Digital AF Lab Fellow

David Adelman (he/him/his) is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Digital Accessible Futures lab at the University of Michigan. His research interests center disability and crip studies, with a particular emphasis on disability media studies, digital disability cultures, disability film studies, and critical sexuality studies. Through an interdisciplinary crip studies/feminist lens, he pursues questions which emerge at the intersection of power, culture, technology, identity, and desire. His recent dissertation, “Ambivalent Pleasures: Pleasure, Desire, Authenticity, and the Production of Value in Online Disability Cultures,” examines how discourses of “desirable disability” manifest in cultural productions and Internet publics. This project traces the circulation and intensification of such discourse in popular culture across a range of audiovisual material, exploring the neoliberal commodification of identity politics that occurs and, concomitantly, is contested, online. He also maintains an artistic practice which centers experimental video and remix as a means to explore disability culture, aesthetics, and politics. For more, visit www.davidadelman.work, and on Twitter: @DavidAdelman90.

HAT Lab Fellow

Aaron Dial earned his PhD from North Carolina State University in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) program where his expertise is in materialist and digital media studies, digital humanities, Black studies, and cultural studies of technology and race. These areas of expertise inform his research and teaching interests, which, broadly sketched, are affective labor, popular culture, urban spaces and temporal flows, and the nexus between sports and science and technology.

Right now, Aaron is working on his first monograph, entitled “Deadstock, A Philosophy of Sneakers and Materiality in the Afterlife of Black Bodies.” This work articulates the intimate and undiscussed connections between sneakers as material objects and Black bodies. This project excavates sneakers from the strict confines of culture and fashion, asserting their existence as an object wherein bodies act and that acts upon bodies and spaces. Furthermore, this project hones the theoretical position that sneakers exist first and foremost as literal extensions of Black bodies, both sporting and cultural. That is, in sneakers, racialized imaginations of productive bodies are enlivened both as representative cultural fantasies and a collective reverie constellating the athletic possibilities of human potential. For example, in one of Deadstock’s later chapters, “Hangtime Melancholia,” which has been published in Cultural Studies, Aaron explodes the notion of hangtime, the physics-defying fantasy of a dunker’s trajectory, to its limit for the purpose of considering the undiscussed connections in the American photographic pastimes of lynching and dunk photography.

Aaron is a big-time sneakerhead with over 30 pairs in his collection. But also, his interests are varied—you can catch him doing anything from bumping the latest music release (he’s learning to DJ!) to watching some dope anime to obsessing over NBA basketball. If you have any questions, just ask – preferably over a nice bourbon.

Michigan Hub Network Building Fellow

Jeff Nagy is a historian of computing whose research focuses on exchanges between computing and the behavioral sciences from World War II to the present. He holds a PhD in Communication from Stanford University, where his dissertation, “Watching Feeling: Emotional Data from Cybernetics to Social Media,” told the story of how emotion was made computable. Other interests include disability in the history of science and technology, the social integration of emerging technologies, and the history and future of computer-mediated labor. His research has appeared in Technology & Culture, New Media & Society, and elsewhere. You can find him online at jeff-nagy.com.

PREACH Lab Fellow

Dr. Brandy Pettijohn is a postdoctoral fellow in the Project on Rhetorics of Equity, Access, Computation, and Humanities (PREACH) Lab (a DISCO Network Member) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. Her scholarship focuses on ethical digital storytelling for cultural sites, creating a framework called Black feminist technopractice. Grounded by Black feminist theory, Black feminist technopractice is an interdisciplinary digital humanities framework for digital storytelling and interactive narratives that deploys what we know as participatory design and speculative design {making with marginalized users in mind, while being expansive in the imagination of what we believe design can do}, combined with art and archival practices {expanding the archive beyond normal institution spaces} while leveraging Black technoculture {examining how Black people make meaning in digital spaces}. Brandy’s research areas include, Black Digital Visual Culture, Black Feminist World Making, and Digital Storytelling.

BCaT Lab Fellow

Rianna Walcott (she/her) is an LAHP alumna and PhD candidate at Kings College London researching Black British identity formation in digital spaces. Rianna combines digital work, decolonial studies, arts and culture, and mental health advocacy in her work, with a deep commitment to outreach work and public engagement. She co-founded projectmyopia.com, a website that promotes inclusivity in academia and a decolonized curriculum, and is the UCL writing lab's Scholar-in-Residence for 21-22. Rianna frequently writes about race, feminism, mental health, and arts and culture for publications including The Wellcome Collection, The Metro, The Guardian, The BBC, Vice, and Dazed. Rianna is co-editor of an anthology about BAME mental health - The Colour of Madness (2022), and in the time left over, she moonlights as a professional jazz singer.

Rianna will be based at The Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab at the University of Maryland-College Park. Research at this new lab will focus on race and technology, as well as the development of a pipeline program to introduce undergraduates and those in the wider community to the field of Black digital studies with the aim of working toward a more equitable digital future.

You can find out more about Rianna’s work at www.riannawalcott.com, and she tweets at @rianna_walcott.

Michigan Hub Curriculum Development Fellow

Lida Zeitlin-Wu is a scholar of media, race, and visual culture whose work explores the rationalization of sensory experience and selfhood under techno-capitalism. She received her PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley in 2022. Her book project, Seeing by Numbers, tells the story of how something as subjective and ephemeral as color came to be seen as standardized. Her writing has been published in Camera Obscura, Just Tech, Frames, and elsewhere, and with Carolyn L. Kane, she is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press, 2024). Other teaching and research interests include food studies and critiques of the wellness industry, particularly as they intersect with culture, race, and technology.

Lida has a strong investment in equitable course design and anti-racist pedagogy, which she is continuing to cultivate at the DISCO Michigan hub in her role as Curriculum Development Fellow.

Website

DISCO Faculty Affiliate

Assistant Professor of English · Vanderbilt

Huan He (he/him/his) is a Curriculum Development Fellow at the DISCO Network Michigan Hub and holds a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Most broadly, his research engages Asian/American literature and culture, histories of media and technology, visual culture, digital game studies, and poetics. His book project, currently titled, “The Racial Interface,” explores the racial associations linking Asian/Americans and information technology in the digital era. Drawing from literature, art, and archival sources, this project reveals how myths of racial and technological progress converge in the shadow of U.S. liberal capitalism. He foregrounds minoritarian writers and artists who challenge the dominant technological imaginaries shaping the digital present. He is also interested in the relationship between race, gaming, cheating, and scams and pursuing a second project on these topics. His scholarly writing has been published in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies and Media-N and is forthcoming in an anthology on Asian/American game studies. In Fall 2023, he will start as an Assistant Professor of English (Asian American and Asian Diasporic Literature) at Vanderbilt University.

He is also a poet and the author of the chapbook, Sandman (2022), which won the 2021 Diode Editions Prize. He was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Adrienne Rich Award and has poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, A Public Space, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.

DISCO Faculty Affiliate

Assistant Professor of Critical Media and AI Studies · University of Florida

Before joining the DISCO team, Kevin Winstead was a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University. He served as director of communications for the Center during its inaugural year, where he founded DigBLK Studios, the project's streaming, and digital outreach arm. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland and served as the Project Manager for African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities. His research areas include Social Movements, New Media, Digital Humanities, and Critical Race Theory.

Twitter

Website

Future Histories Studio Fellow

Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who explores the ways that small, iterative processes can have outsized effects over time. His work often identifies technological developments and relationships of debt and obligation as the modes through which these processes are enacted.

Recent exhibitions and screenings include Brief Histories, New York; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Nothing Special, Los Angeles; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; ltd los angeles, Los Angeles; Artspace, New Haven, and Human Resources Los Angeles. Collins is a 2022 recipient of a Graham Foundation research grant. He has also received support from NYFA and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He received an MFA from UCLA in 2018, and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. In 2019, he participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. He lives in New York, where he is currently serving as the inaugural DISCO Network Artist-in-Residence at Stony Brook University’s Future Histories Studio. For more info on Coleman’s work, visit www.colemancollins.info.