[Commlist] Digital Delights & Disturbances Spring ‘23– Lecture series

**Digital Delights & Disturbances Spring ‘23**– Lecture series

Presented by: *JCU Media and Communications* speaker series

_Events will be on campus (at John Cabot University, Rome) and live 
streamed on YT_

Big data, artificial intelligences, algorithmic prediction: are these 
the solutions to the problems affecting our unstable societies or more 
sophisticated forms of social control and compliance to the powers that 
be? Is there any way out from the digital neoliberal realism within 
which we live? Are there ways to imagine data that are not extractive 
and abusive, A.I.s that are relational and not intrusive, or a domain of 
the digital that is not just limited to the ‘social’ of social media?

*2^nd of February 2023 – 6.30pm CET*

*Digital Politics and the Politics of Disengagement: social justice, 
data justice, environmental justice*

Adi Kuntsman

The talk will focus on the recently published co-authored book, 
“Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: in search of the Opt-Out Button” 
(Westminster University Press), and address a number of topics which 
push the boundaries of what we think of as the field of digital 
politics. The talk will address these so through the lens of digital 
reduction and digital disengagement. Firstly, it will discuss the 
ordinary violence of digital public services and automated decision 
making which increase the hold of the state on the poor and the 
racialised, while leaving little room to refuse the digital; secondly, 
it will explore the growth in everyday datafication from the perspective 
of digital justice; and finally, the talk will turn to global 
environmental harms of digital communication and discuss promises and 
limitations of environmentally driven digital disengagement. Weaving 
together a number of disciplinary and conceptual frameworks, the talk 
will show that the conceptual and political framework of digital 
disengagement is a powerful tool to imagine a different (digital) future.

*9^th of February 2023 – 6.30 pm CET*

*Female Biophilia as inclusive innovation*

Giulia Tomasello

Female Biophilia wants to explore how the intersection of science and 
technology is uniquely situated to address womxn’s intimate care and 
contribute to revolutionize practices within bodies. An opportunity to 
question how we are changing the way we interpret and question the 
world, no matter if about biological or social issues and it suggests 
that it’s time to choose how we want technology to enter all aspects of 
our lives.

*5^th of April 2023 – 6.30 pm CET*

*The Trillion Dollar platform in your pocket?*

Marc Coté and Jennifer Pybus

The average person has over 40 different applications on their mobile 
device and each app has about 18 different third parties or Software 
Development Kits (SDKs)  that harvest and share our data. Not 
surprisingly, Google and Facebook feature in the majority of apps, 
though users have little access to who is accessing our data, why, or 
how it is supercharging their profits. The lecture will discuss how 
platform monopolisation is spreading through mobile apps, and open up 
SDKs to show how digital giants are controlling your data.

*26^th of April 2023 – 6.30 pm CET (on Zoom)*

**

*White Sight. Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (Book launch) *

**

Nicholas Mirzoeff

White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by 
visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues 
that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that 
white sight was not always common practice, we can devise better ways to 
dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff 
connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and 
the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power 
to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with 
ever-expanding surveillance technologies to show that white sight 
creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not 
appear as white are under constant threat of violence. Analyzing recent 
events like the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of 
George Floyd and the Central Park birdwatching incident, Mirzoeff 
suggests that we are experiencing a general crisis of white supremacy 
that presents both opportunities for and threats to social justice. If 
we do not seize this moment to dismantle white sight, then white 
supremacy might surge back stronger than ever. To that end, he 
highlights activist interventions to strike the power of the white 
heteropatriarchal gaze.

*
*

*Please rsvp*at (ddd /at/ johncabot.edu) to reserve your seat or receive the 
link for the live streaming.


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