The leaves are turning orange, the mosquitos have gone back to the deepest and darkest part of the earth, and there is a faint pumpkin smell in the air which means it’s officially fall and the BCaT Lab is back and in full swing! We have been having an exciting year of research, academic inquiry, and innovative work focused on Black digital humanities! We are excited to open back up our writing lab, book club, BCaT eats, and so many more events for our BCaT community!

The DISCO Network is very proud to announce that we are continuing our work to envision an anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future as a refreshed and re-booted version of ourselves. 

Over the course of her career as a performance artist and computer programmer, UCLA Design Media Arts professor Lauren Lee McCarthy has engaged with surveillance and control. She has created projects in which she is both observing and being observed. McCarthy spoke about her works in her talk “What Do You Want Me to Say?” as part of the DISCO Search Engines Lecture Series.

Pratiksha Thangam Menon, GSRA for the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, loves GoodReads. She holds two MAs—one in Communications from the University of Illinois-Chicago and one in Journalism from Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communication in India.

The two-day symposium will host speakers from around the world for nine panel conversations about digital racial inequality, histories of exclusion, disability justice, and racial politics within academics, technology, and beyond.

Believe it or not, we’re past the Ides of March and with Spring Break coming to a close there’s no better time to recap what the first half of the semester has looked like for the BCaT Lab. The month of February was complete with conference presentations, workshops, volunteering, and social events to keep us engaged in Black digital humanities and cultural scholarship.

At once disorienting and captivating, Coleman’s AI-generated images thus invoke that liberatory wildness, revealing the libidinal economy that occurs at the sutures of modern technology and the contemporary black experience.

Suparak was hosted on U-M’s campus by the new Digital Studies Institute and DISCO Network programming “Search Engines” for the second in-person exhibition of her piece “Asian Futures, Without Asians.”

BCaT’s fall was busy – filled with collaborative learning and research opportunities, scholarship presentations, and fellowship and bonding through our weekly and monthly events. Although the lab (and UMD) is on Winter break, it seemed like an appropriate time to share more about and reflect on all that the fall semester offered us which included: conference attendance and presentations, further developed research by our Black Digital Migration team, BCaT Lunch & Learns, BCaT Eats, and a multi-authored book panel with scholars from the DISCO Network.

Now is an especially important moment for humanists, makers, and social scientists to engage in collective dialogue about humanity’s entanglements with technology. 

Allucquere Rosanne “Sandy” Stone and Cassius Adair discuss and reflect on their experiences communicating with the trans community through the evolution of the digital world.

After a summer that never feels long enough – we’re back! Not only are we back but we’re excited to delve into another year of research, scholarship, and critical making that engages Black digital humanities.

What happens when 14 scholars in the humanities collaboratively write a book in five days?

This year’s theme, Digital Physical Entanglements: Environments, Bodies, and Space addressed the intertwining relations between digital and physical realms.

DISCO believes that the arts have a crucial role in conversations about equitable futures. With funding from the University of Michigan Arts Initiative, ‘Search Engines’ will bring artists to campus who are deeply invested in leveraging new media to create work that critiques existing social and political inequalities.

Each year the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) conducts collaborative projects that examines the intersections between Black culture, digital technologies, and rhetorical imaginations. Dr. Rianna Walcott led 2023’s compelling BCaT collaboration with insights on digital Black migrations, which seeks to reimagine what informs Black users mobilities to other platforms when significant changes are made to apps that impact their user experience.

Disability rights activist Lydia X. Z. Brown speaks in conversation with the DISCO network about ableism and technology.

Author Logan Smilges reflects on Queer Silences in their talk with the Digital Studies Institute.

Rianna Walcott, Fellow with the BCaT Lab, writes about her hopes for her work with the DISCO Network.

Lida Zeitlin-Wu, a Michigan Curriculum Hub Fellow, writes about her hopes for her time with the DISCO Network.