This semester in BCaT Bookclub we will engage with art exhibitions, films, readings, and more, while exploring Black placemaking practices across the diaspora. View the BCaT Lab’s Black Homeplace Project page for up-to-date information about the weekly topic.

Join DISCO Network scholars in a roundtable conversation on Technoskepticism, a topical and timely multi-authored 50,000 word monograph, at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in Sheffield, UK.

This semester in BCaT Bookclub we will engage with art exhibitions, films, readings, and more, while exploring Black placemaking practices across the diaspora. View the BCaT Lab’s Black Homeplace Project page for up-to-date information about the weekly topic.

This semester in BCaT Bookclub we will engage with art exhibitions, films, readings, and more, while exploring Black placemaking practices across the diaspora. View the BCaT Lab’s Black Homeplace Project page for up-to-date information about the weekly topic.

This roundtable conversation considers what it means to design accessible conference presentations, as well as how to survive and navigate conferences as a disabled scholar. How might we advocate for access in inaccessible and often high-stakes terrain? What strategies might we use in our own conference practices to support the work of access creation?

If you are a near/recent grad student considering a career outside of academia, join us as we hear from representatives from the (Smithsonian) National Museum of African American History and Culture, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and independent scholars. 

This semester in BCaT Bookclub we will engage with art exhibitions, films, readings, and more, while exploring Black placemaking practices across the diaspora. View the BCaT Lab’s Black Homeplace Project page for up-to-date information about the weekly topic.

This semester in BCaT Bookclub we will engage with art exhibitions, films, readings, and more, while exploring Black placemaking practices across the diaspora. View the BCaT Lab’s Black Homeplace Project page for up-to-date information about the weekly topic.

This semester in BCaT Bookclub we will engage with art exhibitions, films, readings, and more, while exploring Black placemaking practices across the diaspora. View the BCaT Lab’s Black Homeplace Project page for up-to-date information about the weekly topic.

Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography” as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto.

This semester in BCaT Bookclub we will engage with art exhibitions, films, readings, and more, while exploring Black placemaking practices across the diaspora. Keep an eye out on the BCaT Lab website for up-to-date information about the weekly topic.

Join the BCaT Lab for an information session on Wednesday, September 18th at 10am to learn about our new inter-institutional research project focusing on Black Homeplace and Black placemaking practices.

We’re seeking collaborators from UMD and beyond, and will award some summer microgrants for participation. The project will include weekly co-working, learning, and practical workshops throughout the 2024-2025 academic year.

From 3D-printed replicas of sculptures destroyed by ISIS, to interactive installations and hypertext fables that infuse medieval fable with contemporary gender politics, to purpose-built generative AI aimed at recovering lost queer traditions in Persian art, Morehshin Allahyari’s work leverages storytelling, archival research, and new technology as tools to push back against Western colonialism.

This panel will be a conversation with the Principal Investigators (PIs) of the DISCO Network as they reflect on their most well-known publications, and their influence on their current research.

The DISCO Network Graduate Scholars Program is designed for graduate student researchers committed to developing interdisciplinary work about the intersection between digital technology, culture, race, disability, gender, sexuality, and liberation.

The collective will reflect on its collaborative effort and explore the tensions between digital optimism and technoskepticism.  

Discussion topics include digital worlds, DISCO Network’s collective scholarship and adventures in knowledge dissemination, and future directions for critical humanistic, social science, and artistic approaches to digital studies.

An interactive, Zoom-based presentation entitled “What do you want me to say?” McCarthy’s practice – spanning performance, software, electronics, internet, film, photography, and installation – examines social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living.

This roundtable conversation considers what it means to write, make, and do (or not!) on crip time.

Eight co-authors of Technoskepticism, Lisa Nakamura, Remi Yergeau, André Brock, Catherine Knight Steele, Stephanie Dinkins, Kevin Winstead, and Rianna Walcott, and Jeff Nagy, will be in conversation about this exciting new manuscript.

My argument in this project is to make AI more wild, not less. By wild, I indicate generative possibility for the technology in opposition to the reproduction of the same.

This roundtable stories in/access and crip feelings in the wake of anti-trans and anti-critical race theory legislation, as well as the rollback of COVID-19 protections and policies.

"Asian futures, without Asians" is a multimedia presentation by artist and curator Astria Suparak, which asks: “What does it mean when so many white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people?”

This talk will examine the current state of the esports industry, discussing and dissecting both the light and the dark side of this captivating space.

This talk provides an exploration into the (in)accessibility of gaming technologies, most notably the Xbox Kinect. While the gaming world remarked on the possibilities created when the body becomes the controller, many Black gamers illustrated the centrality of race in deciding who can (and cannot) participate in this technological potential.

How can people make a living out of playing video games? Who would want to watch them? And why?

Each DISCO Graduate Scholar will give a “lightning talk” on their research affiliated with their DISCO Network lab.

A Symposium on Sneakers, Blackness, and Community

Over the past year, CRT has been a source of discussion everywhere – in the media, in school board meetings, in classrooms – and has generated many questions. During this session, Taifha Alexander, UCLA Law CRT Forward Project Director, will discuss CRT, its founding, and contributions, and the recent assault on the theory.