News/Research

BCNM Around the Web November 2020

06 Nov, 2020

BCNM Around the Web November 2020

Check out the amazing work of our faculty, students, and alumni around the web this November!

Malika Imhotep

Malika held an interactive lecture that is part of The Cooper Union's Intersectional Justice Speaker Series. This was their first joint "public talk" and they presented on origins, methods of black feminist study + embodied citation, and also shared a few of their theory maps.
For more information, click here.

Vincente Perez
Andrew Sandoval-Strausz hosted Voices of Afro Latinidad, an evening of spoken poetry and community dialogue on Blackness and Latinidad with the performer, writer, and scholar, Vincente Perez. This is a Penn State Hispanic Heritage Month 2020 event.

Read more here!

Xiaowei Wang

In Logic Books Festivals, City Lights in conjunction with Gray Area and FSG Originals presented three days of discussion exploring the way we interact with technology and how it affects our lives. Xiaowei Wang was invited to talk bout her newly launched book "Blockchain Chicken Farm".

In "Blockchain Chicken Farm", the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.

Read more here.

Camille Crittenden

Camille Crittenden introduced her project "Blockchain, Digital Identity, and Health Records" in LA Progressive, discussing considerations for vulnerable populations in California. She concluded that blockchain holds the potential to improve public service provision for homeless residents in California and other states. However, issues with user authentication, cost, and trust must be addressed for these benefits to be realized.

From the article, "We find that blockchain-based identity and health records management systems may indeed offer advantages for unhoused populations in California."

Read more here.

Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg will present a lecture on AI, Automation, and Anxiety on November 11, 2020, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm. Covid-19 has radically transformed teleconferencing, telemedicine, and our work in general. Join us for a special presentation by Ken Goldberg and hear more about how assumptions of AI and Automation are shifting and revealing how these technologies can be complementary to our unique human abilities.

Read more here.

Jane McGonigal

"The First Five Minutes of the Future" is a new writing-based game that helps you consider what to do in emergency situations. It's developed by Palo Alto's Institute for the Future. It tries to train our brains to imagine the unimaginable.The Institute's director of game research and development, Jane McGonigal, says it's a technique neuroscientists call specificity training.

"They actually are able to imagine things that they previously described as unimaginable, to see them in their mind almost as if it were a movie that they had seen and could remember, or if it were a virtual reality world," she said.

Read more here.

Jeremy Rue


Jeremy Rue (Berkeley School of Journalism) and Catriona Bonfiglioli (University of Technology Sydney), unable to go on their habitual spring trip to Aarhus because of the pandemic, held two guest lectures via Zoom for Mundus students and alumni in August.

From the article: "At Mundus Journalism, we consider interchange of knowledge and research essential elements for fueling the debate on the present and the future of journalism. Attending a programme with a consortium of 11 universities from all around the world, students are used to being confronted with different, and thus enriching approaches stemming from both academic and cultural diversity."

Read more here.

Alex Saum-Pascual

Alex held a discussion table "Time, space, in turn: documenting and filing in pandemic virtuality?" It has been proposed to think, with the collaboration of three specialists in digital arts and new media in the fields of teaching, research and artistic practice, the possibilities of virtual and digital documentation in the pandemic stage under a transhistoric perspective and with a view to a present that requires interdisciplinary methods to safeguard its digital memory, with the many challenges that this implies.

Read more here.

danah byd
Does the current metrics-driven news landscape emerge from, and potentially reinforce historical racial inequality? Angèle Christin, author of the new book Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms and Joseph Torres, author of the classic News For All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (co-authored with Juan González) analyze racial divisions in media-making and its interplay with data-centric technology. This conversation is hosted by Data & Society Founder and President Danah Boyd.

Read more here.

Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is a participant in the event AI and Allegory in the COVID Era. The event brings together scholars, curators, and artists to discuss the role of Artificial Intelligence and the politics of images in an increasingly virtual COVID-adapted era.

Read more here.

Jen Schradie

Jen Schradie took part in a conversation on 'The Revolution that Wasn't' in the Conversations in Conflict Studies Speaker Series at Syracuse University.

Read more here.

John Scot

John had presented at a session on "Equity in Transition: Inclusive Design for Uncertain Times". The transition to remote instruction and uncertainty about campus reopenings have amplified concerns about equity and access, especially for historically at-risk students. Learn strategies and tools that can be used to ensure that students with disabilities, students with limited financial resources, and first-generation students have equitable opportunities for academic success.

Read more here.