Join us for the LGBTQ+ VR Museum Open House hosted by the Digital Studies Institute and the Just XR Futures Lab from Oct. 7 through Oct. 11, 2024. The LGBTQ+ VR Museum was created by DiVRse Technologies, a world-leading immersive studio that produces ground-breaking digital experiences using VR and XR technologies. Disrupting historical gatekeeping and […]

Abstract: Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, “going viral” had nonetheless become commonplace—the epidemiological metaphor characterizing an increasingly-familiar trajectory of explosive circulation, remix, and reportage expanding from individual nodes of audiovisual content online. This presentation briefly historicizes and contextualizes the contagious concept, before suggesting how “virality”—as aesthetic repertoire, as popular narrative, as social logic made […]

Join ESC affiliates and their guests for our Fall mixer at the Elks. We will assemble care packages for student researchers in computing and information who are under attack. Materials will be provided. Free parking in rear. Download the digital flyer here. RSVP Required: Click here to RSVP Formed in 1922 during racial segregation, the […]

November's election brings with it unprecedented disinformation technologies, from new uses of social media platforms to generative AI. Join our panel of experts to discuss how our institutions, platforms, and politicians are both combating and enabling this threat to democracy. Panel discussion to be followed by an interactive Q&A with the viewers. A conversation with Ceren Budak, […]

Also streamed online via Zoom during the event. Abstract This talk examines the combination of policies, practices, and algorithms of suspicion that control workers’ access to wages and work on digital labor platforms. I show how “fraud” acts as a quasi-legal category that legitimizes and protects platform operators’ unilateral decisions to fire workers. This case […]

Molly Soda is a NYC-based artist, designer, writer, and educator. Her distinctly post-internet creative practice bridges the worlds of performance art and Internet art, often drawing from her own experience as an Incredibly-Online individual as well as from a rich archive of digital artifacts accumulated over the past two decades. Her work spans a variety […]

In this presentation, Erin McElroy will discuss Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, just published with Duke University Press with Matt Bui. The book maps out processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and also looks at […]

Abstract: Emotion AI, increasingly used in mundane (e.g., entertainment) to high-stakes (e.g., education, healthcare, workplace) contexts, refers to technologies that claim to algorithmically recognize, detect, predict, and infer emotions, emotional states, moods, and even mental health status using a wide range of input data. While emotion AI is critiqued for associated scientific validity, bias, and […]

A conversation with UMSI Assistant Professor of Information Oliver L. Haimson, author of Trans Technologies (MIT Press), hosted by UMSI Professor Kishonna Gray, on how technology creates new possibilities for transgender people, and how trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology. Book signing and reception to follow. Free book copies for the first […]

On March 13-14, 2025, STS is hosting a 25th Anniversary Conference featuring presentations from graduate student alumni and former and current UM STS faculty members. STS program envisions this as an academic family reunion—a chance to share a meal with old friends, meet new colleagues, reflect on past accomplishments, and discover what’s new in the […]