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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.
Attuning to our Digital Practices with Fan Wu and Lucy Wowk
Friday January 29, 2021
3:30 - 5:00pm | Online (Zoom)
Collective work towards the future begins in spaces of translation: how do we make sense of one another’s silences, intonations, and vernaculars when we gather online across difference? How can we understand the patterns and rhythms of language, while still listening for the fundamental differences of another’s voice? Please join us for a workshop with guests Fan Wu and Lucy Wowk that takes translation as its starting point to assemble diverse knowledge about gathering in the virtual while working through our multivalent responsibilities and response-abilities.
UPCOMING
NEWSLETTER FEATURES
Envisioning Equiveillance
Coming 2021
PAST EVENTS
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.
