Media Futures Hub researchers in Social Sciences Week 2021 events

Researchers from the UNSW Media Futures Hub (MFH) feature in a variety of public online events to be held as part of the Social Sciences Week 2021 (SSW2021).

 Media Futures Hub is a collection of scholars in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at UNSW researching justice, media and emerging technologies. Social Sciences Week is a week-long series of events held across Australia each September offering insight into the impact of the social sciences on our lives. It is an initiative of several of Australia’s Social Sciences associations and is coordinated by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Details of events featuring Media Futures Hub researchers are below:

Tuesday 7 September

VIRTUAL PANEL The Future of Justice

In this digital event join author/filmmaker, Media Future Hub’s Mary Zournazi, philosopher Michael Sandel and theologian Rowan Williams to explore what concepts like gratitude and grace mean for us as individuals and societies, and how humility and love may serve us in our relationships with each other. Instead of separating secular and theological approaches, what ideas can we bring together to chart a course for the common good and a more just world?

Further details and registration link here: https://www.centreforideas.com/event/the-future-of-justice

Wednesday 8 September

VIRTUAL PANEL Emotion Inequality in Pandemic Australia

This webinar will map the emotional contours and costs of COVID-19, including various forms of suffering and solidarity, as well as the impacts of government efforts to contain the virus. Media Futures Hub Co-Director Michael Richardson will be speaking on surveillance strategies and over policing of the general public in pandemic Australia. Panellists include: Michelle Peterie, Lea Williams Veazey, Barbara Barbosa Neves, Cameron Parsell, Sukhmani Khorana and Gaby Ramia.

Further details and registration link here: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/emotion-inequality-in-pandemic-australia-tickets-165377625931

Friday 10 September

VIRTUAL PANEL Critical Race Theory: Transforming Knowledge in the Australian Social Sciences and Humanities

This virtual panel features leading Australian critical race scholars including, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Debbie Bargallie, Alana Lentin, Andrew Brooks of the Media Futures Hub and Sherene Idriss. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has had high profile media attention in both the US and Australia this year, with Sky News, the Daily Telegraph and the Australian echoing calls from the US to ‘ban’ CRT. The Senate passed a motion to ‘reject’ CRT in the national curriculum. Beyond this moral panic, Australian social science and humanities scholars are yet to fully grapple with how critical race perspectives potentially challenge and transform disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledges in a settler colonial context.

Further details and registration link here: https://socialsciences.org.au/socialsciencesweek/event/critical-race-theory-transforming-knowledge-in-the-australian-social-sciences-and-humanities/

PODCAST SPECIAL: Ask a Social Scientist - Politics of Listening with Tanja Dreher

In this Social Science Week podcast Media Futures Hub Co-Director Tanja Dreher discusses the recent ‘turn to listening’ in media studies, cultural studies and political theory. Listening is increasingly understood: as a political practice; as a critical frame; as an alternative politics; and as a contribution to justice and/or as an ethics of relation. The discussion focuses on settler responsibilities to listen in the context of First Nations sovereignties. The ‘Ask a Social Scientist’ podcast series is hosted by UNSW’s Siobhan O’Sullivan and features 10 academics from UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture.

Listen here

PUBLICATION: Kevin Witzenberger's research on EdTech publishes in leading journal

Kevin Witzenberger’s recent paper “Why EdTech is always right: students, data and machines in pre-emptive configurations” in collaboration with Prof. Kalervo Gulson is published in Taylor & Francis journal. The paper looks at the use of pre-emptive methods within education.

Pre-emption describes a system of automated knowledge creation and intervention that steers the present towards a desirable future, by building on knowledge derived from the past. Folding together temporalities makes it impossible to disprove pre-emption. It is increasingly featured within EdTech, introducing new forms of automated governance into education. This paper examines how students and EdTech come together to make pre-emption possible, not as a single event but as a normalised governance instrument. For this, we introduce Lucy Suchman’s idea of configuration to examine pre-emptive EdTech. The paper presents three openings into the configuration of students and pre-emptive EdTech. These include observations from an EdTech trade show; interviews with insiders of technology companies; and analysis of accepted papers to a learning analytics conference. We conclude the data used at the heart of pre-emptive EdTech seeks to exclude students and configures them as absent. Yet, its interventions have material consequences.

URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2021.1913181

Kevin Witzenberger is a Scientia PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His dissertation investigates forms of automated governance within education. Kevin is interested to understand the shifting power relations as tools of automated governance transform into fully automated technical systems. He also received the HDR Research Output Award for publishing in a Q1 journal from the faculty for this article.

Kevin can be reached at @KevinWtz

DRONE CULTURES SYMPOSIUM, 8-10 DECEMBER 2020

This three-day symposium brings together academics, artists and researchers to explore drone cultures from multiple perspectives and practices with the aim of generating dialogue across disciplinary boundaries to better understand the diversity of drones and drone cultures. How has drone vision influenced contemporary visual culture? How do practices, aesthetics, techniques and technologies move back and forth between military and non-military contexts? How have artists, writers and filmmakers critiqued, adopted and innovated drone technologies? How have drones changed how power is exercised and experienced? What cultures have sprung up around drones in conservation, activism, amateur photography and other contexts? How are drones and other remote sensing systems shaping and shaped by our desires and imaginaries? What does the proliferation of drones mean for the future of the human?

KEYNOTE: Caren Kaplan, UC Davis

PLENARY: Alex Edney-Browne, Melbourne

ARTISTS & ACADEMICS: Christine Agius (Swinburne), Michele Barker (UNSW), David Beesley (RMIT), Olga Boichak (USyd), Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox (Curtin), David Chesworth (RMIT), Sarah Eleazar (UT Austin), Adam Fish (UNSW), Jack Faber (Uniarts Helsinki), Edgar Gómez Cruz (UNSW), Jennifer Smith-Mayo (Maine), Mitch Goodwin (Melbourne), Kathrin Maurer (Southern Denmark), Anna Munster (UNSW), Tom Sear (UNSW Canberra), Kate Richards (WSU), James Rogers (Southern Denmark), Simon M. Taylor (UNSW), Yanai Toister (Tel Aviv), Madelene Veber (UNSW), Vaughan Wozniak-O'Connor (UNSW), Anne Wilson (Deakin), Andrew Yip (Coventry)

REGISTER via Eventbrite

PROGRAM AND OTHER INFO at the Drone Cultures website.

DRONE FUTURES #6: MAHWISH CHISHTY, 26 NOVEMBER 2020

A virtual public seminar on “Cultural Aesthetics + Borders” with artist Mahwish Chishty.

Mahwish Chishty’s artistic research combines her interest in Pakistani traditional folk art/culture and contemporary politics as it relates to US/Pakistan relations. This talk will cover the inspiration and motivation behind the projects that Chishy has been working on since 2011, including: Drone Art series, Wagah Border, Basant: Let’s Go Fly a Kite and Danyore. Chishty will share paintings, installations and collaborative projects as part of this discussion.

Mahwish Chishty is a multimedia artist who initially trained as a miniature painter in Pakistan. Her work combines traditional artistic practice with her interest in contemporary politics, particularly the relationship between the US and Pakistan. In 2017, Chishty was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in the same year she held a solo exhibition of her drone art at the Imperial War Museum, London. Her 2018 installation, Naming the Dead, was shortlisted for the ArtPrize. She is currently Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Image: X-47B (2012)

When: Thursday November 26, 10 - 11.30am (AEDT)

Where: YouTube Live

REGISTER HERE

DRONE FUTURES #5: THOMAS STUBBLEFIELD, 4 November 2020

A virtual public seminar on “The Ornithology of Drone Art” with Thomas Stubblefield (UMass Dartmouth).

As a result of the historical reliance of war upon the animal body, modern military technologies such as the drone are haunted by a lingering zoological presence. Of the nonhuman animals that occupy the modern drone perhaps none are as influential as birds. Not only do these creatures offer a means of materializing an enduring connection between flight and surveillance that had occupied the imaginary for centuries, but so too do they introduce an aerial proxy by which a thoroughly modern asymmetry of warfare would come into being. This presentation will discuss the ways in which the video Seagulls (2013) and the #NotABugSplat installation (2014) engage this residual animal presence in order to both excavate alternate histories of the drone and reimagine its practices of targeting.

Thomas Stubblefield is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Media Studies and Interim Associate Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. In 2015, his book, 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (Indiana University Press), was awarded the Rollins Prize. His most recent book, Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium (2020), was published by the University of California Press. His essay: “Towards a History of the Medial Regime: Force and the Post-Industrial Female Body” appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of Cultural Critique (University of Minnesota Press).

When: Wednesday November 4, 10 - 11.30am (AEDT)

Where: YouTube Live

REGISTER HERE

MEDIA, RACE, VIOLENCE #4: AFTERLIVES, GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS

The Media, Race, Violence Reading Group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. The group will engage with work from the fields of media studies, critical race theory, Indigenous studies, anti- and de-colonial theory, Black studies, cultural studies, and more.

#4: Afterlives, Ghosts, Hauntings

When: Friday November 13, 9-10:30am (and recurring the second Friday of every month)

Where: Zoom

The readings for this session consider the afterlives of slavery and colonisation, tracking the way that the histories of racial ascription continue to haunt the present. The sociologist Avery Gordon described the concept of haunting as ‘one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security).’ This session will focus on the temporalities of racialising practices and the ways in which unresolved or repressed social violence (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) repeatedly and cyclically makes itself known. The readings consider how the afterlives of race are mediated and how the reproduction of racial regimes might be interrupted.

Tuck and Ree offer a glossary of terms related to the violence of colonialism and the various trauma it produces; the Karrabing Film Collective offer as a dystopian vision of the near future that considers the history of the forced removal of Aboriginal children and shows us how the past is bound up with the present; Ruha Benjamin considers the afterlives of slavery in relation to caraceral systems in the US and posits kinship as a way of intervening in the reproducing of racial injustice; and Legacy Russell develops the glitch and the void as generative figures for moving beyond the body defined by structures of domination such as the gender binary and race. Further readings provide additional context for thinking through the climate of anti-Blackness and further developing the concept of haunting.

 Themes/Objects: archives, racial legacies, afterlives of slavery and colonisation, temporality, reproduction, affective climates, incarceration, hauntings, glitches, agency

Readings for Discussion:

• Eve Tuck and C. Ree, ‘A Glossary of Haunting’, in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis (Routledge, 2013), pp. 639-658

• Karrabing Film Collective (film), The Mermaids, or Aiden In Wonderland (2018)

• Ruha Benjamin, ‘Black AfterLives Matter’, Boston Review, July 2018

• Legacy Russell, Chapter 4: ‘Glitch Ghosts’ and Chapter 6: ‘Glitch Encrypts’, from Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020)

Further Reading:

• Christina Sharpe, ‘The Weather’, The New Inquiry, July 2017

• Avery Gordon, ‘her shape and his hand’, from Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008): pp. 3-30

To join the mailing list for the reading group and receive access to copies of the texts, please contact Andrew Brooks directly.

IN THE MEDIA: Tanja Dreher

Tanja Dreher spoke to The Sydney Morning Herald’s Melanie Kembrey on cancel culture controversies.