Presented By: Digital Studies Institute
DISCO Network Presents - Feeling the Future: Asian/Americanist Takes on Techno-Empire, Chinamaxxing, & the “American Century of Humiliation”
Brian J. Chen, Julie Chu, Jasmine Ehrhardt, & Paul Kim in conversation with Lisa Nakamura
Event description coming soon.
This event is open to the public, and we encourage all interested faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students to attend.
Refreshments will be provided to the first 100 attendees.
A corresponding opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to enjoy a free networking lunch with the panelists will be available. Interested students may register for this session using the same form as the main event.
Advance registration is recommended:
Register to attend in-person: https://sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/track/event/22866
Register to attend on Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DDCtopKmSYalc0nf9BadMg
Meet the Panelists:
Brian J. Chen is Data & Society’s policy director, leading the organization’s work to shape tech policy. With a background in movement lawyering and legislative and regulatory advocacy, he has worked extensively on issues of economic justice, political economy, and tech governance. Previously, Brian was a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, where he led campaigns to strengthen the labor and employment rights of digital platform workers and others in precarious industries. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, Phenomenal World, Boston Review, and other magazines. He holds a JD from New York University School of Law and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.
Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China's Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work will analyze the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the temporal intensities and rhythms of people and things on the move between Southern China and the United States.
Jasmine Ehrhardt is a PhD Candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies. Their research engages in critical prison studies, digital media studies, and Asian American studies. Their dissertation "Making the High-Tech Prison: Media, Infrastructure, and Counter-Narratives of the Digital,” explores the knowledge production, analysis, and media practices of imprisoned radicals and abolitionists, and their relationships to digital technology. Analyzing the archives of abolitionist intellectual and political work from the 1970s to the 2010s—in print and digital forms such as zines, essays, personal correspondence, podcasts, TikToks, and other social media ephemera—this work shows how surveillance, security, and digital communications technologies have structured political organizing and repression inside US prisons. Jasmine's writing has appeared in AfterImage, Journal of Visual Culture, and Amerasia Journal.
Paul Kim is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies department at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). His work lies at the intersection of critical AI studies, critical race studies, and visual studies. His dissertation titled “Recommending Race” investigates racial subjectivity within the contemporary recommender system. His work has been supported by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB (IHC) and the Asian/Pacific American Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), among others. He has co-organized the 9th iteration of the Media Fields conference, “Witnessing,” and is on the editing team for the ensuant special issue of Media Fields. His work has been published in AI & Society. In his free time, Paul ravenously watches cinema of the 2020s (TikTok and, recently and excitingly, Instagram Reels).
Meet the Moderator:
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the lead Principal Investigator of the DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network along with Rayvon Fouché, Catherine Knight Steele, and M. Remi Yergeau. Nakamura is also the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and has been writing about digital media, race, and gender since 1994. She 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. She is the author of The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (University of Minnesota, 2026), Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota, 2007) and Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002).
We want to make our events accessible to all participants. CART captioning services will be provided. If you anticipate needing additional accommodations to participate, please email Cherice Chan at [email protected].
This event is open to the public, and we encourage all interested faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students to attend.
Refreshments will be provided to the first 100 attendees.
A corresponding opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to enjoy a free networking lunch with the panelists will be available. Interested students may register for this session using the same form as the main event.
Advance registration is recommended:
Register to attend in-person: https://sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/track/event/22866
Register to attend on Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DDCtopKmSYalc0nf9BadMg
Meet the Panelists:
Brian J. Chen is Data & Society’s policy director, leading the organization’s work to shape tech policy. With a background in movement lawyering and legislative and regulatory advocacy, he has worked extensively on issues of economic justice, political economy, and tech governance. Previously, Brian was a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, where he led campaigns to strengthen the labor and employment rights of digital platform workers and others in precarious industries. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, Phenomenal World, Boston Review, and other magazines. He holds a JD from New York University School of Law and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.
Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China's Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work will analyze the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the temporal intensities and rhythms of people and things on the move between Southern China and the United States.
Jasmine Ehrhardt is a PhD Candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies. Their research engages in critical prison studies, digital media studies, and Asian American studies. Their dissertation "Making the High-Tech Prison: Media, Infrastructure, and Counter-Narratives of the Digital,” explores the knowledge production, analysis, and media practices of imprisoned radicals and abolitionists, and their relationships to digital technology. Analyzing the archives of abolitionist intellectual and political work from the 1970s to the 2010s—in print and digital forms such as zines, essays, personal correspondence, podcasts, TikToks, and other social media ephemera—this work shows how surveillance, security, and digital communications technologies have structured political organizing and repression inside US prisons. Jasmine's writing has appeared in AfterImage, Journal of Visual Culture, and Amerasia Journal.
Paul Kim is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies department at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). His work lies at the intersection of critical AI studies, critical race studies, and visual studies. His dissertation titled “Recommending Race” investigates racial subjectivity within the contemporary recommender system. His work has been supported by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB (IHC) and the Asian/Pacific American Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), among others. He has co-organized the 9th iteration of the Media Fields conference, “Witnessing,” and is on the editing team for the ensuant special issue of Media Fields. His work has been published in AI & Society. In his free time, Paul ravenously watches cinema of the 2020s (TikTok and, recently and excitingly, Instagram Reels).
Meet the Moderator:
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the lead Principal Investigator of the DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network along with Rayvon Fouché, Catherine Knight Steele, and M. Remi Yergeau. Nakamura is also the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and has been writing about digital media, race, and gender since 1994. She 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. She is the author of The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (University of Minnesota, 2026), Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota, 2007) and Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002).
We want to make our events accessible to all participants. CART captioning services will be provided. If you anticipate needing additional accommodations to participate, please email Cherice Chan at [email protected].
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