We are discussing projects along Boneyard Creek for the mini-conference in March 2017. Chris Carl and Evan Blondell worked together on local projects in Urbana Land Arts in 2011 called Allmans Boneyard & Saline.
Also, I thought this short piece I wrote about the Boneyard might be useful: Sharon Irish. “What Might a Polluted Creek Teach Us About Architecture?” In Design for the Environment/Proceedings of the 1995 ACSA West Central Regional Conference (October 1995): 79-84.
* please circulate — apologies for cross-listings *
“Interdisciplinary Encounters: Exploring Knowledge-Making Across Boundaries”
UIUC Graduate Science and Technology Studies Workshop
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | March 10-11, 2017
https://seeingsystems.illinois.edu
Photos courtesy of Celebrate U-C People’s History, ucpeopleshistory.org
The Seeing Systems INTERSECT group is delighted to announce “Interdisciplinary Encounters: Exploring Knowledge-Making Across Boundaries” UIUC Graduate Science and Technology Studies (STS) Workshop. We invite scholars from across disciplines and regional locales whose work connects with STS, digital studies, media studies, communication, information sciences, informatics and design to submit proposals for a two-day workshop addressing diverse themes in the social making of facts, social histories of media and technology, user networks in practice, visual cultures and interactive technologies.
We welcome a range of formats — including standard paper presentations, posters, demonstrations, and hands-on workshops — as well as work intersectional with feminist, anti-racist, transnational, decolonial, queer, and ecological potentials in science and technology studies (STS) and in critical making. The event will also feature faculty-facilitated conversations, campus and nature walks, scavenging exercises, workshops on local citizen science, and keynotes by:
Jenny Reardon, director of The Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California – Santa Cruz, and Max Liboiron, founder of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist marine biology and technology lab at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
We invite work representing a variety of regions and sites, and aim for a gathering that is aware of its context and the opportunities afforded by local contextual considerations for scholarship and research. And we underscore what midwest STS scholars have noted, while the Midwest is often overlooked as a “deindustrial periphery,” it has thriving technoscientific and political groundswells amongst its histories of settler-colonialism (including Black technocultures, independent media, femtech, citizen science, community making, and indigenous presence and practice).
We invite 500–800 word proposals for a variety of formats—from standard talks (15 min.) to hands-on activities with interdisciplinary methods (30–40 min.). Proposals should include a:
Please submit your proposal by January 17, 2017 via the online form at: https://illinois.edu/fb/sec/8043933.
* For any questions, contact SeeingSystemsUIUC@gmail.com.
We aim to finalize participants by February 15, 2017. Please see publish.illinois.edu/seeingsystems for further information about the workshop.
Our full photo set from attending the midweSTS 2016 Workshop at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Downtown Chicago Campus here.
See full photo set here.
And here’s what we were up to:
THURS, Sept. 1
9AM – Track 057 Non-conforming bodies: an exploration of public health knowledge, practice and technologies beyond ‘the body’ – Room 125 (http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=3962)
12:30-2PM #democraciarealya: Hacktivism and Networked Techno-politics in Spain, Room 111. http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4740
12.45-13.45PM: Making Sense of our 4S Experiences: An hour for Connecting and Reflecting Together — How have I come to be someone who would attend 4S/EASST at this time?, Room 123 – http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4778
2PM: T110, “What does it mean to be Human in the 21st Century?”, Room M214 http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4036
2PM: T008: Smart eco-cities: experimenting with new urban futures, Room: M220-M219. http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=3863
6PM Open Thursdays at El Hangar Visual Arts Center (Emilia Coranty 16, 08018 Barcelona, https://hangar.org/en/) – http://www.sts2016bcn.org/demo-night-an-evening-of-platforms-prototypes-and-multimedia-experiments-in-action/
FRI, Sept. 2
12.45-13.45PM: Making Sense of our 4S Experiences: An hour for Connecting and Reflecting Together — How have I come to be someone who would attend 4S/EASST at this time? Part2, Room 123. http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4779
9PM: STS Verbena/Banquet – http://www.sts2016bcn.org/sts-verbena/
SAT, Sept. 3
9A T114 – Innovation, Economic Driver, Disruption: Utopias and Critiques of Making and Hacking, Room 130 (http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4045.
4PM: T054 – “Digital subjectivities in the global context: new technologies of the self”, room 113: http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=3951
6-9PM — Demo Night: An Evening of Platforms, Prototypes, and Multi-media Experiments in Action, at El Hangar Visual Arts Center (Emilia Coranty 16, 08018 Barcelona, https://hangar.org/en/) – http://www.sts2016bcn.org/demo-night-an-evening-of-platforms-prototypes-and-multimedia-experiments-in-action/
On Arriving at the Digital:
Describing Critical Paths into the Digital Humanities
HASTAC 2014 Lima, Peru, April 27, 2014
This workshop will provide a space to discuss the texts, archives, practices or projects you bring to or blend with the Digital Humanities in order to create a space for critical, reflective and transformative work. We seek to form a collectively-authored bibliography or archive that not only illuminates your own paths into DH for others, but captures the field in a state of transition and formation.
For most, the Digital Humanities, or Digital Studies more broadly, is not a space of origination, but a space of destination – and not one that all have felt immediately ready to enter. Many scholars have only found a way in to the Digital Humanities by bringing their own subjects, critiques, epistemologies or languages to the conversation, augmenting and extending the field. This process has resulted in some of the field’s most vital and growing conversations – namely, those that include critical approaches to race, gender or transnationalism as vital to understanding the intellectual, social and political potentials of digital archives and platforms.
Our workshop is open to all HASTAC conference attendees. We ask only that participants send us ahead of time an example – in any language – of an article, book, archive, or object from “outside” the Digital Humanities that has been important to their experience of the Digital Humanities as a transformative space. In anticipation of the workshop, we’ll compile these examples and share them online. For the workshop, we’ll spend time in small groups comparing these examples, and then gather as a large group for discussion informed by a single text, announced ahead of time, and chosen to capture some of the common issues and dynamics at work among the paths represented in our group.
To participate, please fill out the webform at go.illinois.edu/HastacCFP, and we’ll add your reference to the online repository in anticipation of the event.
As we receive submissions, we’ll list them here.
We are an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty from the University of Illinois who are largely new to the Digital Humanities, but who share a common curiosity and excitement about the potential they offer for enacting institutional change. We’re excited about how Digital Humanities scholarship has made room for analyses of technologies as not only technical but cultural. Our group’s base questions lie less in examinations of DH than in understanding how technologies – in their technical, social, and representational capacities – enact culturally-specific values. We see the Digital Humanities as both a site where such processes take place – through the creation of new technologies and platforms – and as a place where scholars can study such processes together. The Digital Humanities also, importantly, offer us at least an excuse, if not a mandate, for posing alternative, transformative processes and technologies for learning, archiving, collecting, sharing.
We are very excited to see the release of Networking Peripheries, the great new book from Anita Say Chan, a faculty in our cohort whose ideas and scholarship have been central to our conversations thus far. A review from Christopher Kelty, editor of Limn:
Anita Chan’s outstanding book stages a fascinating contest over the stubborn difference of human culture and the universalizing aspirations of the Internet and digital culture. Her tour of contemporary Peru shows the reader how Chulucanas pottery can become the digital future of the country and cheap American laptops an object of local artisanal struggle. Whether it is IP Law, entrepreneurialism, software coding or educational technology, she elaborately details the surprise that comes of experiencing a cultural difference in exactly the place one expected more of the same. Networking Peripheries is that rare book that captures the integration of the necessary particularity of life, and universalizing pressures of global technology, finance and politics. It joins a growing body of scholarship that provides rich, well-researched alternatives to the boring echo chamber of Internet punditry.
For more you can also see this week’s review in Nature. Congratulations Anita!
Seeing Systems faculty Terri Weissman and Kevin Hamilton are co-editing the second of two issues of Media-N, the Journal of the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association. The 2014 edition of the journal will be themed around the theme of Art & Networks: Revealing, Critiquing and Composing Global Infrastructures.
Learning to See Systems, a new graduate working and study group, invites applicants for participation in a two-year program of research, study, and exchange around a common question:
How can we make visible the values and epistemologies embedded in complex technological systems?
Relevant work under this question could include scholarship on contemporary or historical subjects from across the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Though the “system” as an idea is sometimes more often associated with forms of modernity, we seek the broadest possible context for our conversation, and encourage applications from scholars working in all time periods and settings.
Available are six Affiliate positions. The Affiliates will work together with the program faculty and a group of new incoming Fellows to establish a new campus hub for work on the history, critique and production of the “system” as a feature of modernity.
Affiliates will agree to take two courses and give one talk on their work over two years. In exchange they will have access to research funds for work and travel, as well as a chance to collaborate with others on an exciting new venture.
Together with the larger group of Fellows and Faculty, Affiliates will contribute to a new experimental space of production and exchange focused on the idea of the “system” as both a subject of research and a mode of doing research. Our new lab space will support critical exploration of the new scholarly tools often found under the Digital Humanities through workshops, collaboration, and visiting talks.
Interested graduate students should review the group’s full mission and course listing at seeingsystems.illinois.edu, then submit a letter of interest describing their work in relation to the theme.
Send the letter, cv and a brief one-page letter of support from your advisor to Program Director Kevin Hamilton at kham@illinois.edu. All materials should be received by May 15. Successful applicants will be notified by June 1.
Professors Weissman and Hamilton invite proposals for their upcoming panel, Beyond Big Data: the politics of vision in complex systems, to be held at the 2014 CAA Conference in Chicago.
Description:
“Big Data” no longer belongs exclusively to the domain of supercomputing. The proliferation of digital artifacts has made the amassing of large collections available to any curious browser or hoarder, including artists, curators, and scholars who have begun to create new online or offline spaces, data structures, maps, and software as part of their research. But how do scholars and artists make visible the values and epistemologies embedded in the technological systems we use—and often, simultaneously, seek to critique? The question of vision is central to this inquiry, not only because images play a key role in these systems, but because technological systems facilitate visibility through the application of frames, filters and algorithms. This session seeks to investigate the politics of vision in technological systems and the innovative methodologies at work in their analysis. We welcome proposals from artists and scholars who approach digital collections as networks that merit examination as technologies themselves.
Apply by May 6. See CAA guidelines here.
Also stay tuned for more information on an upcoming edited journal on the same subject, edited by Weismman and Hamilton for Media-N, the journal of CAA’s New Media Caucus.
