DISCO Collaborators

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

David Adelman (he/him/his) is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Digital Accessible Futures lab at the University of Michigan. His research interests center disability and crip studies, with a particular emphasis on disability media studies, digital disability cultures, disability film studies, and critical sexuality studies. Through an interdisciplinary crip studies/feminist lens, he pursues questions which emerge at the intersection of power, culture, technology, identity, and desire. His recent dissertation, “Ambivalent Pleasures: Pleasure, Desire, Authenticity, and the Production of Value in Online Disability Cultures,” examines how discourses of “desirable disability” manifest in cultural productions and Internet publics. This project traces the circulation and intensification of such discourse in popular culture across a range of audiovisual material, exploring the neoliberal commodification of identity politics that occurs and, concomitantly, is contested, online. He also maintains an artistic practice which centers experimental video and remix as a means to explore disability culture, aesthetics, and politics. For more, visit www.davidadelman.work, and on Twitter: @DavidAdelman90.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Toni Bushner's (they/she) research and pedagogy lives at the cross-section of digital humanities, technical writing, and game studies. They recently completed their doctoral thesis on how board game designers create compelling rules documentation and carry out playtesting data collection as part of the iterative design process. Outside of academia, Toni performs live glitch art for chiptune and other experimental electronic music acts under the stage name D'oh!nut.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who explores the ways that small, iterative processes can have outsized effects over time. His work often identifies technological developments and relationships of debt and obligation as the modes through which these processes are enacted. He received an MFA from UCLA in 2018, and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. In 2019, he participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.

Website

COLGATE UNIVERSITY

Aaron Dial is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and African and Latin American Studies at Colgate University. Previously, he was a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University under the Humanities and Technoscience Lab. He earned his PhD from North Carolina State University in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) program where his expertise is in materialist and digital media studies, digital humanities, Black studies, and cultural studies of technology and race. These areas of expertise inform his research and teaching interests, which, broadly sketched, are affective labor, popular culture, urban spaces and temporal flows, and the nexus between sports and science and technology.

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

Huan He (he/him/his) holds a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Most broadly, his research engages Asian/American literature and culture, histories of media and technology, visual culture, digital game studies, and poetics. His book project, currently titled, “The Racial Interface,” explores the racial associations linking Asian/Americans and information technology in the digital era. Drawing from literature, art, and archival sources, this project reveals how myths of racial and technological progress converge in the shadow of U.S. liberal capitalism. He foregrounds minoritarian writers and artists who challenge the dominant technological imaginaries shaping the digital present. He is also interested in the relationship between race, gaming, cheating, and scams and pursuing a second project on these topics. His scholarly writing has been published in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies and Media-N and is forthcoming in an anthology on Asian/American game studies. In Fall 2023, he will start as an Assistant Professor of English (Asian American and Asian Diasporic Literature) at Vanderbilt University.

YORK UNIVERSITY

Jeff Nagy is a historian of computing whose research focuses on exchanges between computing and the behavioral sciences from World War II to the present. He holds a PhD in Communication from Stanford University, where his dissertation, “Watching Feeling: Emotional Data from Cybernetics to Social Media,” told the story of how emotion was made computable. Other interests include disability in the history of science and technology, the social integration of emerging technologies, and the history and future of computer-mediated labor. His research has appeared in Technology & Culture, New Media & Society, and elsewhere. You can find him online at jeff-nagy.com.

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Dr. Brandy Pettijohn 's scholarship focuses on ethical digital storytelling for cultural sites, creating a framework called Black feminist technopractice. Grounded by Black feminist theory, Black feminist technopractice is an interdisciplinary digital humanities framework for digital storytelling and interactive narratives that deploys what we know as participatory design and speculative design {making with marginalized users in mind, while being expansive in the imagination of what we believe design can do}, combined with art and archival practices {expanding the archive beyond normal institution spaces} while leveraging Black technoculture {examining how Black people make meaning in digital spaces}. Brandy’s research areas include, Black Digital Visual Culture, Black Feminist World Making, and Digital Storytelling.

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

Rianna Walcott (she/her) is an LAHP alumna and PhD candidate at Kings College London researching Black British identity formation in digital spaces. Rianna combines digital work, decolonial studies, arts and culture, and mental health advocacy in her work, with a deep commitment to outreach work and public engagement. She co-founded projectmyopia.com, a website that promotes inclusivity in academia and a decolonized curriculum, and is the UCL writing lab's Scholar-in-Residence for 21-22. Rianna frequently writes about race, feminism, mental health, and arts and culture for publications including The Wellcome Collection, The Metro, The Guardian, The BBC, Vice, and Dazed. Rianna is co-editor of an anthology about BAME mental health - The Colour of Madness (2022), and in the time left over, she moonlights as a professional jazz singer.

On Twitter at @rianna_walcott

Website

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

Before joining the DISCO team, Kevin Winstead was a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University. He served as director of communications for the Center during its inaugural year, where he founded DigBLK Studios, the project's streaming, and digital outreach arm. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland and served as the Project Manager for African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities. His research areas include Social Movements, New Media, Digital Humanities, and Critical Race Theory. He is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media and AI Studies at the University of Florida.

Website

Twitter

OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY

Lida Zeitlin-Wu is a scholar of media, race, and visual culture whose work explores the rationalization of sensory experience and selfhood under techno-capitalism. She received her PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley in 2022. Her book project, Seeing by Numbers, tells the story of how something as subjective and ephemeral as color came to be seen as standardized. Her writing has been published in Camera Obscura, Just Tech, Frames, and elsewhere, and with Carolyn L. Kane, she is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press, 2024). Other teaching and research interests include food studies and critiques of the wellness industry, particularly as they intersect with culture, race, and technology.

Website