CARGC & C3 Postdoc Colloquium

This event will be accessible to virtual audience. Please register to receive Zoom webinar details.

Presenter: Sandeep Mertia, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication and Center on Digital Culture and Society

Abstract: In most of the world, the state is the biggest builder and/or broker of digital futures. The Indian government’s ‘Startup India’ program, which was launched in 2016, now has 1,20,000+ registered start-ups; many of them also supported by allied initiatives of state governments across small cities. Based on over two years of ethnographic and archival research, my work explores how futuristic narratives of digital capitalism are re-assembled at a human scale in postcolonial and global South contexts.

In this presentation, I focus on digital public infrastructures that enable the state and start-ups to interface with each other and with growing collectives of smartphone users to cultivate data and aspirational subjectivity as raw materials for future-making. Thinking through the many gaps between the grand visions of these infrastructures and their materially patchy and economically loss-making lives in practice, I argue for a critical interfacial understanding of data, value, and power in imaginaries of global and planetary-scale computing.

Presenter: Matt Parker, Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow

Abstract: This presentation offers an introduction to my book project Wavefield~Fieldwork: How landscapes become stories of technology. My work reveals the histories of technology embedded within the geographical and cultural terrains of the present by exploring the curious lives of electromagnetic waves, subsea telecommunication cables, castaways, piezoelectricity, 5G, mass bird mortalities, wellness crystals, and sound baths.

Wavefield~Fieldwork explores fieldwork as an artistic research practice that considers the complexities of planetary scale communication technologies within culturally specific ecologies. It offers a careful reminder that to imagine technological landscapes of the future, we must first be able to tell stories of those landscapes’ past.

Presenter: Arthur Wang, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Abstract: This presentation examines biographical media by and about African American space scientists as an alternative to two longstanding visions of race in the cosmos: a progressive model of outer space as utopian departure from earthly oppression and a cyclical model of outer space as defamiliarized recapitulation of historical violence and inequality. Across memoirs, documentaries, profiles, and interviews of Black astronauts and astrophysicists, this talk elaborates a common mode of ironic speculation that draws as much from commentary and criticism in the Black press as it does from Black science fiction.

This work also advances a broader study of the scientific biography’s negotiation between an ideal of scientific impersonality and a hunger for scientists’ life stories in academic and popular cultures. While biographer Ira B. Nadel has suggested that the genre’s appeal relies on a formally conservative insistence on the "coherence of life and comprehensibility of experience," this collection of biographical media instead frames scientific lives through dissonant juxtapositions between Afrofuturist wonder and the earthly politics of stargazing while Black.

Presenter: Zehra Husain, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

Abstract: This presentation explores the circulating images of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali in mainstream news media and in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood in Pakistan’s commercial hub, Karachi. It shows the different scales on which Muhammad Ali’s image operates, beginning with the very personal, where people gain prestige and fashion themselves as local, notable figures of Afro-Baluch descent through their proximity with Ali. Muhammad Ali as an icon also works on a wider, national scale, in Pakistan promoting a “soft diplomacy,” and containing both religious value as a Muslim and secular value as an athlete. By exploring the ways in which Ali appears in the mainstream media, the presentation argues that Muhammad Ali’s status as icon entails a contingent excess. Every new appearance and iteration of Muhammad Ali pulls his image into a new direction. Instead of mere repetition, an icon contains the potential for transformation, as it is drawn into both macro (national) and micro (personal) projects of self-fashioning.

This event is part of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication (Annenberg C3) co-sponsored event series. For more details, please visit https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/events/cargc-c3-postdoc-colloquium.

Host or Publisher CARGC