UPCOMING EVENTS

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DECEMBER 1, 2020

Call for Papers

The McLuhan Centre Working Group, Black Technoscience HERE is seeking papers for an edited volume. Complete details below.

Please contact them directly via EMAIL with any questions.

Call for Papers for Edited Volume
Black Technoscience “HERE”
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2020
Editors: Dr. Nicole Charles, University of Toronto and Dr. OmiSoore Dryden, Dalhousie University

Introduction and Scope:

The impetus for this collection emerges from a 2018-19 working group and salon series of the same name co-convened by co-editors Dr. Nicole Charles and Dr. OmiSoore Dryden in conjunction with the McLuhan Centre and the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto. In monthly meetings over the academic year, our working group brought together scholars, artists, and activists to share their research and praxis in the interdisciplinary creation of Black Technoscience. Following the act of prototyping – of carefully thinking through the minutiae of one’s experiences with an interface, and subsequently collecting feedback for future iterations – event participants brainstormed the black technoscientific methodologies, epistemologies and/or ontologies modeled to them by presenters, and collaboratively workshopped the responses that were useful to their own commitments to technoscience.

Taking inspiration from this working group and the multiple ways Black cultural production, can, as Katherine McKittrick (2010) argues, “writ[e] scientific knowledge anew,” Black Technoscience “Here” signifies a simultaneous disruption to and opening up of technoscience (128). In conversation with critical technoscience scholars who have spoken against both the eurocentrism and US-centrism of technoscience (e.g. Pollock & Subramaniam, 2016; Visperas, Brown & Sexton, 2016), this collection aims to center transnational and diasporic Black technoscientific praxes and methodologies in an effort to broaden perspectives on what technoscientific thought and method entails, while unearthing the politics of doing so as part of a transnational dialogue. In addition, this collection seeks to include reflections on the uniqueness of Black technoscience within Canada. What is Black technoscience? What does it mean, we question, to activate Black technoscience thought “here,” and across time and place?

Call for Papers:

We seek contributions that traverse the fields of Black studies, transnational feminist studies, digital humanities, critical race and disability studies and science and technology studies, to offer new ontologies to think through Blackness and Technoscience both. We aim to think alongside Black practitioners, artists, activists and scholars engaging with a number of technoscientific themes including but not limited to digital and material cultures and activisms, health and biomedicine, memory and futurity, embodiment, ethics, consent, performance, art and curatorial practice as they relate to and intersect blackness.

Approaches that are interdisciplinary, intersectional and transnational, creative works (that can be relayed in print form), co-authored publications, and contributions that explore technoscience in the African diaspora are especially encouraged.

Submission Instructions:

Chapters must be original and should not be submitted for publication elsewhere. Only complete and polished chapters will be reviewed.
Chapters should be between 6000-7000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography (Word document).
Submissions should include a brief bio of all authors (250-words), 6 keywords, and a 250 word abstract at the end of document.
Please submit the required materials to with the subject line “BTH Edited Volume Submission” by December 1, 2020.

This call for proposals has been developed in consultation with University of Toronto Press.

Following the review of papers by the co-editors, papers will be returned to authors for revisions before a full draft is submitted to the publisher for peer review.

Deadline for Chapter Submissions: December 1, 2020

For any further questions, please email blacktechnoscience@gmail.com

UPCOMING

PAST EVENTS

Culture/Work/Resistance

May 30, 2017

A book launch and author discussion for three new titles on
Culture/Work/Resistance in a Digital Age.

Mark Banks Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (Rowman and Littlefield).

Launched by Sarah Sharma.

Enda Brophy Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce (Palgrave MacMillan). Launched by Ursula Huws.

Nicole Cohen Writer's Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill-Queen's University Press).

Launched by Tanner Mirrlees.

Care, Automated

October 21, 2017

A workshop with Amelia Abreu, Marc Böhlen, Hermenio Lima, Ian Roderick, Sarah Sharma,

David Harris Smith + Frauke Zeller. Hosted by Letters & Handshakes.

Presented in partnership with Blackwood Gallery as part of their year long series:

Take, Care.

The habit of attaching “care” to innately positive attributes obscures its entanglement with dominant systems of power and control. The ambivalence of care is crisply reflected in technological configurations of care/work. In this workshop, seven researchers share their inquiries into intersections of care and technology, in particular, automation. Questioning technological fixes to care crisis, Care, Automated examines how care work’s ongoing machinization coexists with and deepens, rather than disrupts, entrenched social hierarchies and prevailing economic imperatives. Beyond providing critical diagnostics, however, the workshop also sets out to consider how technologies of care/work might be ethically and collaboratively reimagined.

Click on images for event details