UPCOMING EVENTS
SEPTEMBER - DECEMBER 2019
Hot MessAge: Media Studies Takes the Call
Visit our Monday Night Seminars page for complete details.
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NOVEMBER 8
Capture & Consent: Images and Stories in Digital Research Cultures
McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology
Working Group Event
3:00 - 5:00 pm
REGISTER HERE
Speakers: Max Liboiron, Zack Marshall, Simona Ramkisson, Jennifer Wemigwans, Jasmine Rault, and T.L. Cowan
Conversation :: What are the digital research practices and protocols emerging from Indigenous, Black, anti-racist trans- feminist and queer science, technology, health, media and cultural studies? The conditions of compelled consent by which the cultural works of minoritized people are ‘captured’ online (through Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.) seem to complement long-standing colonial academic research conventions of shifty/dodgy consent in capturing minoritized people’s images, stories, cultural works and knowledges. In such a context, what kinds of strategies, attention and care-fullness do we need to cultivate as custodians of images and stories in our research, and in digital (research) culture broadly? How are researchers in these fields redefining practices and processes of consent in a digital cultural context?
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DECEMBER 5
The Franklin Lecture with Jodi Dean
Communism or Neofeudalism?
Innis Town Hall / 7:00 - 8:30 pm
The Franklin Lecture is held each year at Innis College's Town Hall in honour of the enduring legacy of Ursula Franklin. Franklin, a former professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science, published prolifically on the structure and properties of metals and alloys as well the history and social impact of technology. In 1984 she became the first woman to be honoured with the title of “University Professor” by the University of Toronto.
Dr. Franklin continues to be known for both her significant scientific achievements and her contributions to the humanities and community justice. This lecture has been established in order to continue in the tradition of Franklin’s vital conversations between Science and Technology Studies and the Humanities. More specifically, the Franklin Lectures will feature invited scholars who bring the critical study of science, media, and politics to bear in their visions of new political futures.
A collaborative venture between Innis College's Writing & Rhetoric Program, OISE Department of Social Justice Education, McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, the Knowledge Media Design Institute, the Centre for the Study of the United States.
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DECEMBER 13
Sarah Sharma: From Mommy's Basement to Outer Space
7:00 - 9:00 pm
MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto) as part of the Age of You Exhibit
This talk will draw a line between Mommy’s Basement to Outer Space and offer a feminist alternative to the technological escapism that pervades our present moment, justly termed the Age of You. The lone male in Mommy’s Basement, equipped with technological portals to more habitable worlds, is by now a common cultural trope. But the cliché goes beyond the wounded masculinity that festers in the extreme right wings of the political spectrum. Mommy’s Basement contains a motley crew of men who temporarily descend and retreat from social life, including the hikikomori (Japan), alt-right hate mongers, internet trolls, the new precariat, internet addicts, gamers, enterprising tech-bros, and (maybe) a few geniuses hard at work. But as this talk will argue, Mommy’s Basement isn’t a futile space: it is a powerful media lab, where unjust ideas about gender and social difference become part of the logic of new technological designs.
PAST EVENTS
Click on images for event details
Lawrence Grossberg: "I've seen the future baby/it is murder" Intellectuals and the "American" Nightmare
November 27, 2018
A talk and reception for Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right from Pluto Press.
Co-sponsored and organized with Innis College, Writing & Rhetoric Program and OISE.
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.
