Digital Keywords with the DISCO Network Fellows

Description

Join four of our DISCO Network Fellows for short talks on keywords for the future of race, gender, disability, and technology, with Huan He (U-Michigan) on "myth," Jeff Nagy (U-Michigan) on "emotion," Rianna Walcott (U-Maryland) on "ritual," and Kevin Winstead (Georgia Tech) on "disinformation."

Panelists

Huan He

Huan He (he/him/his) is a Curriculum Development Postdoctoral Fellow at the DISCO Network Michigan Hub and holds a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Drawing from literature, art, and archival sources, his book project currently titled The Racial Interface explores the racial associations linking Asian/Americans and information technology in the early digital era. The project interrogates how myths of racial and technological progress converge in the shadow of U.S. liberal capitalism. 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. He is also the author of the poetry chapbook, Sandman (2022) and has poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, A Public Space, Colorado Review, and Gulf Coast.

Kevin Winstead

Kevin C. Winstead is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Rhetorics of Equity, Access, Computation, and Humanities (PREACH) within the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on Black social movements and online, transglobal disinformation. He is currently working on his forthcoming manuscript, Sankofa Cyberculture: Black Digital Activism and Disinformation.

Rianna Walcott

Dr Rianna Walcott is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Black Communication and Technology Lab in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. Her PhD research focuses on Black British identity presentation in social media spaces. By taking a mixed-methods approach to investigating Black British social media usage, Rianna incorporates interviews and discourse analysis across various sites in order to examine digital communities, the circumstances under which they are created, and the constraints they face. This research investigates if and how discourse varies in different contexts with different demographics, and how social network services — and their attendant harms — impact how Black users express themselves.

Jeff Nagy

Jeff Nagy is a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow at the Network's University of Michigan Hub, where he is also a member of the Digital Accessible Futures Lab. He holds a PhD in Communication from Stanford University. His research uncovers deep genealogies for digital technologies and shows how those histories continue to shape our social and political worlds. Recent writing has appeared in Communication, Culture, & Critique, Technology & Culture, New Media & Society, and elsewhere. His current book project, Computing With Feeling: Emotional Data from Cybernetics to Social Media, tells the story of how emotion was made computable.

Accessibility

CART will be provided.