Keynotes

‘TikTok, Internet Celebrity, and Small Business Cultures’     

 

ImageCrystal Abidin

CRYSTAL ABIDIN, Associate Professor, Curtin University. 

Abidin is an anthropologist and ethnographer of internet cultures, focusing especially on influencers, internet celebrity, online visibility, and social media pop cultures, mostly in the Asia Pacific region. Her most recent book, ‘Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media’ was released in 2021. The title of her keynote is: ‘TikTok, Internet Celebrity, and Small Business Cultures’. 

https://wishcrys.com/about-me/ 

This keynote is presented in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Social Research at Umeå University (DIGSUM).

‘Smart Forests and the Vegetalization of Digital Technologies’

 

ImageJennifer Gabrys

JENNIFER GABRYS, Professor of Media, Culture and Environment at Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge

Gabrys leads the Planetary Praxis research group, and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. She is the author of How to Do Things with Sensors (2019); Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016); and Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (2011). She is currently completing a book on the Citizen Sense project titled, Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle.

Her work can be found at planetarypraxis.org and jennifergabrys.net.

 
‘Envisioning a Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory and Praxis’ 

 

ImageRoopika Risam

ROOPIKA RISAM, Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English, Salem State University 

Risams research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, and digital humanities. 
Her monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, is one example of her academic endeavor to question and reposition the digital humanities.  
Among her latest publications, we find the co-edited collection The Digital Black Atlantic in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series.  
http://www.roopikarisam.com 
 

 
‘Threats to the Humanities in a Digital Moment’ 

 

ImageJohn Durham Peters

JOHN DURHAM PETERS, Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies, Yale University 

The humanities are always in crisis. That is what they do best. The nineteenth century worried the question about the fate of art in an industrial civilization in the same way that some critics worry about the fate of deep reading in the age of the internet. The humanities are always an integral part of the public sphere, and this gives them their special promise and tragedy. This talk explores some of the ways the humanities have been defined at different times and ways that our strange moment is reshaping them once again. The game is not over!

About the speaker

Durham Peters is a media historian and social theorist, and currently the Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. Among other titles he is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999) and The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015). 
https://english.yale.edu/people/tenured-and-tenure-track-faculty-professors/john-durham-peters