The Chair

The chair is invested in exploring the politics, histories and imaginaries that inform the future of how we envision digital technologies and infrastructures. Our present is delineated by ubiquitous computation, geopolitical conflicts, constant global displacement and accelerating environmental crises. This warrants interdisciplinary analysis that recognizes the inseparability of media technologies, hegemonic power structures and infrastructures. 

When we speak of media and technology as infrastructure, we refer to the material foundations of technology and high-tech political economies (i.e. extraction of labor, materials, or minerals) and the epistemologies (ideology, belief, and knowledges) that structure contemporary digital media. Second, and most importantly, we understand infrastructures as imaginaries of the future; imaginaries for worlds to come. In this understanding, media can be thought of as both an infrastructure and medium fostering or inhibiting diverse forms of life into the future.

Our aim is to examine historical contingencies and diagnose the present in order to contest and debate more equitable futures. As a group, we cross numerous disciplines and practices—including media studies, cultural studies & history, history of science, anthropology, design studies, black studies & black feminist theory, gender studies and queer and trans theory. By bringing together our expertise, we want to foster a more diverse media studies that encourages both empirical and speculative practices.