The Technological Pandemic: The Present and Future of Coming Together
Time: Saturday, February 8 2025, 10:00 am-6:00 pm (EST)
Place: CUNY Graduate Center
(with coffee, lunch, and snacks provided)
Registration Link: https://forms.gle/rvWZmNvbJVRCnoo4A
With support from: Social Practice CUNY, Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Grad Center, GC Digital Initiatives, The Futures Initiative, and Art and Science Connect CUNY
Contact: com-dns@cuhk.edu.hk
You are invited to attend a day-long workshop at the CUNY Grad Center facilitated by Nishant Shah & Alexandra Juhasz in partnership with the Digital Narratives Studio at the School of Journalism & Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
This workshop explores the technological shifts experienced during the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, profoundly altering how we come together as groups, collectives, communities, and people. The workshop aims to unpack these shifts to understand how pandemic conditions persist long after the biological pandemic has been managed.
In this third iteration, the workshop builds upon and compliments two instances held in Hong Kong at Eaton House, and in New Delhi at Khoj Studios, the workshop engages in feminist and queer speculative design and futurism to invite participants to co-create, produce, and build elements of the technological pandemic that we can collectively name and understand experiences, memories, and collective understanding of these technological shifts that have proliferated and been naturalized with and through the local experience of the global COVID19 pandemic.
In this edition of the workshop, we aim to create a space and framework for participants to acknowledge, name, and understand the technological shifts exercised through and after the pandemics. This reflective space will help us hold, grieve, map, name, and understand the changes we have collectively undergone and how they affect our practices of coming together. The workshop is a part of a larger project aimed at producing outputs to inspire, inform, and resist the technologised narratives, approaches, and frameworks that shape our understanding of social and political organisation with its roots in the technological pandemic.
Notes:
The workshop offers basic catering for the participants. We can accommodate up to 25 participants. First come, first served. Once the registration is closed, you will be informed if you made it into the invited list or the wait list. 2 days before the workshop, you will be asked to confirm attendance. Non-confirmation may result in cancellation and expanding invitation to participants on the waitlist. Attendance at Dr. Shah’s public talk about the project on Friday, February 7, 4-6 pm at the CUNY GC will be useful but is not required.
About the the Facilitators
As a Feminist, Humanist, and Technologist, Nishant Shah works at the intersections of digital technologies and society since 2003. He has been the founder of the Centre for Internet & Society, India, the Director of the Digital School at Leuhpana University, Germany, Vice-President of ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands, and a Knowledge Partner for the Dutch Human Rights Organisations Hivos and Oxfam.
Currently, as the Professor and Director of Global Media and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he explores the questions of authorship, authority, and authenticity amid evolving AI and platform technologies.
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author/editor of scholarly books on AIDS including We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (with Ted Kerr, Duke, 2022) and Really Fake (with Nishant Shah and Ganaele Langlois, Minnesota, 2021). Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy as well as the feature fake documentaries The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). She writes about her cultural and political commitments in scholarly and more public platforms including Hyperallergic, BOMB, MS, X-tra, and Lamda Literary Review.
TIME & PLACE
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Saturaday February 8 2025, 10:00 am-6:00 pm (EST)
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CUNY Grad Center