Ashley Cordes and Majerle Lister, in conversation with Lisa Nakamura, discuss the importance of Indigenous innovation in our everyday technologies and the process of conducting research in Indigenous communities.

Search Engines staff member Atticus Spicer expresses the success and organization behind bringing trans writer (and now director) Paul B. Preciado to campus.

Spanish artist Paul B. Preciado shares the process of creating his biographical film and hope for the future of the trans community.

NYC-based artist, Molly Soda, gives a talk on her creative work across time and her intimate relationship with the internet as both a content creator and “collector of trash.”

DISCO scholars discuss their newly published book, Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal (Stanford University Press)

Social media, techno-mess, and imagining collective access.

As April showers roll in and May flowers hopefully follow suit, the Black Communication & Technology (BCaT) Lab reflects on a semester rich in collaborative research, skills-building workshops, meaningful discussions, and a commitment to cultivating communities across several generations of scholars in Black digital humanities studies.

Learn more about Sam’s pedagogical practices and inspirations for his course “Internet (Micro-)Aesthetics.”

How can we create more accessible conference spaces? Panelists Michele Friedner, Ruth Osario, and Victor Zhuang share their expertise in advocating for the needs of disabled people.

A flashlight, a microphone, a 3D printer, a dagger, a teddy bear—a seemingly random collection of objects. And yet, each one represents a story of resistance.

The leaves are turning orange, the mosquitos have gone back to the deepest and darkest part of the earth, and there is a faint pumpkin smell in the air which means it’s officially fall and the BCaT Lab is back and in full swing! We have been having an exciting year of research, academic inquiry, and innovative work focused on Black digital humanities! We are excited to open back up our writing lab, book club, BCaT eats, and so many more events for our BCaT community!

The DISCO Network is very proud to announce that we are continuing our work to envision an anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future as a refreshed and re-booted version of ourselves. 

Over the course of her career as a performance artist and computer programmer, UCLA Design Media Arts professor Lauren Lee McCarthy has engaged with surveillance and control. She has created projects in which she is both observing and being observed. McCarthy spoke about her works in her talk “What Do You Want Me to Say?” as part of the DISCO Search Engines Lecture Series.

Pratiksha Thangam Menon, GSRA for the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, loves GoodReads. She holds two MAs—one in Communications from the University of Illinois-Chicago and one in Journalism from Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communication in India.

The two-day symposium will host speakers from around the world for nine panel conversations about digital racial inequality, histories of exclusion, disability justice, and racial politics within academics, technology, and beyond.

Believe it or not, we’re past the Ides of March and with Spring Break coming to a close there’s no better time to recap what the first half of the semester has looked like for the BCaT Lab. The month of February was complete with conference presentations, workshops, volunteering, and social events to keep us engaged in Black digital humanities and cultural scholarship.

At once disorienting and captivating, Coleman’s AI-generated images thus invoke that liberatory wildness, revealing the libidinal economy that occurs at the sutures of modern technology and the contemporary black experience.

Suparak was hosted on U-M’s campus by the new Digital Studies Institute and DISCO Network programming “Search Engines” for the second in-person exhibition of her piece “Asian Futures, Without Asians.”

BCaT’s fall was busy – filled with collaborative learning and research opportunities, scholarship presentations, and fellowship and bonding through our weekly and monthly events. Although the lab (and UMD) is on Winter break, it seemed like an appropriate time to share more about and reflect on all that the fall semester offered us which included: conference attendance and presentations, further developed research by our Black Digital Migration team, BCaT Lunch & Learns, BCaT Eats, and a multi-authored book panel with scholars from the DISCO Network.

Now is an especially important moment for humanists, makers, and social scientists to engage in collective dialogue about humanity’s entanglements with technology.