Critical Media and Digital Studies
A series of presentations and conversations with the theme Critical Media and Digital Studies, featuring speakers invited to visit Penn State. Its goal is to present critical perspectives on digital culture and media; to explore emerging ideas about the politics and culture of the technology industry, the processing and production of data, and technologism as an ideological form; and to integrate with the study of digital culture the studies of social class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, disability, and postcoloniality, as well as non-Western and non-academic cultural perspectives.
2024-25
- April 3, 2025: Omedi Ochieng, University of Colorado, Boulder; author of Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life (Routledge 2017), Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy (Notre Dame 2018), “Defeat the Police” (Spectre Journal 2021) and “After Philosophy, Black Thought” (Philosophy and Rhetoric 2023); co-editor of A Companion to African Rhetoric (Lexington 2022) — Grucci Room, 3:30pm
- April 10, 2025: Kalindi Vora, Yale University; author of Reimagining Reproduction (Routledge 2023) and Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Minnesota 2015); co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019); co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the End of Revolution (Routledge 2023); winner of the Rachel Carson Prize — Grucci Room, 3:30pm
- April 17, 2025: Aaron Shapiro, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; author of Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (Minnesota 2020), “Platform Urbanism in a Pandemic: Dark Stores, Ghost Kitchens, and the Logistical-Urban Frontier” (Journal of Consumer Culture 2022), and “Optimizing the Immeasurable On the Techno-Ethical Limits of Predictive Policing” (Artificial Intelligence and the City 2023) — Grucci Room, 3:30pm
2023-24
- March 21, 2024: Anna Watkins Fisher, University of Michigan; author of Safety Orange (Minnesota 2021) and The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke 2020); co-editor of New Media / Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge 2016) — Grucci Room, 3:00pm
- April 4, 2024: Patricia Stuelke, Dartmouth College; author of The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (Duke 2021); “Hemispheric Horror, Neofeudal Empire, and the International Women’s Strike”(American Quarterly 2022); and “Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon” (Genre 2021) — Grucci Room, 3:30pm
-
2022-23
- April 5, 2023: Liliana M. Naydan, author of Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) and “WHAT ARE YOU?: Rethinking Frames for Contingent Writing Center Work” (in Speaking Up, Speaking Out, Utah State University Press, 2021) — Grucci Room, 3:30pm
- April 13, 2023: Nan Z. Da, author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2018) and “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies” (Critical Inquiry 45.3, Spring 2019) — Grucci Room, 3:30pm
- April 19, 2023: Katherine Chandler, author of Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and “Apartheid drone: Infrastructures of Militarism and the Hidden Genealogies of the South African Seeker” (Social Studies of Science 52.4, Summer 2022) — Grucci Room, 3:30pm
2021-22
- April 21, 2022: webinar on “Ecology and Technology” with Alenda Chang, UCSB and Yuriko Furuhata, McGill University; video HERE
- April 7, 2022: webinar on “Times of Digital Production” with Marc Steinberg, Concordia University and James J. Hodge, Northwestern University; video HERE
- March 30, 2022: webinar on “Race and Media Philosophy” with Michael Sawyer, University of Pittsburgh and Armond Towns, Carleton University; video HERE
2020-21
- March 22, 2021: Co-sponsored lecture by Thomas Lamarre, McGill University: “Media Ecology: Television and Animation”
2019-20
- November 12, 2019: Max Larson, postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and author of “Optimizing Chess: Philology and Algorithmic Culture” (Diacritics 46.1, 2018). Presentation title: “Computational ± Imperial Stylistics: J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Digital” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
2018-19
- March 28, 2019: Olivia Banner, University of Texas at Dallas, author of Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities (University of Michigan Press, 2017): “Technopsyence and Afro-Surrealism’s Cripistemologies” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- March 14, 2019: Aden Evens, Dartmouth College, author of Logic of the Digital (Bloomsbury, 2015): “Ontological Limits of the Digital” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
2017–18
- April 19, 2018: Justin Joque, University of Michigan, author of Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar (University of Minnesota Press, 2018): “Deconstruction and the Weaponization of Knowledge” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- April 5, 2018: Jennifer Rhee, Virginia Commonwealth University, author of The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018): “Drone Warfare, Drone Art, and the Limits of Identification” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- October 12, 2017: Stephanie Boluk, University of California at Davis, author with Patrick LeMieux of Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2017): “From Metagames to Moneygames.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
2016–17
- April 14, 2017: Margaret Schwartz, Fordham University, author of Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses (University of Minnesota Press, 2015): “On Revolutionary Tenderness: Towards a Feminist Ethics of Care for the Digital Age.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- March 31, 2017: Pooja Rangan, Amherst College, author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017): “Autism, Voice, and the Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- March 17, 2017: Andrew Kopec, Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne: “Data Trouble: Toward a General Theory.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- November 29, 2016: Co-sponsored lecture by David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University: “How to Survive the Robot Apocalypse: Machine Learning and the Ethics of Robot Rights”
- October 6, 2016: Anna Everett, University of California at Santa Barbara: “Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
2015–16
- April 21, 2016: Tom Eyers, Duquesne University: “Formalism in a Positivist Age.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- March 31, 2016: Matt Tierney, Penn State: “Critical Cyberculture in the Large World House.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- September 22, 2015: Siona Wilson, City University of New York: “Anarchy in the ICA: COUM Transmissions’ Queer Aesthetic.” • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
2014–2015
- April 9, 2015: María Fernández, Cornell University, author of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (University of Texas Press, 2014) • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- March 19, 2015: Adrienne Shaw, Temple University, author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- February 12, 2015: David Golumbia, Virginia Commonwealth University, author of The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard University Press, 2009) • This event has been postponed and will be rescheduled for academic year 2015–2016.
- January 29, 2015: Andrew L. Russell, Director, Program in Science & Technology Studies, Stevens Institute of Technology and author of Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014) • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- December 9, 2014: Brian Hochman, Georgetown University, author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)
- December 2, 2014: Astra Taylor, documentary filmmaker, musician, activist, and author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014; Picador, 2015). • Resource page (includes event flyer and other information)