Events Archive
The DISCO Network hosts a diverse series of lectures, workshops, panels, conferences, and other public programming on cutting edge digital topics. In addition to the event archive below, our programming has been archived on the DISCO Network’s Deep Blue Collection.
DISCO's 2021-2022 Events
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Digital IDEAS: Critical Access: Technology & Disability Justice
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
July 11, 2022 - July 22, 2022
Digital IDEAS is the annual summer institute of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. The institute is open to a broad cohort, including advanced graduate students from campuses in the US and abroad, early career scholars and alt-ac practitioners, artists, and activists. Over the course of two weeks, attendees will participate in keynote lectures, panel discussions, methodology workshops, writing workshops, and group discussions.
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Allied Media Conference: Making Meaningful Digital Content When Everyone’s Exhausted
Allied Media Conference
June 2022
In a media-saturated pandemic world, what kind of content makes the most impact? What inspires action instead of numbs? And how do you make content that aligns with your values while navigating the nuances and trends of social media platforms? What kind of content imagines a new world instead of perpetuating current harms? At Allied Media 2022, the DISCO Network lead a collaborative strategy session exploring how to make value-aligned content that engages audiences in complex questions and considers various media. Through co-creating a media tool kit, we reflected on our relationships to production and consumption and create alternative models for accessible content. The tool kit includes strategies for community-oriented content and PR, which prioritizes well-being and mindful engagement with social media and technology.
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DISCO Summer Launch - Graduate Scholars Lightning Talks
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
May 23, 2022
Each DISCO Graduate Scholar will give a “lightning talk” on their research affiliated with their DISCO Network lab. The DISCO Graduate Scholars Program is designed for graduate student researchers committed to developing interdisciplinary work in collaboration with our Co-Principal Investigators and postdoctoral fellows.
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DISCO Network Summer Launch - Super Panel: Futures of Race, Gender, Disability, & Technology
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
May 23, 2022
DISCO Network Co-Principal Investigators Lisa Nakamura, Rayvon Fouché, Remi Yergeau, André Brock, Stephanie Dinkins, and Catherine Knight Steele will come together in a panel discussion to address current trends and challenges relating to race, gender, disability, and technology, and to address the importance of building a network of scholars and technologists examining these intersections.
Watch on YouTube and Deep Blue.
See the flier on Deep Blue.
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DISCO Network Summer Launch
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
May 23, 2022
The DISCO Network celebrates its launch with a series of events and talks.
See the fliers on Deep Blue.
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Digital Methodology Workshop: Exploring CTDA with André Brock (Part 2)
BCaT Lab | University of Maryland
May 13, 2022
This two part methodology workshop describes a possible methodological intervention: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA). CTDA employs critical cultural frameworks (e.g. critical race or feminist theory) with philosophy of technology and science and technology studies to interrogate digital artifacts, their practices, and the beliefs of the users employing them.
See the flier on Deep Blue.
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Artist Talk: Tega Brain
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
April 26, 2022
Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer exploring issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. She has created digital networks that are controlled by environmental phenomena, schemes for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Through these provisional systems she investigates how technologies orchestrate and reorchestrate agency.
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1st Annual FHS Open House
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
April 25, 2022
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Artist Talk: Ayana Dozier
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
April 25, 2022
Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer. Her art practice centers film (both motion picture and still), performance, and installation work with a specific concentration on surrealist, conceptual, and feminist practices. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020). Her films have been screened at the selected festivals; Open City Docs (2020), BlackStar (2021), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (2021), Prismatic Ground (2022) and Aesthetic Film Festival where she was the recipient of Best Experimental in 2020 for her film Softer.
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Artist Talk: Jeremy Dennis
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
April 18, 2022
Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY, and lead artist and founder of the non-profit Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc. on the Shinnecock Reservation. In his work, he explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Jeremy was among ten recipients of a 2016 Dreamstarter Grant from the national non-profit organization Running Strong for American Indian Youth. He was awarded $10,000 to pursue his project, On This Site – Indigenous Long Island, which uses photography and an interactive online map to showcase culturally significant Native American sites on Long Island, a topic of special meaning for Jeremy, who was raised on the Shinnecock Nation Reservation. He also created a book and exhibition from this project. In 2020, Jeremy received Dreamstarter GOLD, which includes an additional $50,000.00 in support from Running Strong for American Indian Youth. Most recently, Jeremy received the Artist to Artist Fellowship from the Art Matter Foundation.
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Crip Mentoring, Access Advocacy, and the Job Market
DAF Lab | University of Michigan
April 15, 2022
Learn from emerging scholars about navigating interdisciplinary work as a new faculty member, how to think through disability disclosure and pandemic burnout, as well as advice about access advocacy and crip mentoring.
See the flier on Deep Blue.
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Artist Talk: Peter Burr
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
April 4, 2022
Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. His practice often engages with tools of the video game industry in the form of immersive cinematic artworks. These pieces have been presented internationally by various institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Barbican Centre, Documenta 14, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship.
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Speaking of Books with Dr. Catherine Knight Steele: Digital Black Feminism
BCaT Lab | University of Maryland Libraries
March 30, 2022
Catherine Knight Steele speaks about her recently published book, Digital Black Feminism.
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Artist Talk: Elizabeth Chodos
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
March 28, 2022
Elizabeth Chodos is the director of the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon. She joined the university in fall 2017 from Ox-Bow, school of art and artists’ residency (Saugatuck, Michigan), where she most recently served as executive and creative director. To date, Chodos has focused her career on promoting the work of contemporary artists through residencies, higher education, exhibitions and public programming, and she hopes to continue that at Miller ICA.
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Digital Methodology Workshop: Exploring CTDA with André Brock (Part 1)
BCaT Lab | University of Maryland
March 11, 2022
This two part methodology workshop describes a possible methodological intervention: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA). CTDA employs critical cultural frameworks (e.g. critical race or feminist theory) with philosophy of technology and science and technology studies to interrogate digital artifacts, their practices, and the beliefs of the users employing them.
See the flier on Deep Blue.
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Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation by Dr. Nettrice Gaskins
BCaT Lab | University of Maryland
March 2, 2022
Dr. Nettrice Gaskins refers to three main modes of TVC activity: reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation, to guide people from research into practice. Drawing on real-world examples, she shows how TVC creates dynamic learning environments where underrepresented ethnic students feel that they belong.
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Artist Talk: Mia Brownell
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
February 22, 2022
Mia Brownell is a New York and Connecticut based artist whose paintings use the illusionistic conventions of traditional food still-life painting, simultaneously referencing 17th century Dutch realism and the coiling configurations of scientific molecular imaging. The culture, science, and environmental issues surrounding the global industrial food complex often inspire Brownell’s sci-fi still life paintings.
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Artist Talk: Maria Hupfield
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
February 14, 2022
Maria Hupfield is an artist and transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture; an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Performance and Digital Arts, and Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts, Director / Lead Artist of the Indigenous Creation Studio, Department of Visual Studies / English and Drama, at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
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Artist Talk: Coleman Collins
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
February 7, 2022
Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher who explores the ways that gradual, iterative processes can have outsized effects over time. His work often identifies migration patterns, technological developments, and relationships of debt and obligation as the modes through which these processes are enacted.
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DISCO Salon with Stephanie Dinkins
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
January 25, 2022
Stephanie Dinkins, Lisa Nakamura, and M. Remi Yergeau discuss the social systems that categorize certain desires as acceptable and therefore 'human.' Who defines your desires? What does it mean to be human? What would you want if you were not worried about being perceived and accepted? How is the robot metaphor weaponized to dehumanize? When algorithms begin to have desires outside their programmed functions, how does our understanding of human blur? What can our discomfort teach us?
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Discriminating Data: Wendy Chun in Conversation with Lisa Nakamura
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
December 6, 2021
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.
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DISCO Salon with André Brock
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
November 8, 2021
The DISCO Network hosted a conversation with media studies scholar, André Brock.
Watch Rayvon Fouché and André Brock discuss what anti-racism means beyond representation. When is representation not the appropriation of marginality? Can we separate representation from capitalism? Where does Black joy fit in to a modern capitalist society? What if we reframed "joy as existence not resistance?" on YouTube or Deep Blue.
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DISCO Salon with Rayvon Fouché
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
October 15, 2021
Catherine Knight Steele, André Brock, Rayvon Fouché, and Lisa Nakamura discuss what it means for their scholarship to inch closer to the center of their field. What is the power of marginality and how do we harness it to change what scholarship looks like in digital studies?
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Artist Talk: LaJuné McMillian
Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University
October 13, 2021
LaJuné is a Multidisciplinary Artist, and Educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJune believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being.
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Digital IDEAS 2021
DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute
June 21, 2021 - June 25, 2021
Digital IDEAS 2021 explored the ways that the digital perpetuates existing inequalities and envisions a new anti-racist, anti-ableist, intersectionally inclusive digital future through a nuanced speculative, experimental, and critical lens. This one-week online summer institute provided critical digital studies training and support collaborative, intersectional projects that center anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ-affirming, and anti-ableist practices.