Join us for the launch of the book Technoskepticism! From Munchausen by Tiktok, to wellness apps, to online communities, to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create. Technoskepticism explores possibility and refusal in new technologies, highlighting how people of color and disabled individuals have long navigated between acceptance and rejection. Technoskepticism shares their stories, revealing the opportunities skepticism can create.

Archives and the Black Tradition explores the significance of personal and digital archives in re/defining historical legacies, promoting narrative control and agency, and expanding conventional notions of memory, place, and truth.

Come celebrate the publication of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal with Huan He of the DISCO Network.

Celebrate the publication of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal with the DISCO Network and the Digital Studies Institute! Join us for the release of our new multi-authored monograph with seven of the book's fourteen co-authors.

Search Engines: Art, Tech, Justice and the DISCO Network, housed in the University of Michigan’s Digital Studies Institute, invite you to an artist's talk by Molly Soda. 

Join the BCaT Lab to learn about and receive assistance with the grad school application process!

In our final book club of the semester, the BCaT Lab will be exploring the virtual reality experience “Obsidian”, created by the Black Artists and Designers Guild in 2021. Obsidian is an interactive web story, exploring a digitally recreated home from Oakland Hills, California.

Search Engines: Art, Tech, Justice invites you to join us in celebrating the release of the Search History zine!

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.

The BCaT Lab is hosting a field trip on November 20th to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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.

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.