HAT Lab | Northwestern University

March 15, 2025

Join us for a talk with Dr. Mikael Mattsson, a leading expert in exercise physiology with 25+ years of experience. A Stanford researcher, author, and global speaker, he specializes in endurance training, exercise analytics, precision health, and sports genetics.

HAT Lab | Northwestern University

March 15, 2025

Dr. Mikael Mattsson has 20+ years of experience in researching and creating physiology algorithms and working with elite and recreational athletes in a variety of sports. Join us for a conversation between Dr. Mattsson and Associate Professor Marcelo Worsley that will explore the rich intersection of data analysis and human performance.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

March 12, 2025 - May 7, 2025

The BCaT Book Club launches the Automating Black Joy collaborative project. Join us to explore speculative fiction, critical design, Black skepticism, and the future of AI. Through readings on AI's impact on education, politics, media, and the environment, we'll collectively imagine possibilities for liberation.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

March 26, 2025

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

The tool we will be discussing is zeeschuimer, which can capture data from TikTok, instagram, twitter and more by 'looking over your shoulder' as you scroll through them, as well as the 4cat interface, which offers a toolkit to process and analyse your raw data.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

March 10, 2025

From generative AI to various phases of appropriation, Black soundscapes are under constant surveillance and manipulation. In this workshop, Dr. Martin demonstrates strategies for considering the ethics of soundscape recording and composition in Black digital and artistic projects.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

February 26, 2025

Join us for the launch of the book Technoskepticism! From Munchausen by Tiktok, to wellness apps, to online communities, to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create. Technoskepticism explores possibility and refusal in new technologies, highlighting how people of color and disabled individuals have long navigated between acceptance and rejection. Technoskepticism shares their stories, revealing the opportunities skepticism can create.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

February 26, 2025

Join us for an information session to learn about our new inter-institutional research project which examines automation and AI through the lens of Black feminist inquiry.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

February 26, 2025

Archives and the Black Tradition explores the significance of personal and digital archives in re/defining historical legacies, promoting narrative control and agency, and expanding conventional notions of memory, place, and truth.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

February 19, 2025

The BCaT Lab is hosting an Associate of Internet Researchers (AoIR) clinic! We are here to offer guidance on your submission materials. The theme for 2025 explores “ruptures,” encompassing alternative internet histories and theoretical perspectives often overshadowed by dominant Western ideation and big tech.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

February 19, 2025

In this workshop our speakers reflect on their own practices of collecting and narrativising Oral Histories, how method informs their research, and give practical guidance towards the recovery and ethical engagement of Black counter-narratives.

Paula Akpan’s historical practice and journalism interrogate themes of Blackness, queerness, community-building and our relationship with technology. Her first book, WHEN WE RULED: THE RISE AND FALL OF TWELVE AFRICAN QUEENS AND WARRIORS, will be published in May 2025 by Trapeze Books.

Jade Bentil is a writer and historian from south London, with a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. Her scholarship uses Black feminist thought and oral history as a methodology that centres Black women’s rebellion. Dr. Bentil’s debut book, REBEL CITIZEN, explores the lived experiences of Black women who migrated to Britain following the Second World War, and is forthcoming from Allen Lane.

DISCO Network | U-M Digital Studies Institute

February 14, 2025

Celebrate the publication of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal with the DISCO Network and the University of Michigan Digital Studies Institute!

Technoskepticism is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. From Munchausen by TikTok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create. 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.

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

January 23, 2025

Search Engines: Art, Tech, Justice invite you to an artist's talk by Molly Soda. 

Molly Soda is a NYC-based artist, designer, writer, and educator. Her distinctly post-internet creative practice bridges the worlds of performance art and Internet art, often drawing from her own experience as an Incredibly-Online individual as well as from a rich archive of digital artifacts accumulated over the past two decades. Her work spans a variety of social media platforms and modes, and has been presented both online and in gallery installations. 

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

December 4, 2024

In our final bookclub of the semester we will be exploring the virtual reality experience “Obsidian”, created by the Black Artists and Designers Guild.

Obsidian is an interactive web story, exploring a digitally recreated home from Oakland Hills, California.

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

November 22, 2024

Search History is a student-led zine publication from the University of Michigan community, hosted by Search Engines: Art, Tech, Justice.

The Search History zine meditates on the implications of an increasingly digital world and asks questions like: How does art help us redefine what technology is? What is your vision of the future and how can art and technology make it a reality? And how do interdisciplinary practices in technology expand traditional knowledge production and storytelling?

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

November 20, 2024

This month, the BCaT Lab is hosting a field trip on November 20th to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. There, they will have lunch in the Sweet Home Cafe and receive a guided tour of the Power of Place exhibition. This tour will help provide insights into the ways BCaT can explore developing their Black Homeplaces Co(Lab)!

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

November 8, 2024

“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography” as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers with their gender fluidity as well as their physical and spiritual metamorphoses across a three-hundred-year span. In making his film, Preciado invited a diverse group of more than twenty trans and nonbinary people to play the role of Orlando and to participate in this shared biography. Together, they perform interpretations of the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of transition and identity formation. Not content to simply update a groundbreaking work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of “Orlando” in the ongoing struggle to secure dignity for trans people worldwide.

Search Engines hosted a conversation and Q&A with Paul B. Preciado about his film.

Watch the film trailer.

Association of Internet Researchers Conference | University of Sheffield

November 1, 2024

Panelists: Rianna Walcott (University of Maryland), Catherine Knight Steele (University of Maryland), Aaron Dial (Colgate University), David Adelman (University of Michigan), and Kevin Winstead (University of Florida)

On this roundtable we question our position as co-producers – those who make with technologies – as opposed to as fungible, exploited in the production of technology. In our discussion of large language models (LLMs), we challenge the deracination of A.I. and question its ability to authentically reproduce—and co-produce—Black vernacular styles as both cause for concern and a site of possibility. We think through the making of home(pages) in our engagement with the internet, and the production of nostalgia and ephemera as acts of refusal. We consider technology and/as care, through clinical fixations with fixing errant bodyminds through the use of high-capacity digital tools, and counterdiagnostic impulses wherein crip, BIPOC, and trans users refashion what it means to have a wayward body in the age of social media and biocertification. Finally, we reconfigure even the process of making academic knowledge, from writing as an individual towards a collective practice.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

DAF Lab | University of Michigan

October 23, 2024

This roundtable conversation considers what it means to design accessible conference presentations, as well as how to survive and navigate conferences as a disabled scholar. How might we advocate for access in inaccessible and often high-stakes terrain? What strategies might we use in our own conference practices to support the work of access creation?

This virtual roundtable conversation features Michele Friedner, Ruth Osorio, and Victor Zhuang.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

BCaT Lab | University of Maryland

October 26, 2024

The Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab at the University of Maryland is hosting a panel about alternative careers outside of academia. Panelists include representatives from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and independent scholars.

Watch on YouTube or Deep Blue.

Search Engines | U-M Digital Studies Institute

September 26, 2024

A screening of the film, "Orlando: My Political Biography" (2023) by Paul B. Preciado. Screening will be followed by a conversation between Jesse Beal, director of the U-M Spectrum Center, and Laurie Pohutsky, the Speaker Pro Tempore for the MI House of Representatives and representative of the 17th House District in Livonia and the audience.