✨Join the Black Digital Humanities in the Age of Technofascism research cluster at the University of Washington for a symposium and conversation on the racialized perils of digital technologies.
From AI’s impact on ecosystems and scarce water resources to the use of surveillance technologies to suppress dissent and social movements, Black populations in the U.S. and abroad have historically been testing grounds for many of these rapid and far-reaching developments.
📅 Thursday, May 14, 4-6 PM
🎟️ Free, donations welcome! RSVP via Linktree.
Part 1: Digital Labor + Memory Work | 4- 5 PM
Inye Wokoma (Co-founder, Wa NaWari)
Sierra Parsons (Wa Na Wari, Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute)
LaShawnDa Pittman (UW)
Kwame Otu (Georgetown University)
Golden Owens (UW)
A. E. Stevenson (University of Chicago)
Part 2: Surveillance +Counter-Surveillance | 5- 6 PM
Simone Durham (Morgan State University)
Jelani Ince (UW)
Brandy Monk-Payton (Fordham University)
Christopher Paul Harris (UC Irvine)
Chrystel Oloukoï (UW)
Rebecca Bayeck (Utah State University)
#FreeProgram #AtTheHenry #FreeAdmission
Accessibility: Assisted Listening Devices (ALDs) and AI live captions will be available. For additional accessibility information, please visit our website.
⚽🌍 The world is coming to Seattle — and you can help tell the story.
The 2026 Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities invites UW undergrads to explore Seattle’s World Cup through community mapping and storytelling.
Students will: • Enroll in HUM 498 (12 credits) • Collaborate on intensive research projects • Receive a $7,500 scholarship • Present at the 2026 SIAH Symposium
📅 Apply by March 2, 2026 📲 Scan the QR code to learn more
#UW #UofWA #SIAH #WorldCup2026 #Storytelling
Humankind has already established a firm and growing presence outside the boundaries of planet Earth. It is likely that major actors are currently creating path dependencies that will determine the conditions of a long-term future, often unknowingly and unintentionally. The following decades will presumably set a space future, but what kind of future is still up for grabs? This roundtable, organized by Stephen Gardiner (Philosophy), on May 29 at 4:00 pm (HUB 214) brings together scholars and practitioners from ethics, policy, and industry to discuss humanity’s future in space from the perspective of intergenerational ethics and justice.
More info in link in bio.
Join us on May 23 at 2:30 pm (CMU 202) for a panel with Anna Preus (English), Amardeep Singh (Lehigh University), and Priya Joshi (Temple University) exploring decolonial approaches in book history and the digital humanities through projects mapping South Asia’s Adivasi communities, reading representations of cultural genocide in U.S. settler archives, and uncovering the imperial underpinnings of the Anglophone publishing industry.
More info in link in bio.
The Teaching with LLMs Hackathon provides a stretch of time where instructors can individually or collectively revise their teaching materials with respect to LLMs. Bring a laptop and materials you would like to revise. Each session will begin with an overview of guiding principles and resources. Come when you can, leave when you like! Join us on May 21 from 1:00-5:00 pm (Open Scholarship Commons, Suzzallo Library).
More info in link in bio.
In this workshop on May 21 at 11:30 am (CMU 202), Golden M. Owens will discuss how the late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century introduction and promotion of laborsaving products and technologies influenced and altered popular perceptions and articulations of domestic work and domestic workers. Examining how this work, once largely performed by Black women, came to be performed by or with the aid of labor-performing technologies, Owens connects this history of laborsaving devices to the present proliferation of artificially intelligent virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and ChatGPT.
More info in link in bio.
What lessons can be learned from the past, when movie theaters were filled with cinephiles and VHS technology created an alternative cultural space? Underscoring the margins of cinema and media studies, three scholars —Jinsoo An (University of California Berkeley), Nguyen Tan Hoang (University of California San Diego), and Ungsan Kim (University of Washington)— discuss the long-lasting legacies of the film and video cultures of the 1990s and 2000s.
Join us on May 12 at 3:30 pm (CMU 202).
More info in link in bio.
On May 8 at 4:00 pm (CMU 120), Ryan Cordell (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) will give a Digital Humanities Lecture on how historical practices, such as reprinting in historical newspapers, can offer vital interpretive purchase for theorizing the dominant text-reuse technology of our moment. From here, the talk will describe a series of experiments aimed at understanding what analytical use LLMs might offer scholars researching in large-scale historical collections, for tasks such as genre classification, textual segmentation, or topic identification.
More info in link in bio.
On May 8 at 11:30 am (CMU 202), Sawad Hussain will share, for the first time, the numbers of copies her translations from Arabic have sold by presenting an analysis of factors that might have led to some triumphing and others flopping. She will offer marketing tips as well as pointers on how to protect yourself as a translator when negotiating contracts (especially regarding the translator’s expected involvement in marketing activities).
More info in link in bio.
The 2025 translator-in-residence, Sawad Hussain, will give a talk on how she has courted authors and editors, and then played guardian and censor in order to bring literary works from Arabic into English. She will discuss the roles and responsibilities a translator assumes when bringing a text from less commonly translated languages into diverse commercial Anglophone arenas. Join us on May 6 at 4:30 pm (HUB 332).
More info in link in bio.
By focusing on software and countermaps primarily designed for political action with social, environmental, and land justice movements, this conference brings together organizers, researchers, educators, and technologists questioning the interdependencies between digital infrastructures, software code, and emancipatory spatial futures.
Join us on May 1 at 10:00 am (Petersen Room, Allen Library)
More info in link in bio.
On April 28 at 4:00 pm (CMU 202), Iván Chaar López (University of Texas, Austin) will explore the making of a technopolitical regime designed to make and manage US borders. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialized violence.
More info in link in bio.
