Speakers

‘Feminist Infrastructures and Technocultures’ includes the following confirmed guest speakers and moderators on April 18-20, 2013.

Organizers: 

LISA CARTWRIGHT is Professor of Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego where she is also on the faculty of the Program in Critical Gender Studies. She is the author of Moral Spectatorship (Duke University Press, 2008), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford University Press, Second Edition 2008, co-author Marita Sturken), and Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1995). With Paula Treichler and Constance Penley, she co-edited the volume The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science (NYU Press, 1998).

ELIZABETH LOSH is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and the forthcoming The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press). She is the co-author of the multimodal manual Understanding Rhetoric (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013) with Jonathan Alexander.  She is also the co-editor of a new work-in-progress Tweeting the Revolution: Networked Media, the Rhetorics of Activism, and Practices of the Everyday with Beth Coleman. She is Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College at UC San Diego and a blogger for the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion and Digital Media and Learning Central. She writes about new forms of learning, institutions as digital content-creators, the discourses of the “virtual state,” the media literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices.  She has published articles about videogames for the military and emergency first-responders, government websites and YouTube channels, the use of vernacular video by activists and artists, state-funded distance learning efforts, national digital libraries, the digital humanities, political blogging, and congressional hearings on the Internet. Much of her work as a feminist concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence, the procedural logics of participation in civic culture, and discourses about human rights.

LISA PARKS is a Professor and former department chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and an affiliate of the Department of Feminist Studies. She also currently serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara. Parks has conducted research on the uses of satellite, computer, and television technologies across different national contexts. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, art, international relations, science and technology studies, and communication studies. She has published on topics ranging from secret satellites to drones, from the mapping of orbital space to political uses of Google Earth, from mobile phone use in developing countries to the visualization of communication infrastructures. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, and Coverage: Aero-Orbital Media After 911 (forthcoming), and is working on a third book entitled Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies. She has co-edited three books: Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures; Planet TV: A Global Television Reader, and Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

MONIKA SENGUL-JONES is a doctoral student in Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego. She earned her BA from the University of Washington, Seattle in Comparative History of Ideas and her MA in Gender Studies from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, where she researched gender and labor in post-Soviet multinational corporations in Hungary. Her current research focuses on how narratives and material practices around English-language digital databases, such as predictive analytics, data mining and SEO optimization, both serve and undercut knowledge production about embodied differences through notions of digital evidentiality.

M. CRISTINA VISPERAS received her B.S. in biotechnology at UCD and her M.A. in media studies at SDSU. She has been a research assistant in both academic and industry laboratory settings, including research in stem cells, burn injuries, parasitic plants, and the biochemistry of membranes. She is currently a graduate student in Communication and Science Studies. Her research interests sits at the interstices of disability/freak studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies. Her theoretical leanings and approaches are primarily underwritten by scholarly work in Black studies, notably those in Afro-pessimism. Cristina’s work is focused on how blackness, gender, and disability were entangled in the context of science and medicine under slavery in the U.S., or how the slave structures and figures in the grammar and optics of scientific objectivity, expertise, and narratives of evidence.

Presenters and Speakers:

MORANA ALAČ is Associate Professor of Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego. Alač’s research deals with ordinary, interactional and practical aspects of science. She is interested in the ways in which scientists study cognition in environments heavily sustained by advanced technologies – brain imaging and machine learning laboratories. By looking at live activities in the laboratories, Alač pays particular attention to the interface between the body and technology. In 2011, MIT Press published her book Handling Digital Brains.

ANNE BALSAMO is Dean of The School of Media Studies at The New School. Balsamo received her PhD in Communications Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and began her faculty career in the School of Literature, Culture, and Communications at Georgia Tech, where she published a book about the cultural implications of emergent biotechnologies, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (1996). In 1999, having grown interested in the practical linkages between technology and culture, she joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), collaborating in the design of media for reading, exhibition, public art, and cultural projects. In 2003, Dr. Balsamo moved from Silicon Valley to USC, where she had been jointly appointed in the Annenberg School of Communications and the School of Cinematic Arts. She directed the Collaborative Design Lab within the Interactive Design Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. She has been a leader in the growth of digital humanities nationally, serving on the Advisory Board of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Co-laboratory) since its founding in 2003. In 2011, she published Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, a transmedia book that synthesizes and theorizes the links between her cultural studies scholarship and digital media projects.

AMANDA CACHIA is from Sydney, Australia and holds Masters degrees in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts (CCA) and in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She was Director/Curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada from 2007-2010, and has curated approximately 30 exhibitions in London, New York, Oakland and across Australia and Canada. Her curatorial practice revolves around interdisciplinary themes within a social justice framework. Cachia has been the Chair of the Dwarf Artists Coalition for the Little People of America since 2007. She is currently working toward a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism at UCSD, where her dissertation will focus on the intersection of disability and contemporary art.

ADELE E. CLARKE is Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of History of Health Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. Her research centers on social, cultural and historical studies of science, technology and medicine with emphases on biomedicalization and common medical technologies for women such as contraception and the Pap smear. She is the author of Disciplining Reproduction: American Life Scientists and the ‘Problem’ of Sex (1998) which won the Ludwik Fleck Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science, and co-editor of a volume on scientific practice titled The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth Century Life Sciences (1992). In women’s health, Dr. Clarke co-edited Women’s Health: Complexities and Diversities (1997) and Revisioning Women, Health and Healing: Cultural, Feminist and Technoscience Perspectives (1999). A recent co-edited volume, Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health and Illness in the U.S (2010), includes her paper on healthscapes and their visual cultures. She developed a method for qualitative research especially effective for STS projects, including research design: Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn (2005; 2nd ed. 2015). She is currently Co-Editor of BioSocieties: Interdisciplinary Journal for Social Studies of Life Sciences and her current projects focus largely on qualitative research. Professor Clarke was recently awarded the 2012 J. D. Bernal Prize for Outstanding Contributions from the Society for Social Studies of Science.

HEIDI RAE COOLEY is Assistant Professor of Media Arts at the University of South Carolina. She is author of Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility, Finding, and Governance in the Digital Era (forthcoming, Dartmouth College Press), which considers how mobile technologies both instantiate norms for the governance of populations and constitute persons as expressive and socially connected subjects. Augusta App, a digital supplement to the book, provides a “laboratory” for considering the book’s argument. In 2010, Dr. Cooley served as co-PI and facilitator for an NEH-funded Humanities Gaming Institute, and in 2012 she served as co-PI for an NEH Level 2 Digital Humanities Grant that funded the development of a serious game, called Desperate Fishwives, that explores early modern British social history. Currently, she and her colleague-collaborator computer scientist Duncan Buell are leading a design team that is developing a mobile application that brings to visibility on iPad the unacknowledged history of enslaved labor that made possible the historic Horseshoe that is the heart of the University of South Carolina campus.

JORDAN CRANDALL is Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego and a media artist, theorist, and performer. Crandall is the 2011 winner of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding theory and research-based digital arts practice, given by the Transmediale in Berlin in collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archive of the University of Arts, Berlin.  His current project, Unmanned, explores new ontologies of distributed systems, and the status of the human in a militarized landscape increasingly dependent on automated technology.  A blend of performance art, political theater, philosophical speculation, and intimate reverie, the work was most recently performed at V2_ Institute in Rotterdam and will be presented this fall at the 13th edition of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal.  Crandall is founding director of the Active Materials research studio at UCSD, an interdisciplinary test-site for new theories of materiality and new forms and methods of material practice, sponsored by the Department of Visual Arts and the Center for the Humanities.

SHARON DANIEL is a Professor in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice.  Daniel is also an artist who produces new media documentary projects that reveal human rights abuses across a spectrum of public institutions. She employs digital technologies, documentary practices and humanities-based analysis to examine how state institutions, social structures and economic conditions (from inequality in health care and education to racial and economic discrimination in the justice system) produce social injustices and undermine domestic human rights. Daniel’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums and festivals including, WRO media art biennial (Poland), Artefact 2010 (Belgium), Transmediale 08 (Germany), the ISEA/ZeroOne festival (2006 and 2010), the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival DEAF03 (Netherlands), Ars Electronica (Austria), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY/USA), the Corcoran Biennial (Washington DC) and the University of Paris I (France), as well as on the Internet. Her essays have been published in books including Context Providers (Intellect Press 2011), Database Aesthetics (Minnesota University Press 2007) and the Sarai Reader05 as well as in professional journals such as Cinema Journal, Leonardo and Springerin. Daniel has been awarded the prestigious Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship and honored by the Webby Awards. Daniel’s recent works include a participatory media installation titled Name Your Price: tracking the social cost of consumer culture exhibited in, “Out of the Garage/Into the World” at the 01SJ Biennial exhibition in San Jose (Sept. 4-19, 2010) and a prototype of the Social Cost Tracker iPhone application.

ZEINABU DAVIS (UCSD)

MARY ANNE DOANE (UC BERKELEY)

KELLY GATES is Associate Professor in Communication and Science studies at UCSD. Gates’ research focuses on the critical analysis of digital media technologies. Her main emphasis has been the politics and social implications of computerization, and particularly the automation of surveillance, in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Her 2011 book, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, explores the effort underway since the 1960s to teach computers to see the human face. The book examines the social construction of automated facial recognition and automated facial expression analysis, focusing on the conceptual and cultural frameworks that are used to think about these technologies, and on the constellations of interests, institutions and social practices that are shaping their development. Gates is currently working on a new project that investigates the emerging professional field of video forensics and its attendant technologies in order to examine the ways in which new visual imaging and archiving technologies are being incorporated into, and transforming, modern investigatory and evidentiary practices. She is especially interested in the emerging forms that police work is taking in the digital economy, including the cultural labor that the police perform in their roles as surveillance workers and media analysts.

N. KATHERINE HAYLES is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Literature at Duke University. Hayles has taught at UCLA, University of Iowa, University of Missouri-Rolla, the California Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth College. She was the faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2001-2006. Her research interests concern topics related to literature and science in the 20th and 21st century; 20th and 21st century American fiction; electronic textuality, hypertext fiction and theory; science fiction; literary theory; and media theory. With degrees in both chemistry and English literature, Hayles is one of the foremost scholars of the relationship between literature and science in the late twentieth century. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99. Her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her latest book, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, came out in June 2012. The winner of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and a fellowship at the National Humanities Center, Hayles is currently working on the book A New Paradigm for the Humanities: Comparative Textual Media with Jessica Pressman which will be published in 2013.

LOUISE HICKMAN is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the UC San Diego. Her work focuses on how disability is mediated through online activism, particularly in the context of the current fiscal crisis within the United Kingdom and United States. In cultivating a transnational conversation, she hopes to consider the intersection of activism and medical interventions across international borders.

LILLY IRANI is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses on cultures of new media work to understand their relationships with broader cultural, political, and social processes. To date, she has investigated these issues through ethnographic fieldwork of a design studio in India, as well as through ethnography and activism in the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. With Six Silberman, she maintains Turkopticon, an activist technology website that lets AMT workers review employers and help each other out. She is co-editor of Limn: Crowds and Clouds (Kelty, Irani & Seaver, 2012). Her articles have appeared in Science, Technology & Human Values, as well as the Proceedings of Computer Human Interaction and Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

ROSHANAK KHESHTI is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her research centers around the consumption of culture through sound and film, with a focus on world music, race and gender, in addition to queer theory and sexuality in Iran. Her forthcoming book, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race, Gender and Sexuality in the World Music Culture Industry examines the history of listening to race and gender in the twentieth century formation of the music industry with a focus on the formation of world music. She has published in Feminist Studies, Anthropology News, Theatre Survey, Hypatia, American Quarterly and Parallax. She has also published numerous musical recordings both as a former member of bay area-based experimental rock band The Ebb and Flow and independently as composer and performer for an independent film score.

SU HYUN KIM is from Seoul, South Korea and is a graduate student in the Department of Design | Media Arts at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA) and a researcher at the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nano Systems  Institute (CNSI). She studied
Architecture and Design in South Korea and Art and Technology
Studies at the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Her past
collaborative project was shown in the exhibition of National Museum
of Contemporary Art, Korea, 2012. Her experimental projects have
focused on enabling viewers to make a relationship between the
surroundings and themselves via interactive media technology. She is
currently working on project ‘Sound Cloud’ (working title), that
connects human’s brain signals and the interactive sound installation.

ANTOINETTE LAFARGE is Professor of Art at UC Irvine and a cyberperfomance artist, a creator of fictive art, and a designer and curator. A curator of early exhibitions showcasing computer games (SHIFT-CTRL, 2000, and ALT+CTRL, 2004), and a founder of the cyberperformance group Plaintext Players, she is the author of works such as the speculative fiction “Cylex” (Wired) and designer for the anthology Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald (2007), a publication of the LA-based ICI Press. Her work questions normative production in such modes as ‘fiction’ and ‘performance’, and areas of special inquiry include impersonation, improvisation, and role-play, social media, games, and technofeminism. Much of her work uses a combination of custom programming and obsolete, appropriated, or hacked media to expose and critique reactionary aspects of contemporary digital culture. In recent performance works like “Galileo in America” (2012), “Hangmen Also Die” (2010), and “Playing the Rapture” (2008-09), she interrogates the politics of censorship and the ineradicable tension between history, ideology, and access to power.

MARTHA LAMPLAND is Associate Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and an affiliate member of the Critical Gender Studies Program.  Her specialties include political economy, science studies, feminist theory, and cultural history (Hungary, Central Europe, 19th-20th c).  Her research focuses on the social sciences as science, specifically in relation to economics, commodification and state formation in both capitalist and socialist societies. Professor Lampland has published and co-edited several books: The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary  (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Altering States.  Ethnographies of the Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, co-edited with Daphne Berdahl and Matti Bunzl (University of Michigan Press, 2000); and Standards and their Stories. How Quantifying, Classifying and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, co-edited with Susan Leigh Star (Cornell University Press, 2009). She has published articles on the role of numbers in formalizing practices; theories of instinct and class formation in the 1930s and 1950s in Hungary; state planning and the transition to socialism in the 1940s; women’s labor in socialism; the role of agrarian elites in Hungary’s decollectivization; gender and the nation in 19th century Hungary; and historical consciousness, revolution, and poetry (1848-1956).  She has just finished a book on agrarian work science and the development of socialist wages during the transition to Stalinism (1920-1956), entitled The Value of Labor: The Science of Work and the Work of Science.  Professor Lampland is a past editor of the Journal of Historical Sociology, and has served on the Academic Advisory Council for the Eastern European Studies Program at the Wilson Center.  She is currently a board member of the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research.

CHANDRA MUKERJI is Distinguished Professor of Communication and Science Studies at UCSD. Her books include Impossible Engineering (Princeton 2009), Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge 1997), and A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State (1990). Her work is primarily concerned with the material aspects of human cultures and communication processes, from built environments to popular cultural artifacts. Against theories that assume that all of culture is discursive, she studies engineered worlds that gain power from their silence and their relative invisibility in politics. She uses theories of distributed cognition and figured worlds analysis as well as the work of Deleuze to connect the material world to cultural patterns of thought outside discursive common sense. Her research focuses primarily on the historical development of techniques of impersonal rule that started to be used extensively in politics in 17th-century France, yielding modern territorial states. And she analyzes modern culture as a struggle between interpersonal and impersonal approaches to power. In addition to her historical work, she has also studied the culture of childhood, and the history of American film using  genealogical analysis as well as analysis of impersonal politics.

KRISS RAVETTO-BIAGIOLI  is Associate Professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies at UC Davis. As a film and media scholar, Dr. Favetto-Biagioli’s work focuses on the problem of representing and theorizing the violence produced by nation building, ethnocentrism, and sexism in a manner that does not play into a vicious cycle where moralism, media images, and language produce their own forms of violence. Based on this work, Dr. Ravetto-Biagioli has published The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (2001) and these themes are at work in her current book project, Mythopoetic Cinema on the Margins of Europe. Dr. Ravetto-Biagioli has published articles on film, performance, installation art, and new media in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Third Text, PAJ, Representations, Screen, Third Text and numerous collected volumes. Her interest in the “digital uncanny” and the culture of surveillance has inspired “Recoded” – the large international conference on the politics and landscapes of new media and “Figures of the Visceral.”

FATIMAH TOBING RONY is a filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, and Visual Studies, at the University of California, Irvine. She received her MFA in Film (Directing/Production) from UCLA and her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University. She is a two-time winner of Directors Guild of America Student Film Awards, and has been awarded a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Berlinale Talent Campus, and an ABC/Disney Writing Grant. Her first book was The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and  Ethnographic Spectacle (Duke University Press, 1996), which won the Society for Cinema Studies prize for best book in the field in 1998, and is in its third printing. Her feature film, Chants of Lotus [Perempuan Punya Certa] (2008), which she co-directed with Nia Dinata, Upi, and Lasya Susatyo, focuses on stories about Indonesian women and was a controversial winner of the Indonesian Film Awards in 2008, since it was met by serious resistance by the Indonesian government’s censor board. Her second book project focuses on realism, sexuality, and globalization in representations of Indonesian women and is tentatively titled Annah la Javanaise: Visualizing Native Women.

 

CAROL STABILE is Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication and the department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon. She is also the director for the Center for the Study of Women in Society. Professor Stabile is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix (1994), editor of Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies (2000), co-editor of Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture (2003), and author of White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture (2006). She is currently completing a book on women writers and the broadcast blacklist in the 1950s, entitled Black and White and Red All Over: Women Writers and the Television Blacklist. She is a founding member of Fembot, an online collaboration of scholars conducting research on gender, new media, and technology, and co-editor of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. Professor Stabile teaches interdisciplinary courses on gender, race, and class in media.

ERIKA SUDERBURG is a filmmaker and writer. She is a member of the Department of Art, theDepartment of Comparative Literatures and Languages, and the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside. Her work has been exhibited internationally in various festivals, museums, galleries and on television. Selected venues include:the Pacific Film Archives, Capp Street Projects, MOMA-New York, The American Film Institute, MOCA-Los Angeles, Kunstlerhaus- Stuttgart, The Collective for Living Cinema, New Langton Arts, Berlin International Film Festival, FilmForum, Redcat, Exit Art, Getty Museum, New Media Center, Pompidou & Mix Mexico. Professor Sunderburg has written about art, performance, television and film and is co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996), and editor of Space Site Intervention: Situating Installation Art (2000). She has recently completed a co-edited volume with Ming Yuen S. Ma entitled Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video (2012). Professor Sunderburg has made a myriad shorts and eight feature films and is currently in pre-production on a feature experimental documentary about Wunderkammern, Kunstkammern, philosophy, collecting and the miniature.

CHIKAKO TAKESHITA is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women’s Bodies (MIT Press, 2011). She was awarded the 2010-2011 American Fellowship Short-term Research Publication Grant from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to support this work. Takeshita’s work is informed by science and technology studies (STS) and feminist studies. She has published articles in biodiversity prospecting and indigenous resistance, contraceptives and reproductive rights, and feminist research methodology in STS. She is currently working on her second book, which investigates the heterogeneous discourses around cesarean section childbirth, and various articles on reproductive health as well as environmental feminism. She is the co-coordinator (with Juliet McMullin) of the Andrew Mellon Workshop on Medical Narratives. She teaches courses on gender, race science, technology, and medicine.

TINA TAKEMOTO is an artist and Associate Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts. Her current work explores queer perspectives on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. She has exhibited and performed at Asian Art Museum, Oceanside Museum of Art, GLBT History Museum, New Conservatory Theatre, Sabina Lee Gallery, SF Camerawork, SOMArts, SFMOMA, and the Vargas Museum. Her film Looking for Jiro received the Jury Award for Best Experimental Film at Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and has been featured at numerous festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Frameline San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, MIX Milano Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, MIX New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, and San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Her articles appear in Afterimage, Art Journal, Performance Research, Radical Teacher, Theatre Survey, and Women and Performance. Takemoto is board president of Queer Cultural Center and co-founder of Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts. On occasion, she makes guerrilla appearances as Michael Jackson and Bjork-Geisha.

VICTORIA VESNA is a media artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). She is currently a senior researcher at IMéRA – Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille (2011-2013). Professor Vena’s experimental creative research resides between disciplines and technologies. Her installations explore the ways communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Professor Vesna has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions and in more than seventy group shows. She has published in excess of twenty papers and has given 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and in 2007 published the edited volume Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow. In 2011 Professor Vesna co-edited a  volume entitled Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy).

 

KALINDI VORA is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, and is affiliate faculty of the Critical Gender Studies Program and the Science Studies Program. Her research interests are in feminist science and technology studies, critical race and gender studies, South Asian area and diaspora studies, and cultural studies. Her work draws from critical race and gender frameworks in the study of transnational movements of people and labor between India and other nations, particularly the U.S. She is currently completing a book manuscript that examines the connections between forms of historically unfree and gendered labor and contemporary transnational affective and biological economies, entitled [working title], Life Support: Race, Gender and New Socialities in the Vital Energy Economy. Her articles have appeared in journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Subjectivity, Scholar & Feminist, and Postmodern Culture.

ADRIANNE WADEWITZ is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College specializing in 18th-century children’s literature and the digital humanities. She received her PhD from Indiana University in 2011 and her most recent publication is an essay about teaching with Wikipedia, which appeared in University of Michigan’s Hacking the Academy (2011). She has been a Wikipedia editor for almost a decade, has written more high-quality content for the site than all but 15 editors, has created hundreds of new articles, and has published academic articles about Wikipedia as well as given public lectures about the site, particularly on the gender gap and on Wikipedia’s role in preserving our cultural legacy.

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