Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. Pathways to Publishing (Part II) (March 24, 2021 2:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/83043 83043-21259014@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 24, 2021 2:30pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

Back by popular demand, DSI Postdoc Elisabetta Ferrari will present a reprised discussion of how to bring your Digital Studies work to publication. The conversation will include an overarching glimpse into the peer-reviewed journal publishing process and related topics, including article preparation and revision, journal research, working with editors, editorial timelines and guidelines, and more. Participants are encouraged to prepare questions in advance.

Elisabetta Ferrari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan's Digital Studies Institute whose research addresses the social and political implications of digital technologies, with an emphasis on activism and social movements. Ferrari has published her research in academic journals such as New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society and Communication, Culture & Critique.

Open to all in the university community. Please RSVP for the Zoom link and share with interested graduate students.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeTG1ZBZLo4RswSDDyV0C64ykex3CbY-KZi9e1K17AODnFuWQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:26:44 -0400 2021-03-24T14:30:00-04:00 2021-03-24T16:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Workshop / Seminar
Post-Binary Feminisms Working Group Launch (April 7, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/83477 83477-21385569@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 7, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

Contact: Marisa Olson,
Executive Director umarisa@umich.edu

The Postbinary Feminisms Working Group is dedicated to exploring new theoretical writings and practices in the area of contemporary feminist thought, through the lens of technology-related issues.

The word “postbinary“ is, at the very least, a mnemonic device here, referring to both gender binaries and digital binary code. "Postbinary Feminisms" refers to the temporal moment after which the field has generally started to approach gender from a more fluid perspective; contemporaneous with a moment in which humanists have begun to reflect critically upon the ways in which the history of technology has been one in which women, people of color, people with disabilities, members of LGBTQ+ communities, the working classes, and others have been further marginalized by the cultural and infrastructural affects surrounding digital technology.

Postbinary Feminisms ought then be understood as not only intersectional, but also explicitly anti-racist; owing a legacy to those feminist thinkers who also worked to raise consciousness around racial binaries.

The Working Group will discuss new work by members of the field, across the disciplines; invite periodic guest lecturers; and hear from members of the University of Michigan community working on projects relevant to the group's focus.

RSVP: https://forms.gle/RobkmXJ9jLz6r9jS8
GMeet: https://meet.google.com/yhs-bmjp-tic

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Other Wed, 31 Mar 2021 15:50:58 -0400 2021-04-07T12:00:00-04:00 2021-04-07T13:30:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Other
Digital Studies Research Meeting (April 16, 2021 11:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/82911 82911-21219287@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 16, 2021 11:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

Li Cornfeld: The Digital Tech Expo

In January 2020, more than 170,000 people traveled from around the world to the Las Vegas Strip for CES, the global tech industry’s massive annual convention. In January 2021, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic pushed the event entirely online. Drawing on research conducted both on the ground at CES in the years prior to the pandemic as well as recent research of this year’s “all digital” event, this presentation asks what these dual modes of exhibition suggest about the role of liveness in tech demonstration. This research is in development as part of a book project, tentatively titled The Theater of Invention: Live Performance in the Tech Industry, which explores tech expos and conventions as ritual practices dedicated to legitimizing the industrial imagination of emerging technology.

Sarah Murray: Fashioning Intelligent Bodies: Mid-Century Smart Working Women and Wearability Before the Wearable

Quick, what do Winnie the Welder, Hildy Johnson, and Claire McCardell have in common? This mix of fictional and real figures represent some of the well-dressed women anchoring the U.S. workforce in the early 20th century. In a period shaped by wartime progress, deep nationalism, and technological development, the definition of a fashionable body changed to accommodate anxieties around white working women, class, and new industrial standards. It is not uncommon to trace the history of artificial intelligence to midcentury war efforts in code-breaking, cybernetics, military computing, and early machine learning. This talk offers a different prelude to ordinary A.I., one at the convergence of fashion, women, and work. What does smart mean before it becomes associated with machine intelligence and contemporary consumer tech? What was the idea of intelligence before ‘thinking machines’ were introduced to the public and became a preoccupation of science, industry, and government? The answers are threaded, quite literally, through the design of clothes for work. Widespread connotations associated smart with neat, efficient bodies connected to work outside the home, skill with new machinery, and sensible, store-bought styles. Long before the wearable, an emergent wearability established the properly outfitted worker as a safe site for the union of technology, gender, and labor and signaled a re-coordination of bodies to accommodate shifting meanings of intelligence.

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Presentation Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:37:39 -0400 2021-04-16T11:00:00-04:00 2021-04-16T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Presentation
Daniel Greene: The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope (MIT Press) (April 21, 2021 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/83686 83686-21454207@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 21, 2021 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

TO PARTICIPATE, click here to register: https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEldeqopz8sH90JlXeAIa8Bkqj5yQgDDnZ6

Abstract: Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code—or else? This common sense has ruled our economic imaginary for at least 30 years. Those who cannot log on or train up are condemned to the margins of the information economy, and contained by the carceral state.

In The Promise of Access, Daniel Greene argues that the problem of poverty became a problem of technology in order to manage the contradictions of a changing economy. We cannot debunk or banish the idea—what Greene calls the access doctrine—that the problem of poverty can be solved with the right tools and the right skills because the idea helps those public institutions that face poverty to save themselves. Technological solutions help public institutions simplify their complex missions and win legitimacy and funding, but at the cost of alienating the populations they serve.

Blending political-economic theory with years of ethnographic fieldwork, Greene explores how this plays out in Washington, DC, examining organizational change in technology startups, public libraries, and charter schools. Tracing the changes to the spirit and structure of these public institutions changes reveals a fight to define the good life under contemporary capitalism--and the alliances that could win that fight.

Speaker Bio: Daniel Greene is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. His ethnographic, historical, and theoretical research explores how the future of work is built and who is included in that future. MIT Press is publishing his first book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, in 2021. His research has also appeared in such venues as Research in the Sociology of Work, New Media & Society, and the International Journal of Communication. Daniel lives online at dmgreene.net.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 09 Apr 2021 13:51:25 -0400 2021-04-21T13:00:00-04:00 2021-04-21T14:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Lecture / Discussion image
Race and Technology: Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair (September 22, 2021 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/87355 87355-21641509@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 22, 2021 10:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

Women of color make our digital products. They assemble them in Asian factories and their cheap labor has made the tech industry’s innovation possible. This presentation focuses on their immaterial and knowledge work that contributes directly to the Internet’s usability. Women of color on social media and gaming platforms contribute unpaid labor to call out misogyny, violations of user agreements, and hateful behavior. They lead our most effective and important campaigns against racism from their keyboards. This is piecework in the classical sense, squeezed in between paid work and leisure, it is unpaid, but it is productive. It is unpaid not because it is not valuable, but because of the type of person who is doing it, a type of person who is not treated as a person. This labor of digital repair is exactly the kind of labor that can’t be automated or outsourced.

This presentation will analyze three examples of young women of color’s work as digital documentarians of public racism on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram using a comparative critical race studies approach. Join Lisa Nakamura, founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and P.I. of the DISCO: Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism Network, a 3-year Mellon-funded 4.8 million dollar collaborative higher education grant, to discuss anti-racist platform building, maintenance, and repair.

Together, you’ll explore:

The history of women’s, children’s, and transgender people’s labor as community leaders (CL’s) from America Online to Instagram how they model a high-touch mutual aid-informed digital culture of care.
Theoretical and speculative approaches to anti-racist platform alternatives
Racial and gendered solidarities and intimacies on visual digital social platforms

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:10:02 -0400 2021-09-22T10:00:00-04:00 2021-09-22T11:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Lecture / Discussion
SLSA2021 "ENERGY": Society for Literature, Science, and Arts (September 30, 2021 8:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/87356 87356-21641510@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, September 30, 2021 8:30am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

The SLSA2021 virtual conference program is with over 90 panels, arts lounges, workshops and roundtables on the wide ranging topic of “Energy" and its parallel events that take place next week on Thursday, September 30, Friday, October 1, and Saturday, October 2.

More information about SLSA can be found here: https://litsciarts.org/slsa2021/
Program and Zoom links can be found here: https://easychair.org/smart-program/SLSA2021/index.html

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Conference / Symposium Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:20:16 -0400 2021-09-30T08:30:00-04:00 2021-09-30T21:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Conference / Symposium
SLSA2021 "ENERGY": Society for Literature, Science, and Arts (October 1, 2021 8:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/87356 87356-21641511@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 1, 2021 8:30am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

The SLSA2021 virtual conference program is with over 90 panels, arts lounges, workshops and roundtables on the wide ranging topic of “Energy" and its parallel events that take place next week on Thursday, September 30, Friday, October 1, and Saturday, October 2.

More information about SLSA can be found here: https://litsciarts.org/slsa2021/
Program and Zoom links can be found here: https://easychair.org/smart-program/SLSA2021/index.html

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Conference / Symposium Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:20:16 -0400 2021-10-01T08:30:00-04:00 2021-10-01T19:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Conference / Symposium
SLSA2021 "ENERGY": Society for Literature, Science, and Arts (October 2, 2021 8:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/87356 87356-21641512@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 2, 2021 8:30am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

The SLSA2021 virtual conference program is with over 90 panels, arts lounges, workshops and roundtables on the wide ranging topic of “Energy" and its parallel events that take place next week on Thursday, September 30, Friday, October 1, and Saturday, October 2.

More information about SLSA can be found here: https://litsciarts.org/slsa2021/
Program and Zoom links can be found here: https://easychair.org/smart-program/SLSA2021/index.html

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Conference / Symposium Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:20:16 -0400 2021-10-02T08:30:00-04:00 2021-10-02T21:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Conference / Symposium
postcommodities... architecture after stuff (October 8, 2021 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/86945 86945-21637612@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 8, 2021 6:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning

We have made too much stuff. The current production model of more, faster, cheaper - which makes what is culture today, product tomorrow, trash the next - has created a counterproductive muchness of simultaneous material excess and environmental precarity. This persistent materialism is contributing to social inequity and climate crisis alike and from material extraction to Pinterest boards to distribution centers, architecture is implicated at all scales of this material saturation.

Beginning from this moment of material reckoning, postcommodities… architecture after stuff argues that our resources should no longer come from the ground, but from the muchness we have already produced. The symposium foregrounds designers and thinkers who are proposing other-again-new modes of operating within this moment, those that present tactics, material ingenuities, and tools needed for a more future-minded and non-extractive material culture.

postcommodities… architecture after stuff explores the possibilities of architecture’s participation in a new socio-material ecology by focusing on reversible design, circular materials, commodity exchange networks, protocols of maintenance and commercial antagonisms, to set the questions:

Is there material after materialism?

What can architecture do with all this stuff?

his mixed-modality 2-day symposium will presented both in-person in Ann Arbor, MI and streamed virtually.

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Conference / Symposium Tue, 14 Sep 2021 15:52:55 -0400 2021-10-08T18:00:00-04:00 2021-10-08T22:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning Conference / Symposium Postcommodities Header
postcommodities... architecture after stuff (October 9, 2021 11:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/86945 86945-21637613@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 9, 2021 11:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning

We have made too much stuff. The current production model of more, faster, cheaper - which makes what is culture today, product tomorrow, trash the next - has created a counterproductive muchness of simultaneous material excess and environmental precarity. This persistent materialism is contributing to social inequity and climate crisis alike and from material extraction to Pinterest boards to distribution centers, architecture is implicated at all scales of this material saturation.

Beginning from this moment of material reckoning, postcommodities… architecture after stuff argues that our resources should no longer come from the ground, but from the muchness we have already produced. The symposium foregrounds designers and thinkers who are proposing other-again-new modes of operating within this moment, those that present tactics, material ingenuities, and tools needed for a more future-minded and non-extractive material culture.

postcommodities… architecture after stuff explores the possibilities of architecture’s participation in a new socio-material ecology by focusing on reversible design, circular materials, commodity exchange networks, protocols of maintenance and commercial antagonisms, to set the questions:

Is there material after materialism?

What can architecture do with all this stuff?

his mixed-modality 2-day symposium will presented both in-person in Ann Arbor, MI and streamed virtually.

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Conference / Symposium Tue, 14 Sep 2021 15:52:55 -0400 2021-10-09T11:00:00-04:00 2021-10-09T14:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning Conference / Symposium Postcommodities Header
DSI Backpacking Event (November 4, 2021 5:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/88776 88776-21658543@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 4, 2021 5:30pm
Location: Mason Hall
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

Come join us in the DSI Space to:

Learn about Winter 2022 Digital Studies course offerings
Declare your Digital Studies Minor
Eat some delicious snacks
Play some Johann Sebastian Joust
Lose a race to Dr. Bushner at Mario Kart 8 (and maybe win a race against fellow students?)

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Social / Informal Gathering Mon, 01 Nov 2021 08:29:31 -0400 2021-11-04T17:30:00-04:00 2021-11-04T19:30:00-04:00 Mason Hall Digital Studies Institute Social / Informal Gathering MK
MIDAS Symposium: Machine Learning as a Creative Design Tool (November 15, 2021 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/88861 88861-21658652@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 15, 2021 4:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

Dr. Fiebrink’s research focuses on human-computer interaction, machine learning, and signal processing all to allow people to apply machine learning to new areas such as designing new musical instruments or gestural interfaces for accessibility. She is also involved in digital humanities scholarship and machine learning education.

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Livestream / Virtual Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:56:11 -0400 2021-11-15T16:00:00-05:00 2021-11-15T17:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Livestream / Virtual
DSI & DISCO Network Book Talk | Discriminating Data: Wendy Chun in Conversation with Lisa Nakamura (December 6, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/89099 89099-21660478@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 6, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data's predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media and leads the Digital Democracies Institute. She is the author of several works including Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT, 2016), Discriminating Data (MIT, 2021), and the co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota & Meson Press, 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. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and she has held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on race, gender, and the Internet. She is the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and the Lead P.I. for the DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration and Optimism) Network (disconetwork.org).

Please register in advance for this zoom webinar here: https://bit.ly/3bVf65j.

We want to make our events accessible to all participants. This online meeting will have live, automated captions. If you anticipate needing accommodations to participate, please contact ericcman@umich.edu Please note that some accommodations must be arranged in advance and we encourage you to contact us as soon as possible.

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Livestream / Virtual Wed, 17 Nov 2021 12:15:37 -0500 2021-12-06T12:00:00-05:00 2021-12-06T13:30:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Livestream / Virtual chun
Welcome to the Indigenous Future (December 9, 2021 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/89388 89388-21664061@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, December 9, 2021 3:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

A Digital Studies Institute panel discussion, co-presented by the University of Michigan and the Consulate General of Canada

The logic of so-called "technological evolution" categorizes innovations into binaries of Old/Defunct and New/Good, without a fluid understanding of time, influence, or use. Likewise, settler cultural studies compartmentalize indigenous peoples and practices as outside of the present time and space. This panel discussion taps into growing movements around the discussion of indigenous technologies and indigenous futures (itself a nod to Afrofuturism), taking a more expansive view of the holistic relationship between people and technologies. The panelists are coders, artists, and theorists who investigate not only the history but also the present and future of indigenous technologies, as well as the language and methodologies used to study them.

Presenters include:

- Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Banks Preeminence Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, University of Florida, Digital Worlds Institute;
- Ron Eglash, Professor of Information, School of Information and Professor of Art and Design, Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan;
- Jason Edward Lewis, University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary at Concordia University;

Moderated by DSI Executive Director Marisa Olson, with opening remarks from the Consulate General of Canada.

Live Captioning will be provided.

Register here: https://bit.ly/3rvri5H

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 02 Dec 2021 14:19:39 -0500 2021-12-09T15:00:00-05:00 2021-12-09T16:30:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Livestream / Virtual indigenous
Applied Trans Technology Studies (January 22, 2022 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/88815 88815-21658548@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, January 22, 2022 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host its first virtual symposium, co-organized by Senior Fellows Oliver Haimson, Alex Hanna, and Anna Lauren Hoffmann and co-sponsored by:

Northwestern University (NU) Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing,

University of Michigan (UM) School of Information,

UM Digital Studies Institute,

UM Institute for Research on Women and Gender,

NU PhD in Technology and Social Behavior,

The Sexualities Project at Northwestern, and

NU Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.

This event highlights existing and emergent connections between applied trans studies and the critical and cultural study of technological design, development, application and use—especially in the domains of digital studies and critical data studies. Importantly, the event conceives of these connections as multifaceted and multidirectional. Rather than merely identifying trans lives and subjects within the existing matrices of study, we ask how the precepts and commitments of an applied trans studies challenges how we think about and understand data and digital technologies today.

SESSION 1: Applied Trans Studies X Critical Data Studies

In this session, we will hear from scholars on entanglements of gender, surveillance, and data technologies—in particular, computational techniques predicated on capturing, classifying, labeling, sorting, bounding, optimizing, and visualizing data in various contexts. Particular concern will be paid to the practical and material effects of these processes on trans lives and livelihoods, as well as the ways trans subjects make evident the assumptions of organizing logics of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and beyond.

Moderator: Alex Hanna (Google)

Panelists: Avery Everhart (University of Southern California), Jack Gieseking (University of Kentucky), Mar Hicks (Illinois Institute of Technology), Morgan Klaus Scheuerman (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Nikki Stevens (Dartmouth College)

KEYNOTE: How To Stuff a Wild Duck: Configurations of Transness in Corporate Computing

In this keynote, we will hear from Dr Cassius Adair (University of Minnesota), who will bring us closer to a trans history of computing through an analysis of IBM.

SESSION 2: Applied Trans Studies X Digital Studies

In this session, we will hear from scholars who work at the intersection of applied trans studies and digital studies. We will explore the past, present, and future of trans technologies like apps, social media sites, health resources, games, and internet forums to understand some ways digital technologies do and can help to address challenges faced by trans people and communities.

Moderator: Oliver Haimson (University of Michigan)

Panelists: Alex Ahmed (Carnegie Mellon University), Moya Bailey (Northwestern University), Tee Chuanromanee (University of Notre Dame), Avery Dame-Griff (Washington State University, Pullman), and Whit Pow (New York University)

Register here:http://bit.ly/CATS003

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 16 Dec 2021 11:17:19 -0500 2022-01-22T13:00:00-05:00 2022-01-22T17:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Livestream / Virtual applied
DSI Book Talk with Anna Watkins Fisher & Kris Cohen (January 25, 2022 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/90651 90651-21672073@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 3:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable. This talk takes up Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.

Anna Watkins Fisher, author of Safety Orange (Minnesota, Dec 2021), Digital Studies Institute faculty member, and Associate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, is a cultural and media theorist whose research spans the fields of digital studies, performance studies, visual culture, environmental humanities, and critical theory. Her first book, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke University Press, 2020), explores what artistic resistance looks like in the 21st century when disruption and dissent can be easily co-opted and commodified. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Journal of Visual Culture, Social Text, Discourse, WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), MIRAJ, and TDR/The Drama Review. She is the co-editor with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of the 2nd edition of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2015). She's also a founding member of the digital research collective Precarity Lab; the collective's manifesto, Technoprecarious, was published by Goldsmiths/MIT Press in 2020. She co-leads the Critical Futures Project, a research collective based at the University of Michigan that explores theoretical approaches for addressing the new urgency of climate change under digital and racial capitalism.

Respondent Kris Cohen is an associate professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College. He works on the relationship between art, economy, and media technologies, focusing especially on the aesthetics of collective life. His first book, Never Alone, Except for Now: Networked Life between Populations and Publics (Duke University Press, 2017), looks at the art of Thomson & Craighead, Sharon Hayes, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, artists who straddle the border between image culture and network culture, between a logic of spectacle and a logic of networks. His second book manuscript, The Human in Bits, is a study of how and why artists working out a non-representational politics of Blackness have engaged a history of the pixel and the raster of the graphical computer screen or graphic user interface (GUI), expanding that history beyond the confines of a liberal, post-racial politics that sought to recuperate whiteness as a part of a multicultural national social matrix.

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Livestream / Virtual Wed, 19 Jan 2022 13:59:07 -0500 2022-01-25T15:00:00-05:00 2022-01-25T16:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Livestream / Virtual safety
Critical Conversations: Embodiment (January 27, 2022 12:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/91012 91012-21675441@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 27, 2022 12:30pm
Location: Angell Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

"Critical Conversations" is a monthly lunch series organized by the English Department for 2021-22. In each session, a panel of four faculty members give flash talks about their current research as related to a broad theme. Presentations are followed by lively, cross-disciplinary conversation with the audience.

Presentations begin at 12:30pm, followed by discussion. The session concludes at 2:00.

Link to RSVP:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4U2XWgyopSNN_-1cUIV8iPFjjVtAbw3jXXCpZ2LIlLNS55Q/viewform?usp=sf_link

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 14 Jan 2022 11:26:45 -0500 2022-01-27T12:30:00-05:00 2022-01-27T14:00:00-05:00 Angell Hall Department of English Language and Literature Lecture / Discussion wooden human model poses on the table
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow in the Metaverse Panel (February 17, 2022 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/90653 90653-21672075@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 17, 2022 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Digital Studies Institute

This panel convenes a group of leading international artists and curators working in online spaces in a variety of modalities, including net art, video/animation, game development, VR, XR and the NFT-adjacent art community. The speakers will briefly introduce their own practice and participate in a roundtable discussion that reflects critically on the present concept of the "metaverse," from creative, art historical, and socio-politically-informed perspectives. The conversation will seek to chip away at some of the hype and corporately co-opted buzzwords clouding the present discourse in order to underscore some important legacies and trace a path for the trajectory of the most compelling work in the metaverse.

Panelists:
LaTurbo Avedon, Artist/Avatar
Yvette Granata, Artist, Digital Studies Institute faculty, Assistant Professor, Dept of Film, TV & Media, University of Michigan
Auriea Harvey, Artist, Professor of Games, Kunsthochschule Kassel
Tina Sauerlaender, Director & Head Curator, Peer to Space
Moderator: Marisa Olson, Artist, Executive Director, Digital Studies Institute

*Live captioning (CART) will be provided. Please let us know if you have any additional access needs, at dsi-administration@umich.edu.

Zoom Link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/92670896264?pwd=QnNNRXdTeUx0WXg0SkNPMkZBVUtzUT09

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 17 Feb 2022 13:06:53 -0500 2022-02-17T13:00:00-05:00 2022-02-17T14:30:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Digital Studies Institute Livestream / Virtual metaverse