Announcing the 2023-2024 History and Theory of New Media Season
The History and Theory of New Media lecture series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression. The series is free and open to the public.
Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
2023
10/11 AI and the Humanities: Generative Creativity and Interpretation
Timnit Gebru, Founder & Executive Director, The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR); Vikram Chandra, Writer and Co-Founder, Granthika Co.; Hannah Zeavin, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Berkeley Center for New Media, University of California, Berkeley
In-person event at Geballe Room (220 Stephens Hall). Presented with the Townsend Center for Humanities as part of BCNM’s Critical Infrastructures and Cultural Analytics program.
10/16 Rerouting Media in the Living Forest
Martina Broner, Assistant Professor, Department of Arts & Sciences, Dartmouth University, and Co-Founder of the Amazonia Section of the Latin American Studies Association
In-person event at 102 Wurster Hall. Presented as part of BCNM’s Latinx & Latin American Media Ecologies program and Indigenous Technologies initiative. Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the Department of Art Practice.
2024
2/26 Unsettling Sound Technologies: Indigenous Sonic Sovereignty and Border Politics
Christina Leza, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Indigenous Studies, Colorado College
Trevor Reed, Professor of Law in the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University
Online event, see listing for Zoom and YouTube links. Presented as part of BCNM’s Indigenous Technologies initiative. Co-sponsored by the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Art Practice.
3/4 Mediascapes of Postsocialism: Cuban New Media Cultures after the End of History
Paloma Duong, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies and Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In-person event at 575 McCone Hall. Presented as part of BCNM’s Latinx & Latin American Media Ecologies program.
3/13 AI & the Humanities: Arficial Intelligence and Translation
Behrooz Ghorbani, Researcher, OpenAI; Cathy Park Hong, English, UC Berkeley; Hoyt Long, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, University of Chicago
In-person event at Geballe Room (220 Stephens Hall). Presented with the Townsend Center for Humanities.
3/21 Seeing and Seafaring: Maritime Navigation and the Scopic Regime of Computation
Bernard Geoghegan, Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media, King's College, London
In-person event at Geballe Room (220 Stephens Hall). Presented by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society.
4/1 AI & the Humanities: AI is Weird
Erik Davis, Writer, Journalist, and Lecturer
In-person event at 470 Stephens Hall. Presented with the Townsend Center for Humanities.
4/22 Historical Data, Present-Day Harms: On the Uses and Limits of Data Science for the Study of Social Movements
Lauren Klein, Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the Departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English, Emory University
In-person event at Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, Studio 310. Presented with the Digital Humanities program, as the keynote of BCNM’s Critical Infrastructures and Cultural Analytics program. Co-sponsored by the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), the Jacobs Insitute for Design Innovation, and the Media Studies program.
Accessibility
BCNM events are free and open to the public. Our 2023-24 History and Theory of New Media lecture series will be held in person on the Berkeley campus, with the exception of our event with Christina Leza and Trevor Reed, Unsettling Sound Technologies: Indigenous Sonic Sovereignty and Border Politics, which will be held online, on Zoom and YouTube. We post video, with captioning, of our in-person events to our YouTube channel within a few weeks of the event date. For our online events, we provide live-captioning in Zoom and offer a separate Streamtext window for live-captioning with options to customize text size and display. We strive to meet any additional access and accommodation needs. Please contact info.bcnm [at] berkeley.edu with requests or questions.