Event | ‘Radical Digital Cultures: Exploring Feminist, Queer and Intersectional Technocultures’ [Updated]
Event | ‘Radical Digital Cultures: Exploring Feminist, Queer and Intersectional Technocultures’
Dates: 10 November 2023, 17 November 2023, 1 December 2023 [Optional], 7 December 2023
Time: 13:00-15:00
Location: University of Amsterdam (Rooms specified on poster)
Organizers: Sara Nuta, Marissa Willcox
Contact: S.e.m.nuta@uva.nl & m.g.willcox@uva.nl
Registration here
Registration deadline: 4 november 2023
Credits: 1 ECTS
We bring attention to feminist, queer and intersectional approaches to understanding, analyzing and making radical digital culture in the academy and outside of it. For this seminar series, we focus on the modes of creativity, activism, and community-building that are used to generate what we define as “radical digital cultures”. Radical digital cultures in this context are creative and organizational practices of making, analyzing and participating in feminist, queer and intersectional digital subcultures, which are both sustaining people and transforming cultural movements.
Through two lectures and a making workshop, the series places new digital cultural movements in a lineage of moments of anti-authoritarian dissent and contestation throughout history. We unveil the ways in which radical digital art and creative social media practices inform contemporary cultural movements and politics of resistance. How do acts of rebellion and subversion online coincide with the formation of communities such as anti-capitalist networks of mutual aid, queer creator circles, or spaces to highlight marginalized voices? How can creativity, desire, and imagination drive revolutionary digital projects?
With an attention to literature focused on posthuman agency, as well cyberfeminist, queer and intersectional approaches to the study of digital culture, we ask the participants to read 2 readings per session and be able to discuss the readings while participating in radical critical thinking processes that challenge and explore digital subcultures and communities.
Speakers and Programme Schedule
Friday November 10th, 1-3 pm
Professor Anna Hickey Moody
Universiteitstheater (Room 1.01)
Anna Hickey-Moody is the inaugural Professor of Intersectional Humanities in the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Maynooth. Her work explores intersecting angles of disadvantage through philosophical and creative approaches. In her talk she will present a digital and creative methodology for engaging queer kids at religious schools to talk about their identities and emotional geographies.
Friday November 17th, 1-3 pm
Dr. Cat Mahoney
Location: BG1 (Room 0.16)
Cat is an inaugural Derby Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She is interested generally in postfeminism as a cultural phenomenon, particularly the ways in which it inflects and informs our understanding of people, places and the past. Her broader research interests centre on the representation of gendered histories, postfeminism in contemporary culture, television and historical place making, the role of the media in facilitating our engagement with and understanding of the past and the relationship between television and cultural memory. Her talk for our seminar series will focus on postfeminist Instagram creators and the ways they navigate the capitalist confines of Instagram while still being true to their own aesthetic.
Friday December 1stm 3-4:30 pm [Optional Session – not required for credits]
Dr. Aisha Mershani
Location: Zoom (link provided upon registration)
Aisha Mershani is a scholar, photographer, activist and critical thinker, whose work combines social media activism with research in Middle Eastern Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Social Movements, Media and Social Justice. Her current project explores how activist art and photography on a material and street-level can be engaged with by viewers in digital spaces. The intent of the talk is to show how audiences can differently engage with activist content and experiences in times of global conflict through a new media lens. To make art more inclusive, and outside the four walls of a gallery, she brings the visual imagery directly to the community as an essential aspect of activism, and argues for this as a sustaining art practice, which can be used also as a research method.
Friday December 7th, 1-3 pm
Mariana Fernandez
Location: BG1 (Room 0.16)
Mariana Fernandez is an artist, writer, researcher, feminist and the current editor and communications person at ARIAS. Her practice investigates the intersection between performance, language, and technology. Her latest book “Dear Machines” explores the potential of natural language processing as co-writers and considers new forms of relationships between humans and technology. She is a fellow researcher at the Sandberg A.I. cell, Visual Methodologies at the HvA, founder of the feminist research collective “COVEN”, and she leads the A.I. thematic line “Artificial Worlds” at ARIAS Amsterdam.
Credit Details
Research MA and PhD-students affiliated with one of NICA’s partner universities can earn 1 EC by attending all three lectures, studying the assigned readings and preparing discussion questions.