Letter from the Director Fall 2022
by Lisa Nakamura
Digital culture has been on fire lately, and not in a good way. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has reminded many of us that we’re unwelcome guests in a house owned by an absolute ruler. Yet at the same time, intellectual communities continue to get built, the platform is full of subversive humor and collective resistance to unaccountable platforms.
This is a ripe moment for new thinking, theorizing, and creative practice about our complex digital personhood. The DISCO Network was formed to create new objects–writing, art, media, and other critical interventions–that can shed light on how we can encounter it with attention to power, culture, and discourse. We are celebrating our second year in existence by adding new people to the network and spinning out new co-authored work. We welcome eight new DISCO Fellows, whose full profiles are on our website, and four new graduate fellows, listed here. This spring our Fellows will offer new courses in the DISCO theme with titles like: Race and the Technological Imagination, Networked Disability Cultures, etc.
This summer me, Andre Brock, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouche, Catherine Knight Steele, and Remi Yergeau gathered in Detroit for a week of intensive facilitated writing with Faith Bosworth of BookSprints to co-author a new book, Digital Optimism, currently under review. You can read more about our five days of collaborative writing on our blog.
Please follow us on Twitter for invitations and links to our talks, workshops, and publications. We have partnered with the S.S.R.C.’s Just Tech platform to publish six “Tech Wins and Fails” open access reports on fast-breaking topics like the cultural politics of race and meditation/wellness apps, black community platform engagement post-Twitter, big data psychodiagnostics, the imagined histories of medical technology and critical accessibility studies, and others. These will be up on the site this summer.
This June the DISCO Network will convene to write another massively multi-author monograph about race, gender, technology and disability. We also plan to host a series of open Zoom salons to coalesce an intellectual community around our shared work on these topics, and you are invited! Please check our website for a list of published dates/times.
DISCO is composed of five Labs with individual research foci and one Hub at the University of Michigan.
André Brock’s PREACH Lab
Stephanie Dinkins’s Future Histories Lab
Rayvon Fouché’s HAT Lab
Catherine Knight Steele’s BcaT Lab
Remi Yergeau’s Digital AF Lab
If you’d like to get more involved with the DISCO network please subscribe to get our future newsletters and event announcements. talking, writing, and making about technology.
