Standing Session

Film and Media Studies / Cultural Studies

Jon Heggestad (Davidson College)
johe@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Sara Santos (Stony Brook University)
sara@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This Digital Studies session will explore how digital technologies shape human life, culture, the environment, and academia, with particular attention to the power structures that govern their design, use, and impact. We invite scholars, artists, and writers to contribute work that engages critically and creatively with digital culture across fields ranging from new media to digital identity, from data surveillance to digital humanities. We are especially interested in work that takes an interdisciplinary approach.

The Digital Studies session examines how digital technologies shape human life, culture, the environment, and academia. The area remains interested in a broad range of work at the intersection of the humanities, the arts, and digital culture. However, in line with this year’s conference theme, we are particularly interested in the power structures that shape how technologies are used, by whom, and to what ends. Who is included in the design and implementation of digital technologies, and who is left out? Who benefits, and who pays the greatest costs?

This session invites scholars, artists, and writers to present on a wide range of topics related to Digital Studies, including but not limited to: media and technology, digital storytelling and data visualization, digital identity, algorithmic culture, data surveillance and ethics, video games, the history and theory of new media, game design, electronic literature, locative media, user interfaces, interface aesthetics, the rhetoric of new media, cybernetics and cybercultures, virtual communities and social media, the psychosocial impact of digital media, historical and theoretical approaches to electronic media, queering digital culture, digital humanities and online archives, artificial intelligence and LLMs, cyberfeminism and posthumanism, and the intersections of literature and data.

We especially encourage work that pushes disciplinary boundaries and engages critically and creatively with the evolving landscape of digital life.