PUBLICATION: Kevin Witzenberger's research on EdTech publishes in leading journal

Kevin Witzenberger’s recent paper “Why EdTech is always right: students, data and machines in pre-emptive configurations” in collaboration with Prof. Kalervo Gulson is published in Taylor & Francis journal. The paper looks at the use of pre-emptive methods within education.

Pre-emption describes a system of automated knowledge creation and intervention that steers the present towards a desirable future, by building on knowledge derived from the past. Folding together temporalities makes it impossible to disprove pre-emption. It is increasingly featured within EdTech, introducing new forms of automated governance into education. This paper examines how students and EdTech come together to make pre-emption possible, not as a single event but as a normalised governance instrument. For this, we introduce Lucy Suchman’s idea of configuration to examine pre-emptive EdTech. The paper presents three openings into the configuration of students and pre-emptive EdTech. These include observations from an EdTech trade show; interviews with insiders of technology companies; and analysis of accepted papers to a learning analytics conference. We conclude the data used at the heart of pre-emptive EdTech seeks to exclude students and configures them as absent. Yet, its interventions have material consequences.

URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2021.1913181

Kevin Witzenberger is a Scientia PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His dissertation investigates forms of automated governance within education. Kevin is interested to understand the shifting power relations as tools of automated governance transform into fully automated technical systems. He also received the HDR Research Output Award for publishing in a Q1 journal from the faculty for this article.

Kevin can be reached at @KevinWtz

ONLINE SYMPOSIUM: IMAGES OF MACHINE LEARNING (June 30 & July 1, 2021)

Large image collections – from Sloan Sky Survey through to ImageNet – and their traversals through and by datasets, algorithmic functions and predictive models have become the operative ‘matter’ of contemporary AI. At the same time, machine learning assemblages have come to re-organise seeing itself as comprising processes of feature detection, convolutional accumulation of image/pixel building blocks and latent spaces.  How have artists, cultural producers and critical AI scholars engaged with the ways in which images and machine learning have come to re-configure each other? What might redeployments of image-oriented machine-learning techniques tell us about the less than predictable sensibilities of AI’s visuality? This online symposium gathers artists and producers, media and STS thinkers together to think about and discuss such issues, collectively questioning how we might come to differently parse images of machine learning.

Organised by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) and Adrian MacKenzie (Australian National University, Canberra Australia) and supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme.

Hosted by Media Futures Hub, UNSW.

Program

Wednesday, June 30 2021, 3-6pm AEST

Keynote by Anna Ridler, artist and researcher

Automated Dreaming: Using AI in a Creative Practise

Panel 1: Images and Machine Learning Practices: critical interventions in art and curation

Katrina Sluis, Associate Professor, Head of Photography and Media Arts, Australian National University

Kynan Tan, Independent artist and postdoctoral fellow and, ARCDP, Re-Imaging the Empirical, National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales

Monica Monin, Lecturer, University of Technology, Sydney

Thursday, July 1 2021, 3-6:30pm AEST

Keynote by Fabian Offert, Assistant Professor, History and Theory of Digital Humanities, UC Santa Barbara 

Latent Deep Space: GANs between Art and Science

Panel 2: Images, machine learning and practices of knowledge-production

Mitchell Whitelaw, Professor, Design, Australian National University

Maya Indira Ganesh, writer and researcher, Bergruen Institute Fellow, Leuphana University, Lüneburg

Gabriel Pereira, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University

Free registration: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/images-of-machine-learning-online-symposium-tickets-156848266387

Website: https://imagesofml.ai/

WORKSHOP: Infrastructural Inequalities: Building Research Cultures and Infrastructures of Study (17 May 2021)

Image: Snack Syndicate, Infrastructural Inequalities exhibition, Artspace, 2018. Photograph: Jacquie Manning.

Interdisciplinary research, public engagement, impact, and social collaboration are key features of contemporary university discourse. Yet achieving such outcomes can be difficult for individual academic workers, in part because of what is institutionally recognised, required, and rewarded – by grants assessors, hiring and promotion committees, media units, and so on. Slow scholarship, a politics of care, and scholactivism are all ways of framing modes of academic labour that contrast with the neoliberal demands of endless production of a generic high quality, yet it is not always clear how to action such approaches, including from positions of insecure work. The dissection of academic research from teaching, the branding demands of corporate universities, and the institutional anticipation of shifting metrics tied to funding can all stand in the way.

This workshop uses Infrastructural Inequalities as one among many approaches to collaboration aimed at public intellectual culture. For us, it is an attempt to build a social infrastructure for critical thinking and public engagement: how to generate projects that enliven such principles in ways that are meaningful, ethical, pleasurable, and practically possible. Describing the Infrastructural Inequalities project, the workshop will reflect on why we might collaborate, with whom, and the ethics and challenges of doing so. It introduces the forms that collaboration can take – such as reading groups, co-authorship, exhibitions and public programs, organising, independent publishing – and asks participants to share experiences and explore techniques for pursuing different forms.

This workshop is aimed at higher degree research students and early career researchers with an interest in thinking about various forms of academic production. Led by Andrew Brooks, Liam Grealy, Astrid Lorange, and Tess Lea its success will depend on the thoughtful engagement of all participants, in relation to past projects, present difficulties, and future aspirations. Participation for the workshop on the afternoon of Monday 17 May will be in-person and capped.

If you are interested, please submit 300-500 words on:

• What do you research?

• What are the infrastructures that your research engages with and/or depends on?

• What are the impediments to your desired project or approach?

• What aspect(s) of collaboration would you like this workshop to consider and why?

Submissions should be made to a.brooks@unsw.edu.au by 5pm Monday 26 April. 

PUBLIC PROGRAM: Infrastructural Inequalities: Resistant Media and Abolitionist Futures (14 + 17 may 2021)

            Credit: Tim Gregory, Asylum Seekers Searched on Christmas Island (2014), Cotton on linen, 60x60cm.

What is abolition a call for? And how does it relate to the question of infrastructure? Abolition moves beyond calls to simply reform prisons and policing, positing that an end to structural racism and state violence requires upending the political, economic, and social conditions that produce them. A crucial part of the revolutionary agenda of abolition is to intervene in the reproduction of existing inequalities and to build material infrastructures and networks of care that support people’s needs before they find themselves in precarious situations. Abolition seeks the transformation of the world, but it is not content to wait for a world-historical revolutionary rupture. It is also a set of practices that intervene in existing inequalities by building and organising alternative social infrastructures that facilitate and gesture to ways of living outside the racial capital relation.

This public program, facilitated by Infrastructural Inequalities, follows the publication of the Infrastructural Inequalities Journal: Policing, Crisis, Abolition, a special issue focused on carceral infrastructures and the struggle to abolish them. Bringing together speakers whose research, activism, and creative practice converge on the problem of carcerality and the hopefulness of abolition, the program will comprise two panels. The first will focus on abolition as a critical practice and as a mode of organizing; the second will focus on resistant media and the possibilities of storytelling. Both panels will be livestreamed on YouTube.

1. Critiquing the Carceral State, Organising Abolitionist Futures

            Friday May 14

            11:30 – 13:00am (AEST)

            Streaming live through YouTube

            Featuring: Tabitha Lean, Debbie Kilroy, Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian

2. Resistant Media and Abolitionist Storytelling

Monday May 17

10:00 – 11:30am (AEST)

Streaming live through YouTube

Featuring: Alison Whittaker with Astrid Lorange; Johanna Bell and Rocket Bretherton with Liam Grealy

Register here

CAMRA 2021: Community and Alternative Media Research in Australia

CAMRA 2021 online workshop
Friday 26 February 2021 9.30am – 5pm (AEDT) 

Registrations are now open for the online workshop CAMRA 2021: a snapshot of community and alternative media research in Australia 

This online workshop will showcase, connect and encourage research on community and alternative media in Australia 

Topics include: the emotional labour of minorities in community media; Indigenous Storywork; community media and the politics of listening; climate change communication; radical advocacy journalism; community media destinations; refugee media; community development in the Pacific; local significance in community radio; music and community radio and more.  

Presenters include: Heather Anderson (Griffith), Charlotte Bedford (Adelaide), John Budarick (Adelaide), Tanja Dreher (UNSW), Kerrie Foxwell-Norton, Anne Leitch, Bridget Backhaus (Griffith), Nicola Joseph (UNSW), Diana Kreemers (UNSW), Rochelle Lade (Swinburne), Michelle O’Connor (CSU), Poppy de Souza (UNSW), Christina Spurgeon (QUT), John Tebbutt (RMIT), Verena Thomas (QUT), and more to be confirmed.  

A full, detailed Program will be available shortly 

To register for CAMRA2021, please click here:  CAMRA 2021: a snapshot of community and alternative media research in Australia, Hosted online, 26th of February | Humanitix 

Community and Alternative Media Research Australia (CAMRA) is an informal network of researchers and practitioners working in academia and in media, with a focus on research, advocacy and activism for community and alternative media in Australia.  

For further information on CAMRA, or to join the low volume email list, please email: CAMRA2021@groups.griffith.edu.au  

CAMRA 2021 is convened by Tanja Dreher (Media Futures Hub, UNSW), Heather Anderson and Bridget Backhaus (Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University)  

MEDIA, RACE, VIOLENCE #5: BECOMING HUMAN (I)

The Media, Race, Violence Reading Group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. The group will engage with work from the fields of media studies, critical race theory, Indigenous studies, anti- and de-colonial theory, Black studies, cultural studies, and more.

#5: Becoming Human (I)

When: Friday December 11, 9-10:30am (and recurring the second Friday of every month)

Where: Zoom

This session will mark the first of a series of meetings concerned with interrogating the human and its relation to the long history of racial violence that continues to inform our lives. We will ask: How does the figure of the human become synonymous with the over-represented Western colonial construct, ‘Man’? How does the construction of ‘Man’ relate to racialising assemblages that bare certain nonwhite subjects from the category of human? How does technology relate to this particular construction of ‘Man’ and that which is presumed to be its opposite – Black Indigenous subjects, animals, machines. Sylvia Wynter stated that the object of her inquiry was not simply the human but rather the genres of the human. ‘Our struggle as Black women has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the human of “Man.”’ Wynter argues that the colonial world-making project imposed genre-specific truths on the world that have become solidified through the repetition of representations. Framing the human in terms of genre highlights its constructedness and invites us to work toward the abolition of ‘Man’ by simultaneously looking into the past and into the future. This interrogation of the human and its expression as ‘Man’ seeks to both question the autopoetic nature of racialisation and naturalisation of racism as commonsense, as well as seeking to articulate alternate conceptions of humanity grounded in irreducible difference. 

 This session will focus on a long essay by Sylvia Wynter that offers a history of the production of Man-as-human with a view to unsettling what she refers to as the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom. Continuing with our interest in speculative thought, we will also read an essay by Maddee Clark that considers both the reproduction of dehumanising, extinction narratives in science fiction and the possibilities of the genre for articulating Indingeous futurity.  Mad Professor’s ‘Obeah Power’ offers us a way of leaping from the miserable present into a different future and models the possibility of a different relationship between technology and race. The further readings by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Alexander Weheliye (thanks for this suggestion Samira) offer vital context for the critiques of humanism articulated in Black studies and expand on Wynter’s thought. Future sessions will continue this thematic with a specific focus on the relationship between race, humanity, technology, technics, and machines, including readings from Vora and Atanasoski’s Surrogate Humanity

Themes/Objects: ‘Man’, pre-humanism, post-humanism, dehumanisation, animalisation, anti-Blackness, liberalism, futurity, automation, technology

 Readings for Discussion:

Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation––An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3/3 (2003): p. 257-337

Maddee Clark, ‘Coded Devices’, Next Wave Worm Hole, 2016

Mad Professor, ‘Obeah Power’ (1985)

Further Reading:

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, One Becoming Human: An Introduction, in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World(New York: New York University Press, 2020), p. 1-44.

Alexander Weheliye, ‘Blackness: The Human’, in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)

Extra treat:

David Scott (with Sylvia Wynter), ‘The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter’, Small Axe 4/2 (2000): 119-207.

Please contact Andrew Brooks for links to readings and to the Zoom discussion.

DRONE CULTURES SYMPOSIUM, 8-10 DECEMBER 2020

This three-day symposium brings together academics, artists and researchers to explore drone cultures from multiple perspectives and practices with the aim of generating dialogue across disciplinary boundaries to better understand the diversity of drones and drone cultures. How has drone vision influenced contemporary visual culture? How do practices, aesthetics, techniques and technologies move back and forth between military and non-military contexts? How have artists, writers and filmmakers critiqued, adopted and innovated drone technologies? How have drones changed how power is exercised and experienced? What cultures have sprung up around drones in conservation, activism, amateur photography and other contexts? How are drones and other remote sensing systems shaping and shaped by our desires and imaginaries? What does the proliferation of drones mean for the future of the human?

KEYNOTE: Caren Kaplan, UC Davis

PLENARY: Alex Edney-Browne, Melbourne

ARTISTS & ACADEMICS: Christine Agius (Swinburne), Michele Barker (UNSW), David Beesley (RMIT), Olga Boichak (USyd), Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox (Curtin), David Chesworth (RMIT), Sarah Eleazar (UT Austin), Adam Fish (UNSW), Jack Faber (Uniarts Helsinki), Edgar Gómez Cruz (UNSW), Jennifer Smith-Mayo (Maine), Mitch Goodwin (Melbourne), Kathrin Maurer (Southern Denmark), Anna Munster (UNSW), Tom Sear (UNSW Canberra), Kate Richards (WSU), James Rogers (Southern Denmark), Simon M. Taylor (UNSW), Yanai Toister (Tel Aviv), Madelene Veber (UNSW), Vaughan Wozniak-O'Connor (UNSW), Anne Wilson (Deakin), Andrew Yip (Coventry)

REGISTER via Eventbrite

PROGRAM AND OTHER INFO at the Drone Cultures website.

DRONE FUTURES #6: MAHWISH CHISHTY, 26 NOVEMBER 2020

A virtual public seminar on “Cultural Aesthetics + Borders” with artist Mahwish Chishty.

Mahwish Chishty’s artistic research combines her interest in Pakistani traditional folk art/culture and contemporary politics as it relates to US/Pakistan relations. This talk will cover the inspiration and motivation behind the projects that Chishy has been working on since 2011, including: Drone Art series, Wagah Border, Basant: Let’s Go Fly a Kite and Danyore. Chishty will share paintings, installations and collaborative projects as part of this discussion.

Mahwish Chishty is a multimedia artist who initially trained as a miniature painter in Pakistan. Her work combines traditional artistic practice with her interest in contemporary politics, particularly the relationship between the US and Pakistan. In 2017, Chishty was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in the same year she held a solo exhibition of her drone art at the Imperial War Museum, London. Her 2018 installation, Naming the Dead, was shortlisted for the ArtPrize. She is currently Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Image: X-47B (2012)

When: Thursday November 26, 10 - 11.30am (AEDT)

Where: YouTube Live

REGISTER HERE

DRONE FUTURES #5: THOMAS STUBBLEFIELD, 4 November 2020

A virtual public seminar on “The Ornithology of Drone Art” with Thomas Stubblefield (UMass Dartmouth).

As a result of the historical reliance of war upon the animal body, modern military technologies such as the drone are haunted by a lingering zoological presence. Of the nonhuman animals that occupy the modern drone perhaps none are as influential as birds. Not only do these creatures offer a means of materializing an enduring connection between flight and surveillance that had occupied the imaginary for centuries, but so too do they introduce an aerial proxy by which a thoroughly modern asymmetry of warfare would come into being. This presentation will discuss the ways in which the video Seagulls (2013) and the #NotABugSplat installation (2014) engage this residual animal presence in order to both excavate alternate histories of the drone and reimagine its practices of targeting.

Thomas Stubblefield is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Media Studies and Interim Associate Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. In 2015, his book, 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (Indiana University Press), was awarded the Rollins Prize. His most recent book, Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium (2020), was published by the University of California Press. His essay: “Towards a History of the Medial Regime: Force and the Post-Industrial Female Body” appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of Cultural Critique (University of Minnesota Press).

When: Wednesday November 4, 10 - 11.30am (AEDT)

Where: YouTube Live

REGISTER HERE

MEDIA, RACE, VIOLENCE #4: AFTERLIVES, GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS

The Media, Race, Violence Reading Group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. The group will engage with work from the fields of media studies, critical race theory, Indigenous studies, anti- and de-colonial theory, Black studies, cultural studies, and more.

#4: Afterlives, Ghosts, Hauntings

When: Friday November 13, 9-10:30am (and recurring the second Friday of every month)

Where: Zoom

The readings for this session consider the afterlives of slavery and colonisation, tracking the way that the histories of racial ascription continue to haunt the present. The sociologist Avery Gordon described the concept of haunting as ‘one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security).’ This session will focus on the temporalities of racialising practices and the ways in which unresolved or repressed social violence (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) repeatedly and cyclically makes itself known. The readings consider how the afterlives of race are mediated and how the reproduction of racial regimes might be interrupted.

Tuck and Ree offer a glossary of terms related to the violence of colonialism and the various trauma it produces; the Karrabing Film Collective offer as a dystopian vision of the near future that considers the history of the forced removal of Aboriginal children and shows us how the past is bound up with the present; Ruha Benjamin considers the afterlives of slavery in relation to caraceral systems in the US and posits kinship as a way of intervening in the reproducing of racial injustice; and Legacy Russell develops the glitch and the void as generative figures for moving beyond the body defined by structures of domination such as the gender binary and race. Further readings provide additional context for thinking through the climate of anti-Blackness and further developing the concept of haunting.

 Themes/Objects: archives, racial legacies, afterlives of slavery and colonisation, temporality, reproduction, affective climates, incarceration, hauntings, glitches, agency

Readings for Discussion:

• Eve Tuck and C. Ree, ‘A Glossary of Haunting’, in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis (Routledge, 2013), pp. 639-658

• Karrabing Film Collective (film), The Mermaids, or Aiden In Wonderland (2018)

• Ruha Benjamin, ‘Black AfterLives Matter’, Boston Review, July 2018

• Legacy Russell, Chapter 4: ‘Glitch Ghosts’ and Chapter 6: ‘Glitch Encrypts’, from Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020)

Further Reading:

• Christina Sharpe, ‘The Weather’, The New Inquiry, July 2017

• Avery Gordon, ‘her shape and his hand’, from Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008): pp. 3-30

To join the mailing list for the reading group and receive access to copies of the texts, please contact Andrew Brooks directly.

READING GROUP: MEDIA, RACE, VIOLENCE

The Media, Race, Violence reading group meets monthly to investigates theories, methods, and practices in order to build more just futures. 

The reading group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. 

All are welcome to join.

Contact Andrew Brooks at a.brooks@unsw.edu.au to get on the mailing list.

POLITICS OF LISTENING / INFRASTRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES ROUNDTABLE

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief existing infrastructural inequalities. 

The unequal distribution of access to the resources and networks of care necessary for living has resulted in increased risk of exposure and vulnerability to death. This crisis has revealed a truth long articulated by activists and scholars: racism is a public health issue. 

In the settler colony of Australia, calls to put an end to racialised policing and Black deaths in custody have grown louder, joining global protests demand the abolition of the carceral system and assert that Black Lives Matter.

These roundtable events will consider the politics of listening in the settler colony in relation to infrastructures of law, policing, and incarceration. 

Convenor: Andrew Brooks

CONFERENCE PANEL ON NON-HUMAN VISION

Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference panel on Non-Human Vision, organized by Adam Fish, Michael Richardson, and Edgar Gomez Cruz, August 17, 2020.

SCREENING OF ADAM FISH’S FILM CRASH THEORY

Revelation Perth International Film Festival and Academic Conference, Perth, Australia, Dec. 4-5, 2020.

MEDIA FUTURES HUB WRITING GROUP: WRITING WEDNESDAYS

The Writing Wednesdays writing sessions aim to share experiences and strategies of writing up research in media studies. The sessions provide quiet, focused company for writing. 

Each Wednesday morning we meet (online) to chat, catch up and share writing goals. The conversations are focused on ongoing media research, research methods, and writing strategies. We will then sit down for two hours of focused work time. 

Convenors: Danielle Hynes & Diana Kreemers

Simon Michael Taylor

Selected Member of a year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar at University of Cambridge UK looking at 'Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power' from May 2020 to July 2021.

Elaine Jing Zhao

Deans Research Award for Best Monograph by an Early Career Researcher in the category of Academic Excellence, in recognition of the book Digital China's Informal Circuits: Platforms, Labour and Governance (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

Committee Feedback: Digital China’s Informal Circuits is a highly original and intellectually energetic work that treats an understudied topic - the imbrication of informal circuits and formal economic structures in China's digital media economy. Well written, highly engaging, and thought provoking, it tackles a subject of immense importance to the contemporary world, while holding significance well beyond its immediate topic.

Fever games: SIMON MICHAEL TAYLOR

Fever Games' a video presentation on thermal surveillance for Tony D. Sampson organised conference—A&SM#4.5 Media Virality and the Lockdown Aesthetic—University of East London, UK 16 July, 2020.

https://viralcontagion.blog/asm4-5/

IN THE MEDIA : Elaine Jing Zhao

Elaine Jing Zhao on SBS.com.au talking about TikTok's rapid development and the growing controversy surrounding the platform.

IN THE MEDIA: Tanja Dreher

Tanja Dreher spoke to The Sydney Morning Herald’s Melanie Kembrey on cancel culture controversies.