University of Florida

August 29, 2024

Join the UF African American Studies Program and the Digital Media and Community Lab to discuss the Hulu documentary Black Twitter with special guests André L. Brock (Georgia Tech), Sarah Florini (Arizona State University), Raven Maragh-Lloyd (Washington University in St. Louis), and Jasmine McNealy (University of Florida).

View on Deep Blue

DAF Lab | University of Michigan

August 14, 2024

In this workshop, panelists will address a few different questions, including: What strategies might you consider for deciding how and when to disclose your disability? How do you navigate asking for accommodations for interviews and campus visits? This workshop will also address topics such as remote work accommodations, finding mentors, negotiating access while job-seeking and after being hired, and how to navigate (access) fatigue. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions and participate in the conversation.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 17, 2024 - June 28, 2024

Digital X Climate brings together eminent scholars, artists, and practitioners working to illuminate the critical impact of digital technology on our social, psychic, and ecological lives. The summer institute will engage these ideas through intentional conversation, reflection, workshopping, and community.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 15, 2024

As junior scholars, the Digital Inquiry Speculation Collaboration Optimism (DISCO) Network postdoctoral fellows faced unique challenges negotiating the tensions of being legible for academic employment and serving digital studies projects that foster collaboration and community. This panel discusses best practices for being young career scholars in critical identity and digital studies.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 15, 2024

Digital infrastructure shapes access, representation, and cultural politics. Indigenous, Asian and Southeast Asian, Palestinian, U.S. Mexico border, and women of color uses of digital networks are often represented as niche or marginal, sequestered in area studies, ethnic studies, and women studies, yet the U.S. and Western Europe are the numerical minority.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 15, 2024

"Digital Possibilities" presents an intergenerational panel of arts practitioners who explore the critical role deliberate exploration and practical research play in understanding and shaping digital technologies and culture. The panel showcases the transformative power deeply engaging digital technologies can have on molding practical, aspirational, and equitable understandings of self and society. Panelists discuss how practice can leverage discovery, curiosity, out-of-the-box thinking, and leadership to mine and challenge opportunities, or the lack thereof, for beauty, potentiality, subjugation, and liberation that digital technologies often carry. The panel also engages thought about how future, present, and past technologies combined with narratives centering on underutilized, underrecognized communities can be coaxed or developed to produce technological ecosystems that produce nuanced, open, and equitably informed digital tools, platforms, and collaborators.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 15, 2024

Black folks have a tradition of being innovative in ways not understood and expected by traditional markets, dominant cultural formations, or information platforms. As the world is enamored, fascinated, enraptured, troubled, or simply confused by the potentiality of generative AI, is there a place and a role for Blackness to participate, contribute, or intervene in this next technoscientific atmospheric river? What will Black innovation and creativity look like in a world propelled by a network of AI trained on past utterances that did not see Blackness as meaningful? How can Blackness and Black innovation and creativity disrupt expected technoscientific futures?

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 15, 2024

Is optimism an antidote or salve for turmoil? Please join us in a collaborative discussion charting pathways for digital scholarship to build optimistic societal interventions that traverse the potentialities of joy, sadness, refusal, skepticism, and trust.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 14, 2024

How do students’ stories about themselves or others—their anecdotal relations—inform their burgeoning understandings of digital inequality and related concepts? In this session, we reflect on student interviews and instructor experiences drawn from a study of five U-M Digital Studies classes focused on race and disability.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 14, 2024

The experiences of Black women online serve as a harbinger of what digital culture affords and what is to come. This panel thinks through the relationship between pleasure and pain in the online lives of Black women and how Black feminist methods, epistemologies, and strategies may point us toward a better digital future for us all.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 14, 2024

In their manifesto on crip technoscience, Kelly Fritsch and Aimi Hamraie (2019) impress upon us that access production is a “frictional process,” one that requires “acknowledging that science and technology can be used to both produce and dismantle injustice.” This roundtable explores the frictional intimacies, practices, and material conditions of what it means to do the digital. In particular, panelists will consider myriad ways in which accessibility holds the potential to burn, grate, spark, and tug at new imaginings of crip futures.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 14, 2024

Optimism is the belief that the interval between the now and liberation is where we can act. Digital optimism is the recognition that there are elements of life that vivify and energize in the here and the now, despite and amidst the digital purgatories that we endure. Sometimes that energy is found in stillness; sometimes in refusal; and sometimes in moments of catharsis or joy. This panel will explore the concept of digital optimism as it appears in DISCO’s collaborative writing and work together.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

June 14, 2024 - June 15, 2024

The DISCO Summit is a two-day interdisciplinary summer symposium about digital social inequalities in celebration of the third year of the DISCO Network. The DISCO Summit will include nine panel conversations about the past, present, and future of the intersection between digital technology, culture, race, disability, gender, sexuality, and liberation.

See the event materials on Deep Blue.

See the event photos on Deep Blue.

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

May 16, 2024

From 3D-printed replicas of sculptures destroyed by ISIS, to interactive installations and hypertext fables that infuse medieval fable with contemporary gender politics, to purpose-built generative AI aimed at recovering lost queer traditions in Persian art, Moreshin Allahyari's work leverages storytelling, archival research, and new technology as tools to push back against Western colonialism. Join us for a conversation with Moreshin led by Pedram Baldari, an interdisciplinary artist and scholar in UM's STAMPS School of Art & Design, and Oguz Kayir, doctoral student in Film, Television, and Media and Graduate Curator of Search Engines.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

May 2, 2024

This panel is a conversation with the Principal Investigators of the DISCO Network as they reflect on their most well-known publications, and their influence on their current research. The collective reflects on how these formative works shaped their academic careers, and the reverberations those works continue to make within the DISCO Network. Hosted at the University of Maryland College Park by the BCaT Lab, one of the DISCO Networks labs.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

May 1, 2024

Learn about the BCaT Lab's collaborative projects, eat good foods, hear snippets from our brand new podcast, and meet the DISCO Network PIs.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

April 26, 2024

Black Networked Resistance explores the creative range of Black digital users and their responses to varying forms of oppression, utilizing cultural, communicative, political, and technological threads both on and offline. Raven Maragh-Lloyd demonstrates how Black users strategically rearticulate their responses to oppression in ways that highlight Black publics' historically rich traditions and reveal the shifting nature of both dominance and resistance, particularly in the digital age.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University

April 24, 2024

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

April 18, 2024

DISCO Network graduate scholars of the 2024 cohort present the research they've conducted in collaboration with DISCO Network Principal Investigators.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DAF Lab | University of Michigan

April 18, 2024

The Accessing Disability Culture Reception celebrated the completion and release of the Anthology and its contributing authors. This event focused on care, community and support networks, and opportunities to share; contributors had the opportunity to present their work and talk about their inspiration, experience, and process. The reception concluded with food, photos, and the hope to create another disability culture anthology next year!

Read the anthology.

PREACH Lab | Georgia Institute of Technology

April 17, 2024

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

April 10, 2024

This workshop offers a user-friendly data scraping method, for the researcher who - like me [Rianna Walcott] - is not particularly tech-savvy.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

HAT Lab | Northwestern University

April 8, 2024

Purdue University, as a vibrant, beautiful sneaker community, dances, laughs, and thrives in sneakers Zach Edey gets buckets in sneakers. Scores of you go to bars and parties in sneakers. Some of you collect them, and some of us teach while wearing them. This campus has many Sōl Stories, including your own. The point of this exhibition is to share some of those stories. These six student photographers have rendered and imagined their own Sōl Stories for you to witness and experience. There are stories of family and tradition, tales of intergalactic wonder, emotional narratives, and stirring fables about nature. You will see artists honoring memory as well as imagining nostalgia and fantasy through Purdue car culture. Mostly, though, as you from image to image and series to series, you will see the work of talented student artists who care deeply about their craft and Purdue. 

See the posters on Deep Blue.

PREACH Lab | Georgia Institute of Technology

April 4, 2024

Northwestern University

April 4, 2024

This panel is a conversation with the Principal Investigators of the DISCO Network. What can an equitable digital future look like? In our contemporary moment, is it possible to create transformative movements, rooted within humanistic inquiry, to address inequities, histories of exclusion, disability injustice, techno-ableism, and digital racial politics? Over the past few years, the DISCO Network began a portion of this work. The collective will reflect on its collaborative effort and explore the tensions between digital optimism and technoskepticism.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

March 26, 2024

In Resurrecting the Black Body, Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans -and the records that document them- from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

PREACH Lab | Georgia Institute of Technology

March 7, 2024

Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University

February 29, 2024

Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University

February 28, 2024 - March 1, 2024

An open conversation with the Principal Investigators of the DISCO Network examining our digital worlds, scholarship, and adventures in knowledge dissemination.

See the brainstorming notes on Mural.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

February 28, 2024

How is morality understood in the marketplace? Why do brands speak out about certain issues of injustice and not others? And what is influencer culture's role in social and political activism? Big Brands Are Watching You investigates corporate culture, from the branding of companies and nations to television portrayals of big business and the workplace. Francesca Sobande analyzes media, interviews, survey responses, and ephemera from the history of advertising as well as exhibitions in London, brand stores in Amsterdam, a music festival in Las Vegas, and archives in Washington, DC, to illuminate the world of branding.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

February 14, 2024

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

February 8, 2024

Search Engines hosts Lauren Lee McCarthy for an interactive, Zoom-based presentation entitled, "What do you want me to say?" McCarthy's practice-spanning performance, software, electronics, internet, film, photography, and installation - examines social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

DAF Lab | University of Michigan

January 19, 2024

This roundtable conversation considers what it means to write, make, and do (or not!) on crip time. Universities and other institutions typically represent disability through the logics of cost-burden models, which position disability as antithetical to collegiality, punctuality, responsibility, and often, life. How might we work against, crip, and ultimately dismantle these systems? How might bed rest, deferrals, stims, stutters, and other embodyminded insights help us generate tactics for survival? How might we think about digital activism and disabled collectivity online in ways that provide us respite rather than distress? How might we collectively reimagine the temporalities of labor, care, and composing?

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DISCO Michigan Hub | U-M Digital Studies Institute

December 14, 2023

Technoskepticism is a topical, and timely multi-authored monograph written by an intergenerational group of 14 DISCO Network researchers and artists (David Adelman, André Brock, Aaron Dial, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Huan He, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Knight Steele, Rianna Walcott, Kevin Winstead, Josie Williams, Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu) This book offers a critical road map of the contemporary digital landscape from the point of view of disabled and POC technology scholars, arguing for the concept of ‘technoskepticism’ as a response to our current inflection point in regards to race relations, disability history and care activism in relation to technology use. Read more about DISCO’s forthcoming publication, Technoskepticism, here. Eight co-authors of Technoskepticism, Lisa Nakamura, Remi Yergeau, André Brock, Catherine Knight Steele, Stephanie Dinkins, Kevin Winstead, and Rianna Walcott, and Jeff Nagy, will be in conversation about this exciting new manuscript.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University

December 6, 2023

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

December 6, 2023

In this lunch and learn we have the privilege of being joined by André Brock, Associate Professor of Black Digital Studies and Media in the Department of Literature, Media and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We'll be discussing CTDA, an internet research method that takes a discourse-analytic approach to digital objects and phenomena and is framed by cultural theory.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

December 4, 2023

Beth Coleman's argument in this project is to make AI more wild, not less. By wild, she indicates generative possibility for the technology in opposition to the reproduction of the same. The prompt for this line of inquiry is the call for transparency and accountability as an “ethics” in AI design. Another prompt is the “alien encounters” described in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series of speculative fiction. This talk wonders if advocacy toward a corrective can produce the ends sought: less harmful bias and more equitable opportunity. What if—outside of the frame of the ethical corrective—one reorients AI application and ontology?

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DAF Lab | University of Michigan

November 28, 2023

This roundtable stories in/access and crip feelings in the wake of anti-trans and anti-critical race theory legislation, as well as the rollback of COVID-19 protections and policies. In the midst of this onslaught, how do we survive, much less maintain optimism? This roundtable and workshop considers digital storying as a means for maintaining and amplifying community.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University

November 16, 2023

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

November 15, 2023

"Asian futures, without Asians" is a multimedia presentation by artist and curator Astria Suparak, which asks: “What does it mean when so many white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people?”

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Cosponsored by DAF Lab | University of Michigan

November 15, 2023

Historically, disability studies is anchored to the humanities, which generates a tremendous volume of discourse on disability through activism and advocacy, creative practice, and justice-informed frameworks. However, within the academy and society at large, perceptions, perspectives, and approaches to disability are more volatile. Physicians tend to understand disability as a therapeutic object to be diagnosed, ameliorated, and cured. Engineers engage disability as a problem to be solved through technical means. Artists and designers work through disability to motivate a range of creative practices. Architects and urbanists leverage disability narratives around mobility and accessibility but often fail to accede to the demands of disabled people in terms of equity and inclusion in public life. Everyone appears well-intentioned but often intention becomes oppressive, pathologizing, and isolating. A civil understanding of human rights remains contested.This panel is convening as a form of repair across disciplinary divides; in order, hopefully, to foster greater connection and, perhaps empathy in the process of our collective work.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Watch on YouTube.

Cosponsored by the DISCO Network

November 10, 2023

Over 3 billion people consider themselves video gamers. Competitive gaming, known as esports (and not eSports, e-sports and CERTAINLY NOT e-Sports) is a vibrant industry with viewership number and revenue rivaling that of most traditional sports. Although seemingly a recent development, this ecosystem has been evolving since the arcade leaderboards of the 1980s. As with any instance of rapid expansion, growing pains are frequent and often overwhelming. This talk will examine the current state of the esports industry, discussing and dissecting both the light and the dark side of this captivating space.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Cosponsored by the DISCO Network and DAF Lab

November 10, 2023

This talk provides an exploration into the (in)accessibility of gaming technologies, most notably the Xbox Kinect. While the gaming world remarked on the possibilities created when the body becomes the controller, many Black gamers illustrated the centrality of race in deciding who can (and cannot) participate in this technological potential.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Cosponsored by the DISCO Network

November 9, 2023

Esports — video gaming as a spectator sport — currently boasts an estimated global viewership of 500 million and an annual revenue of over US$1 billion. This talk examines esports' perceived novelty through the lens of its history and popularity in East Asia, particularly South Korea and China. East Asian players continue to profoundly dominate today’s global esports scene, even while the video games that they excel at are American-made. The drama (and the profitability) of this global virtual competition depends on a potent set of fantasies about race, gender, national identity, and ideal "sportsmanship." Esports both interrupts and reproduces stereotypes of Asian and Asian American men as unathletic, nerdy, “cheap,” hyper-competitive Others. This talk argues that the continued success of global esports ultimately depends on a toxic set of "mini-games" which bring together old and new modes of inter-racial competition, ideas of masculinity and athleticism, and American nationalism against the backdrop of a rising China.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Cosponsored by the DISCO Network | U-M Digital Studies Institute

November 9, 2023 - November 10, 2023

Videogames have become a global sensation and spectacle. In recent years, we have witnessed the increasing popularity of multiplayer competitive games such as Valorant, Call of Duty, Fortnite, and League of Legends, the expanding viewership of Twitch content creators, and the growing multibillion-dollar industry of professional videogame players. Yet, who are these players? Who are the viewers and the fans? What games take center stage, and why? Who is celebrated and why, and who may be excluded? This symposium explores the energetic phenomenon of esports—videogaming as a spectator sport—through the lens of identity and the embodied experiences of race, gender, and disability. While some players and fans might view online gaming as separate from real-world concerns of identity (where who you are doesn’t matter as long as you are “good”), we look at the many surprising ways identity shapes—and is shaped by—digital games, technologies, and their competitive worlds.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

November 8, 2023

This one-hour interactive workshop will show you a few options for making use of Zotero for your researching and writing needs. It will cover organising folders and storage in Zotero, in-text citations and different reference styles, and making use of the Zotero built-in PDF annotation system.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

American Studies Association

November 2, 2023 - November 5, 2023

DISCO Network postdoctoral scholars in a panel at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

October 25, 2023

Topics addressed include: big data and quantifying lived experience, social media platform histories, adaptive methods of data collection, ethical considerations in social media research, and restricted API access across social media platforms including X, TikTok, and Facebook.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Cosponsored by the DISCO Network | U-M Digital Studies Institute

October 24, 2023

Carolyn Kane zeros in on the "White City" at the Chicago's 1893 Columbian World's Fair, and New York City's "Great White Way" in the 1910s-1930s, to argue that a new training ground was forged for the American subject, engendering a unique brand of spectatorship rooted in visual possession by way of spectacle-based consumption.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

October 11, 2023

Topics addressed include: big data and quantifying lived experience, social media platform histories, adaptive methods of data collection, ethical considerations in social media research, and restricted API access across social media platforms including X, TikTok, and Facebook.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

October 4, 2023

Topics addressed include: big data and quantifying lived experience, social media platform histories, adaptive methods of data collection, ethical considerations in social media research, and restricted API access across social media platforms including X, TikTok, and Facebook.

See the flier on Deep Blue.

Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University

September 27, 2023

Crystal Marie Fleming, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, is a critical race sociologist, the author/editor of four books and an internationally recognized expert on racism and antiracism. Her work empowers people of all backgrounds to become change agents and dismantle white supremacy. Dr. Fleming’s passion for speaking truth to power and promoting social transformation infuses her scholarship, writing and pedagogy. She earned a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in Sociology from Harvard University and graduated with honors in Sociology and French from Wellesley College. Her research appears in leading journals such as Social Problems, The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Poetics, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and Mindfulness, is a critical race sociologist, the author/editor of four books and an internationally recognized expert on racism and antiracism. Her work empowers people of all backgrounds to become change agents and dismantle white supremacy.

Future Histories Studio | Stonybrook University

September 27, 2023

Cultivating new connections between revolutionary leaders of the past and a future generation of critical thinkers, Ancestral Archives brings historically significant Black leaders, who inspired artist Josie Williams, to present-day communities in the form of virtual poets and authors: Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Octavia Butler. This work explores how generative AI can be enriched with the connections, experience, and knowledge of the past. In doing so, it leverages the learning capabilities of deep neural networks with Black culture to create a thoughtful, one-of-a-kind physical and digital experience, showcasing the power of harnessing technology for positive human impact and building a better world.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

September 20, 2023

This event is for undergraduate and graduate students who would like assistance on their professional documents. Right after this event, you can stay for BCaT Eats - dinner will be provided, and we'll be voting on what film to watch!