Symposia
Our symposia series looks to develop an account of postdigital intimacies in a time when divisions between public and private life have been eroded. It draws together speakers whose vital research addresses this from different dimensions, with important implications for how we make sense of relationalities.
Intimate Digital Feminist Activism
DATE TBCPostdigital intimacies perform a folding public and private, shaping new ways of collectivising. What are the activist potentials of postdigital intimacies?
In the fourth seminar in the Postdigital Intimacies network, we explore the networked relationalities of digital feminist activism. Digital feminist activism is central to the struggles over feminism: hashtag, popular, and neoliberal, but also radical and creative, forming new lines of feminist inquiry and reprising old ones. Central to these new lines of feminist practice has been an intimate visibility of rape culture, sexual and racial harassment, and everyday misogyny.
This seminar will explore the merging of public and private in acts of feminist resistance. The speakers will reflect on how we can represent, experience and act in the world differently, through queer, critical race and feminist theory. Their work reflects the way creative practice also locates the blurring of public and private as both present, future and past when the personal is (and always has been) political.
Image credit: @scottwebb on unsplash.com
Today, the body’s intimate functions, including sleep, sex, menstruation, pregnancy and giving birth, and our mental health and wellbeing, can be digitized. Relationalities are forged, including our more-than-human intimacies with technology.
This symposium will explore how the conjoining of data, health and the experience of our bodies shapes how we feel, including the new “moral-intimate-economic” fantasies incorporated into self-monitoring, tracking and online digital health technologies. Speakers will share research that demonstrates the extended postdigital body, as well as how these relationalities reproduce social inequalities, limiting what the body can do and how we feel connected to others.
Image credit: @korpa on unsplah.com
(Post)digital Data and Health
EVENT CLOSED
Visual Ethics, Networked Selves
EVENT CLOSEDPostdigital intimacies are ephemeral, often visual, sometimes implicated in vulnerabilities, tensions and risks. Research on spaces between public and private raise ethical issues, creating fresh challenges for researchers.
In this symposium, the ethics and use of ethical methodologies for studying networked selves will be explored. Our speakers borrow from posthumanist, feminist and social justice approaches to research. Their contributions will explore how we create knowledge in the context of postdigital intimacies above and beyond traditional ethics. Their methodological perspectives touch on issues connected to selfies and intimate visual social media images, participatory human-technology methods, and visualising affect.
The next event will be held on Tuesday 29th June 3-5pm BST.
Image credit: @elleflorio on unsplash.com
Digital culture has regularly been understood as facilitating new intimate connections. But, there is a growing recognition that we should pay attention to moments where intimacy is repudiated, ruptures, breaks down, or appears to fail, or when intimacy produces nuanced feelings of hostility, anger or boredom.
In the first symposium, we draw attention to such failure. Our speakers’ highlight the way such failure is located in power structures, structured by gender, race and sexual identity. Their talks will explore new forms of extremism forged through the connective spread and contagion of online networks, as well as injury and repair.
Image credit: @villxsmil on unsplash.com
