Spring 2021 BCNM Events
Image credit: Elizabeth LaPensée
Mark your calendars for this incredible line up of speakers! We will launch our virtual mini-series Fandom + Piracy with two keynote lectures and two panels! We'll also host talks on Indigenous Technologies, the sonic image, wildfire ecologies, and the second Grad Chat with BCNM alums who have pursued alt-ac careers. All of our events will be hosted on Zoom and require registration.
Check out the Fandom + Piracy website here and you can also add our Public Programs calendar directly to your calendar here!
Monday, February 1
6:30 — 8:00 PM | Register here.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Artist, Beirut
This lecture will deal not with the visualization of sounds but rather the sonification of images. What is politically at stake when an image behaves like a sound? The lecture will present ways of using sound and sonic imagination as new propositions for producing and reading images that are continuous with the omnidirectional and uncontainable way that sound propagates both throughout the space of a building, the border of a nation, and through the architecture of memory itself.
Presented as a part of BCNM's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium and A+D Mondays, and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Arts Research Center, and the Department of Art Practice.
Monday, February 1
6:30 — 8:00 PM | Register here.
Performing Cultural Exchange on Ohlone Homelands in Huichin
Pauline Lampton, Director of Miriki Performing Arts
Corrina Gould, co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust
Erica Estrada, Northern Pomo Dancer
Director of Miriki Performing Arts (Pauline Lampton), co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (Corrina Gould), and Northern Pomo Dancer (Erica Estrada) will participate in a panel discussion on the role of cultural exchange on the UC Berkeley campus, a campus that obtained its land through the Morrill Land-Grant Act and resides on the Ohlone Homelands in Huichin. Bayal Kaymanen is part of a tradition of honoring native sovereignty and building global networks of kinship for people who continue to endure the colonization of their lands. Excerpts from a documentary about the project will be shared during the panel discussion.
Presented with UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies in partnership with Berkeley Arts + Design as part of Arts + Design Mondays.
Wednesday, February 3
5:00 — 6:30 PM | Register here.
Indigenous Cyber-relationality: Discerning the Limits and Potential for Connective Action
Marisa Duarte, Assistant Professor of Arizona State University
As Indigenous social movements increasingly rely on social networking sites (SNS) toward connective action, community groups also perceive the limitations of ICTs toward social change. For a range of reasons, grassroots activists, tribal elders, cultural knowledge-keepers, attorneys, IT experts, and law enforcement identify the vulnerabilities that radical uses of SNS introduce in already marginalized communities. Indigenizing SNS with regard for the colonial entanglements of social media platforms creates the grounds for discerning how Indigenous peoples carry protocols of respect, belonging, kinship, and shared purpose into digital spheres.
Presented as a part of BCNM’s Indigenous Technologies Initiative and History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series.
Thursday, February 25
5:00 — 6:30 PM | Register here.
Fandom + Piracy Keynote: “How should we theorize injury in fan studies?”
Rebecca Wanzo, Professor and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis
Interlocutors: Grace Gipson, Malika Imhotep, Patrick Johnson
Perhaps no issue makes disciplinary differences in approaches to the popular transparent like the question of injury. In Fan Studies, scholars are very attentive to the agency of fans and concerned about reductive characterizations of them, just as fans are attentive to dismissive interpretations of their love objects. Fans and media studies scholars more broadly push against causal claims about the injuriousness of popular culture that are more common in the social sciences, as such scholarship rarely without examines the transformational and utopian work of the popular. This talk takes as a case study a popular text in which accounts of injuriousness came from multiple directions: the HBO limited series Watchmen. Damon Lindelof called the show “a very expensive bit of fanfic,” and for some fans of the original comic book, the injury was the emphasis on race and social justice. Many fans were also sympathetic to comic book writer Alan Moore’s understandable objections to constant infringement on his intellectual property by the publishers. For some descendants of the Greenwood Massacre, the writers were guilty of cultural theft. And for others, the political discourse of the show was injurious because of its casting of a Black woman as a police officer and the treatment of reparations. In this talk I will explore how injury is just as important as pleasure in our understanding of the role of the popular in our lives, and discuss how competing injuries often structure evaluations of the popular text’s value.
Presented as a part of BCNM's Virtual Mini-Series Fandom & Piracy 2021.
Monday, March 1
6:30 — 8:00 PM | Register here.
A Conversation on Wildfire Ecologies
Margo Robbins, Co-founder and President of the Cultural Fire Management Council
Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and the President of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust
With California wildfires becoming a seasonal inevitability, we turn our Indigenous Technologies series to the question of fire ecologies. Join us for a conversation on indigenous fire management and land practices with two indigenous ecologists. We’ll hear from Margo Robbins, co-founder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council and Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and the President of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.
Presented as a part of BCNM's History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series.
Thursday, March 4
5:00 — 6:30 PM | Register here.
Fandom + Piracy Keynote: “Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction”
Kavita Philip, Professor of History & affiliate faculty in Informatics at UCI
Interlocutors: Yairamaren Maldonado, Lou Silhol-Macher, Jaclyn Zhou
Pirates who threaten to invert power relations through appropriating things less tangible than ships and bodies have become a growing concern for the managers of twenty-first-century economic globalization. Appropriating, modifying, and sharing a range of less concrete but equally crucial objects, intellectual property “robbers” today traffic in images, music, and software. Although business analysts regard this as a novel problem, supposedly precipitated by the unprecedented importance of “knowledge” as a force of economic production, historians of science and law tell stories of intellectual property theft that predate the current IPR discourse by two centuries. Anti-piracy discourses now frequently intersect with anti-terrorist security discourses, where both pirates and terrorists function as threats to free markets and civilized nations. Clearly, even while it participates in a long history, the current discourse of piracy is specific to our present historical and economic moment and illuminates particular characteristics of the emerging forms of global informational capitalism.
What forms of globalized citizenship and personhood are being shaped via the emerging legal discourses of intellectual property, on both sides of the struggle for access to new forms of information? In Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction: The Pirate Function and Postcolonialism, I read the 21st-century debate over “sharing,” “openness,” and “freedom” in software, music, and film not as an entirely unique and unprecedented moment, but rather, via a genealogical understanding of its legal, cultural, and political-economic conditions of enunciation.
Presented as a part of BCNM's Virtual Mini-Series Fandom & Piracy 2021.
Thursday, March 11
5:00 — 6:30 PM | Register here.
Fandom + Piracy: Fandom & Race Panel
André Carrington, Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside.
Racquel Gates, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Alfred Martin, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at University of Iowa.
Rukmini Pande, Assistant Professor of English Literature at O.P. Jindal Global University.
Scholars of color will discuss how fandom is racialized, how race is addressed (and not) in fannish spaces, how and where people of color explore and express their fannish interests, how fans of color are responding to the media industries’ attempts at diversifying casts and narratives, and fan studies and critical race theory currently intersect, and their visions for the future of fan studies.
Likely topics include fandom and political activism, representation in media, race and fan platforms, and the Movement for Black Lives.
Presented as a part of BCNM's Virtual Mini-Series Fandom & Piracy 2021.
Thursday, March 18
5:00 — 6:30 PM | Register here.
Fandom + Piracy: Piracy & Capitalism Panel
Alexander Dent, Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.
Keller Easterling, an architect, writer and Professor of Architecture at Yale University.
Jennifer Holt, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
Elleza Kelley, Ph.D candidate in English at Columbia University.
A discussion of the long and troubled history of piracy’s relationship to capitalist frameworks of ownership, authorship, access, infrastructure, sharing, saving, and theft from the perspectives of anthropology, architecture, media industries, archives, and literature.
Likely topics include piracy and libraries, piracy and racialized capitalism, piracy and cultural imperialism in the Global south, and piracy and resistance to Global North capitalist hegemony.
Presented as a part of BCNM's Virtual Mini-Series Fandom & Piracy 2021.
Thursday, April 15
12:30 — 2:00 PM | Register here.
BCNM hosts our second Grad Chat, a special conversation focused on alt academic careers with UC Berkeley grads Jennifer Lowe, Dan Perkel, and BCNM Advisory Board Member Aylon Samouha. Moderated by BCNM Director Gail De Kosnik.
Thursday, April 22
5:00 — 6:30 PM | Register here.
Elizabeth LaPensée, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University
Indigenous people have made and played games since time immemorial. Indigenous self-determination in game design continues to rise in games of all forms. Commercial game industry shows trends towards involving Indigenous people in roles such as cultural consultants, as meanwhile, Indigenous game developers working independently establish and sustain space for their games to be recognized through exhibitions and events. Whether AAA or indie, there are a myriad of games in which Indigenous cultures inform design. This talk offers insights into the trajectory of Indigenous games, from past to present to future, highlighting work from Turtle Island to Aotearoa.
Presented as a part of BCNM’s Indigenous Technologies Initiative and History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series.
For more on our lecture series:
BCNM's Indigenous Technologies Initiative
Fandom + Piracy Virtual Mini-Series
Accessibility
BCNM events are free and open to the public. All of our events for the 2020-2021 academic year will be held on Zoom in English, in Pacific Standard Time (PST). 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@berkeley.edu with requests or questions.