📅 Dates: Thursday 4 December & Friday 5 December
🕕 Time: 10am to 5pm on both days, and a 6pm film screening on Day 1
📍 Venue: Robert Webster Building, UNSW Sydney
We live in times of compounding and intensifying crisis: climate catastrophe, a genocide in Gaza, a rising fascist tide across the globe, the long crisis of settler colonial invasion and occupation here in Australia, and the exhaustion of growth economies. Media technologies are often posited as a way to out of crisis: artificial intelligence promises productivity gains, automated weapons are presented as more efficient and humane ways to wage war, new imaging tools shed light on the impacts of global warming, increased data collection is positioned as step toward closing the gap and addressing systemic state neglect. At the same time, media platforms and organisations are also often seen as amplifying crises in the midst of an information disorder, the limited and harmful diversity paradigms of legacy media, and the intensification of racial capitalism in newsrooms and production studios. How are we to make sense of the poly-crisis we find ourselves in? And how are we to cut through the hype of the techno-fix?
Media Futures in Times of Crisis confronts these questions across two days of presentations, screenings, and discussions. Presented by the UNSW MediaFutures Hub, this free symposium seeks to cultivate theory and analysis adequate to the task of understanding the futures we move toward.
Keynotes
Oliva Khoo (Monash)
Amy Gaeta & Beryl Pong (Centre for Drones & Culture, Cambridge)
Film Screening
WINHANGANHA, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Jazz Money
Resilience and Resistance in Journalism: An Industry Roundtable
Alex McKinnon (Deepcut News), Fahim Y. Fahim (AAP), Alan Sunderland (ABC), and Nour Hayder (GUA)
Panels featuring
Tanja Dreher, Thao Phan, Pearl Tan, Ruby Hamad, Sarah Malik, Scarlet Wilcock, Georgia van Toorn, Rachel Rowe, Justine Humphry, Seamus Byrne, Ayesha Akbar, Olga Boichak, Sonia Qadir, Jodi Brooks, Sukhmani Khorana, Ayesha Jehangir, Michael Richardson, Andrew Brooks, Charu Maithani
Program to come.