project at the intersection of race and digital gaming. His scholarly work appears/is forthcoming in Configurations, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, Media-N, and an anthology on Asian American game studies. He is also a poet, whose work can be found in Poetry, Sewanee Review, A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Rayvon Fouché holds a joint appointment as Professor of Communication Studies and Professor in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrative Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. He authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of the Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). He previously held faculty appointments in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the History Department and the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the American Studies program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Most recently he served as Division Director of Social and Economic Sciences within the Directorate of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the National Science Foundation.
Jeff Nagy is an Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Critical Data Studies in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Previously, he was a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he collaborated with scholars, artists, and policymakers to envision and build anti-racist and anti-ableist technological futures. He currently serves as faculty lead for Search Engines, a programming series at the University of Michigan centered around the arts, emerging technology, and social justice. He is a historian of computing and AI focused on the intersections between that history with disability and psychological and psychiatric science. He holds a PhD in Communication from Stanford University. His research has appeared in Just Tech, New Media & Society, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere.
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Culture, and the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since 1994, Nakamura has written books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies. These books include, Race After the Internet (co-edited with Peter Chow-White, Routledge, 2011); Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minnesota, 2007); Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002); and Race in Cyberspace (co-edited with Beth Kolko and Gil Rodman, Routledge, 2000). In November 2019, Nakamura gave a TED NYC talk about her research called “The Internet is a Trash Fire. Here’s How to Fix It."
Rianna Walcott is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, and a former DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow. An alumna of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP), Dr. Walcott earned her PhD in Digital Humanities at King's College London for her research on Black (and British) communication practices across social media platforms with different demographics, and how different social network service affordances influence how Black users interact. She combines digital research, Black feminist praxis, decolonial studies, arts and culture, and mental health advocacy in her work. Dr. Walcott founded projectmyopia.com, a LAHP-funded digital humanities and arts project that promotes inclusivity in academia and decolonised curricula, and was co-editor of 'The Colour of Madness', an anthology about mental health inequities faced by people of colour in Britain.
Remi Yergeau is Associate Professor of Digital Studies and English, and Associate Director of the Digital Studies Institute, at the University of Michigan. Their book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, was awarded the 2017 MLA First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. They are currently at work on a second book project about disability, digital rhetoric, surveillance, and (a)sociality, tentatively titled Crip Data. Active in the neurodiversity movement, they have previously served on the boards of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and the Autism National Committee (AutCom).
Lida Zeitlin-Wu is currently an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication & Theatre Arts and the Institute for the Humanities at Old Dominion University. She holds a PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley and was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. Dr. Zeitlin-Wu is an interdisciplinary Humanities scholar working at the intersection of media theory and history, STS, critical race studies, and visual and material culture. Originally trained in modern languages, she now researches the rationalization and commodification of sensory experience and personhood—particularly color—under technocapitalism. Her current book manuscript, How Color Became a Technology: The Making of Chromatic Capitalism, tracks the transformation of color from an ephemeral concept into a sophisticated technology, beginning with 19th-century mass standardization and culminating in today’s privatized digital landscape. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Visual Studies, Camera Obscura, Frames Cinema Journal, Adaptation, and elsewhere, and with Carolyn L. Kane, she is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press, 2025).
About the DISCO Network:
The DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network is a consortium of investigators working to envision a new anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future. With funding support from the Mellon Foundation, the DISCO Network works collectively to provide mentoring and networking opportunities for BIPOC and disabled scholars, develop interdisciplinary undergraduate courses about the intersection of identity and technology, publish open-access research on topics of digital social inequalities, and host public programming to build the field of race, gender, disability, and technology studies.
Housed within the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, we consist of four labs across three universities: the Digital Afterworlds Lab (PI: Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan), the Humanities and Technoscience Lab (Co-PI: Rayvon Fouché; Northwestern University), the Digital Accessible Futures Lab (Co-PI: M. Remi Yergeau, University of Michigan), and the Black Communication and Technology Lab (Co-PI: Catherine Knight Steele, University of Maryland-College Park). Each lab functions both independently and as part of the broader network, engaging in research and dialogue about the intersections of digital technology, race, disability, gender, sexuality, and liberation.
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