For those too busy to read the entire book, here is an interview I gave to the Centre for Communication & Social Change at the University of Queensland. It’s called, well, feminist activism and the digital, and I talk about the motivations, the challenges, and the key premises of the book.
I look forward to talking at the workshop Materiality, Publicness and Digital Media, at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies. The workshop is part of the Series ‘Trajectories of Publicness and Contestation’ series, (25-26 October 2016). This second workshop in the series focuses on materiality, aiming to explore and theorize how popular protests are articulated through particular technologies and material settings (ranging from face-to-face communication to global social platforms), which ‘mediate’ how these protests take shape.
My session is called (Dis)engagement & Disobedience (Chair: Stefania Milan), with co-speakers Anne Kaun (Södertörn University) who will be talking about ‘Disconnection activism: the slow media movement’, Sebastian Kubitschko & Sigrid Kannengießer, (University of Bremen) who will present on ‘Repairing and hacking as examples of acting on materiality’, and I will be talking about ‘Feminist ‘smart’ publics: Feminism in the era of the Quantified Self’ – work that I have developed in my book and here.
The new ADA issue on Queer Feminist Media Praxis that I co-edited with Alex Juhasz and Kate O’Riordan is now online!
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FEMBOT Announcement:
We are pleased to announce the publication of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, Issue 5 Queer Feminist Media Praxis, edited by Aristea Fotoupolou, Kate O’Riordan, and Alexandra Juhasz.
You’ll notice that the Ada site has a new design – as always, our emphasis has been on accessibility, so we have had to balance aesthetic considerations with the need to ensure that the site is as accessible and usable as possible.
We are grateful to the people who worked on and provided support for the re-design: Karen Estlund, Paula Gardner, Mél Hogan, David McCallum, Bryce Peake, Staci Tucker, and Jacqueline Wallace, as well as for the support provided by the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Digital Scholarship Center, and the School of Journalism and Communication.
Best,
Carol A. Stabile, Professor
School of Journalism and Communication/Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Editor, The Fembot Collective
This podcast (from the Annenberg School of Communication) was shared in the ECREA mailing list and I thought it was interesting. The whole issue of tenure (or the European equivalent of tenure) is not even remotely relevant to me at this stage (or so I hope), however listening to this I reminded myself what is also repeated in the Get Tenure, Not Cancer project: pages: how important it is (and how difficult it may become) to maintain personal/political interests and attachments as productivity drives in academia.
* 3620 is a podcast of and about communication scholarship, run by PhD students at the University of Pennsylvania.
On the 16th of May I attended the workshop ‘In the Aftermath of the Cybernetic Hypothesis’, organised by the Digital and Social Media Research Theme at the University of Sussex. Guest speaker Alexander R. Galloway (New York University) proposed a way of thinking about the history of information and the emergence of computational systems which is interesting. Here is the abstract disseminated before the workshop:
“In an essay from 2001, the French collective Tiqqun speaks of what they call the cybernetic hypothesis: “[A]t the end of the twentieth century the image of steering, that is to say manageme
nt, has become the primary metaphor to describe not only politics but all of human activity as well.” The cybernetic hypothesis is a vast experiment beginning in the overdeveloped nations after World War II and eventually spreading to swallow the planet in an impervious logic of administration and interconnectivity. What are the origins of the cybernetic hypothesis, and what are its futures? This talk offers a media archeology of cybernetics through an exploration of nineteenth-century chronophotography, the history of the pixel, developments in computer modeling, bit arrays and grid systems, and that most enigmatic cybernetic device, the black box. Instead of contributing to the many heroic histories of cybernetics that already populate the cultural imagination, this talk aims to uncover
an alternative history of digital systems via an examination of the aesthetics and politics of control”. Continue reading
Aristea Fotopoulou 