Time
Friday, 11/20/20 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM (Central)
Title
Migrant Steps
Abstract
The Migrant Steps Project draws inspiration from the popularity of step tracker applications and the overabundance of migrant narratives in mainstream and social media. The project mobilizes step tracking applications as the point where users come into contact with re-contextualized narratives and popular archives in order to counter alarmist, xenophobic media rhetoric about “hordes” of migrants that “flow” across borders. We aim to draw attention and incite critical reflection on the user’s practice of walking as the entry point to re-engaging with narratives about migration. By relying on the user’s walking as the point of interaction with digital narratives about migration, the project will draw attention to the physical dimension of migration and to the importance of words and concepts to making sense of social phenomena.
Bio
Kim Brillante Knight is an Associate Professor in the Critical Media Studies area in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (ATEC) at The University of Texas at Dallas, where she also serves as the ATEC Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. Her research centers on intersectional feminist engagements with digital media, including maker culture, wearables, data visualization, viral media, and transgressive utterances. She is the co-founder and ongoing project Director of Fashioning Circuits, a public Humanities project centered on craft, technology, and collectivity in research, teaching, and community partnerships. Her written work has most recently appeared in Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, and The Routledge Guide to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. Creative work and public scholarship have most recently been highlighted in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities and installed at HASTAC 2019. Her forthcoming book Fashioning Makers: Critical Making and Public Humanities is under contract with University of Iowa Press.
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez’s research and teaching mobilize media theories to critically analyze social phenomena on a global scale. His areas of specialization include transnational media, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American film and television. His first monograph, Border Tunnels: Media and the Infrastructures of the U.S.-Mexico Border, argues for underground tunnels as media figures that reimagine the stakes of border-making practices. His current initiative, Platforming Migration, consists of a series of multimodal projects that critically examine how emerging media potentiate and restrict affective forms of engaging across transnational difference. he has published in the journals Feminist Media Histories, Television & New Media, Film Quarterly, Flow, Jump Cut, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
http://kimknight.com https://llamas-rodriguez.com/ http://fashioningcircuits.com