Please attend Professor Margaret Cohen’s talk, “Piscinéma, from Man Ray to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” on Thursday, February 27 from 12-2 pm in the Knight Browsing Room.
Professor Cohen is Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Stanford University. She also directs Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel.
She is the author of two prize-winners: The Sentimental Education of the Novel and The Novel and The Sea. Professor Cohen’s forthcoming book Underwater Eye deals with the history of cinema shot underwater. She is editing a multivolume Cultural History of the Sea forthcoming with Bloomsbury Press.
Her visit takes place under the auspices of Dr. Fabienne Moore’s new course, FR 460/560: Law and Empire of the Seas. Dr. Moore, an Associate Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages, developed the course with the support of an Oregon Humanities Center 2019-20 Sherl K. Coleman and Margaret E. Guitteau Teaching Professorship.
Thursday, Feb. 27, 6:30 p.m.
110 Knight Law Center on the UO Campus
1515 Agate St.
In his book How We Became Our Data, UO philosophy professor Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational power” we are all now subject to.
Colin Koopman is associate professor of philosophy and director of the New Media & Culture Program at the University of Oregon. His previous books include Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (2009); Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (2013). His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times and Aeon as well as in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, Contemporary Political Theory, Diacritics, and New Media & Society.
This event is presented by the Wayne Morse Center’s Program for Democratic Governance. Cosponsored by the UO Department of Philosophy and UO Data Science Initiative.
Dr Ruha Benjamin will deliver the 2019-2020 Cressman Lecture, entitled “Beyond Buzzwords: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology and Society,” on Tuesday, February 4 at 7:30pm at the First United Methodist Church in Eugene. The First United Methodist Church is located at 1376 Olive Street.
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Professor Ruha Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code” to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. We will also consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends. This presentation takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
Benjamin’s first book, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier(Stanford University Press 2013), investigates the social dimensions of stem cell science with a particular focus on the passage and implementation of a “right to research” codified in California. Her second book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019) examines the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development.
Valérie is a third year PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon. Her education includes a BA in Philosophy and Women’s Studies (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada). Her work situates itself at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of technology and sexuality studies and is focused on questions that relate to queer and lesbian history, activism and archival practices.
After discovering the New Media and Culture Certificate program during the graduate student orientation week, Valérie joined the NMCC program during her first year at the UO in 2017. Now in her third year in the program, Valérie, looking back, can say that she joined because she is interested in two interrelated questions. First, the use of technologies for social change especially as exemplified by the Lesbian Avengers, a direct action group founded in 1992 in New York City focused on issues of lesbian visibility and survival. Second, because she is interested in the ways in which queer and lesbian history and archives are mobilized to give coherence to queer and lesbian communities formed by different identities, experiences and histories.
Moving forward, Valérie is interested in examining different approaches that focus on technologies in terms of their materiality and their associated practices to explore modes of political action that engage and take up the technologies that transform our lives and worlds.
Recommendations:
“Xenofeminism A Politics for Alienation” by Laboria Cuboniks (https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/)
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy by Edmund Husserl
Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real by Bernhard Siegert
Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger by Kelly Cogswell
Oversight: Critical Reflections on Feminist Research and Politics by Viviane Namaste
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is now accepting fellowship applications for the 2020-2021 academic year through our annual open call. This opportunity is for those who wish to spend 2020-2021 in residence in Cambridge, MA as part of the Center’s vibrant community of research and practice, and who seek to engage in collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-sectoral exploration of some of the Internet’s most important and compelling issues.
Applications will be accepted until Friday, January 31, 2020, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.
Proposal Submission Deadline: Thursday, December 12, 2019
We invite submissions for 15-minute presentations from UO graduate students on any aspect of Data/Media/Digital studies for a one-day symposium to be held on Friday, February 28, 2020. The second annual Data/Media/Digital Symposium will be held this year in the Knight Library’s DREAM Lab collaborative workspace. Presentations can be based on work in progress or on research and work in the final stages of development. Proposals should specify clear scholarly or pedagogical goals, and should articulate how the design or argument of a data/media/digital project might address those goals. Any kind of data studies, media studies, or digital studies project is welcome (if you aren’t sure if your project fits our call, then it probably does, but please get in touch and we can offer you our guidance).
This event will be an opportunity to showcase the exciting multi-disciplinary work being produced by graduate students across campus. We look forward to sustaining cross-disciplinary conversations and building inter-departmental community over the course of the day. To facilitate this goal, student participants are expected to attend the symposium for the full day (to the extent that their academic schedule allows). A/V services will be available in-room to all presenters. Coffee and catering will be provided throughout the day (as well as, contingent on available funds, a hosted lunch for all presenters).
Please send your submission to uogradsymposium@gmail.com by the end of day (11:59PM) on Thursday, December 12th (at the end of Exam Week during Fall Quarter). Submissions should include two documents (both as PDFs): a submission file and your CV. Your submission PDF must include: your name, your UO department or program, your presentation title, and a brief 250-to-500 word abstract (or executive summary) of your proposed presentation. Decisions about all submissions will be conveyed no later than Monday, January 6, 2020.
Questions about this event can be directed to any member of our co-organizing committee:
• Colin Koopman: koopman@uoregon.edu (New Media & Culture + Philosophy)
• Heidi Kaufman: hkaufman@uoregon.edu (Digital Humanities + English)
• Bish Sen: bsen@uoregon.edu (School of Journalism & Communication + Media Studies)
Angela Washko: “Poking the Hive: Interventions in Unusual Media Environments”
Thursday, November 14, 4:00 p.m. Lawrence Hall, Room 115
1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR 97403
Artist and activist Angela Washko will present several different strategies for performing, participating in and transforming online environments that are especially hostile toward women.
This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.
Winter NMCC Course offerings have been posted to the website. See the UO Schedule of Classes for any updates or change that may have occured after NMCC assembled this list.
COMMON SEMINAR
In AY 2019-20, the Common Seminar, “History and Theory of New Media,” will be taught in both Winter and Spring Term. In Winter, the course will be titled “Theories of New Media.”
We are happy to announce that the NMCC’s core course, “Histories and Theories of New Media,” will be offered in both Winter and Spring term this year. In the winter, the course will be listed as J610: Theories of New Media and will be taught by SOJC Professor Dr. David Markowitz. The course is scheduled on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10-11:50. In the spring the course will be listed as J610: Histories and Theories of New Media. Professor and timing of the spring course are TBA.
While the course is a broad introduction to new media theories and histories, each individual faculty is given freedom to design the course in a way that best features their own research strengths and academic background. Accordingly, NMCC would recommend the Winter offering with Dr. Markowitz to our NMCC students with a more social science focus (or those interested in developing that way), while the Spring offering will be taught by a faculty member (still TBA, as noted) who will give the course more of a humanities and cultural studies focus.
We hope that this expansion of offerings for our core course will make schedule planning just a little bit easier for all of our students.
