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Lives of Data Panel: Computational Cultures from India
Our Director Sarah Sharma will join other researchers from the Munk School and UofT Asian Institute for a panel discussion on April 9, 2021.
This is the second event in the “The Political Life of Information” seminar series at the Asian Institute.
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Call for Proposals: Proxy Festival
Our 2020-21 The Only Space is Here working group is looking for proposals for the first (and hopefully last) Proxy Festival—an online event exploring our always-online moment and the possibilities that networked experience can offer for the creation of new forms of cultural practice, of embodiment, of place-making, and of experimentation with social conventions.
Check out the full call for proposals for more information.
Submission deadline: April 16, 2021
Successful applicants notified: April 23, 2021
Festival date: May 13, 2021
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Call for Participants: McLuhan Manuscript Workshops
The McLuhan Centre invites UofT researchers with book manuscripts in-progress to participate in a manuscript workshop session.
Workshops are open to researchers working on books related to technology and culture and broadly connected to our annual theme of The Global SpillAge. Selected participants will have the opportunity to invite up to three external scholars and three University of Toronto scholars of their choosing for a half-day workshop to discuss their research and obtain feedback on their draft.
Workshops will take place Spring/Summer 2021.
Workshops are open to UofT faculty only and will be organized by the Centre. Manuscripts must be in progress and ready to be read by the application deadline. Manuscripts under contract with a press will be given priority.
UofT scholars can apply here. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.
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Call for Papers: What would Ursula Franklin Say?
Submissions are now open for a special essay series presented by the 2020-21 Reprising the Real World of Technology working group. Check out the full call for papers for more details and information on applying.
Abstract deadline: April 1, 2021
Submission deadline: June 1, 2021
Authors notified: August 1, 2021
Materials published: Fall 2021
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2020-21 Technoscience Salons Announced
The Technoscience Salon is an open platform for entangling intellectual and political questions about technoscience while remixing the disciplines composing STS. We are happy to announce the 2020-21 Technoscience Salon :: Gathering Online that reflects on the surge in digital gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic. This salon series has been co-organized by Vanbasten de Araujo, Kristen Bos, Sophie Jaworski, Lindsay LeBlanc, Michelle Murphy, Sajdeep Soomal, and Dawn Walker.
The magic of Zoom calls and Skype meetings are created by a global digital technologies industry that is entangled in the history and presence of slavery, colonialism, global mining, financial speculation, and other techniques of the corporation. How do we locate ourselves in the worlds of plasma screens, wires and binary code? Moving beyond individualized and neoliberal concerns of censorship, privacy and data security that often shape public discussions about the politics and ethics of digital gathering, we want to contend with the way that Big Tech assembles itself in everyday practice. How are Big Tech and infrastructures appropriating and manipulating lands and bodies in order to produce open and fair digital paradises for networking and play? What are our complicities? This year’s Salon builds on critical approaches to media ecology/archaeology, digital labour, and decolonization to not only track the corporate, privatized forces that are fabricating digital worlds through neocolonial expansion, but to imagine and practice alternatives as we partake responsibly in those movements that are building other worlds within these zones of extraction.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rush towards digital gathering, engagement, and output across all disciplines and sectors, “Gathering Online” will bring together faculty, graduate students, and community researchers to:
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Research the economies of extraction and investment that we entangle ourselves within by relying on various digital practices of collaboration;
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Gather information about alternative methods and forms of collaboration;
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Experiment with new approaches to distanced and virtual collaboration through our upcoming activities; and
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Partake responsibly in decolonial world-building practices around the globe that honour the inseparability of lands and bodies.
The Technoscience Salon is generously supported by the Technoscience Research Unit, The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC), and the Women and Gender Studies Institute.
NEWS + UPCOMING EVENTS
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Click on images for event details
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.
