Real and Imagined
Embodied Oppression and Activism: Dance, Agency, and Identity in Marginalized Communities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marquita De Jesus
Restrictions enforced by the Covid-19 global pandemic have created countless challenges to marginalized communities. Within the first few months of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that ethnic minorities experience higher rates of morbidity and mortality than White, non-Hispanics. The movement to reconstruct our societies and bodies in the anticipated wake of Covid-19 and the world that emerges “after" is palpable. As we uncover methods of navigating interpersonal relationships and recover from the effects of the pandemic, our bodies continue to help create and frame our experiences and the narratives we construct about ourselves and others. Our nonverbal communication patterns, beliefs about body norms, feelings of connection, and identification with our bodies are all deeply affected by our assigned membership in different social groups and the privileges associated with that membership. Through dance and embodied practices, the body is able to translate experiences into a framework that allows for the transmutation of meaning through embodied consciousness. However, existing models of activism have not been particularly attentive to the body’s importance in responding to oppression. While embodied activism is not substitute for legislative reform, there is growing research to support that dance and embodied experiences are critical agents in the reconstruction of body stories. This paper reviews dance as a public practice of embodied activism and highlights the importance of embodied therapy and historical digital dance archives in marginalized communities.
Featured Technological Affect and ‘General AI’ Imaginations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dora Kourkoulou
While humanity has surrendered, not without initial resistance, to automation of processes and workflows, the idea of ‘general AI,’ technology with the capacity to learn, create, and stand in place of human relationships in imperceptible and unpredictable ways are still met with mixed feelings of anticipation and fear, provoking contemplations on the redefinition of ‘human.’ In this context, the digital humanities can play a crucial role in the imagination and critique of such technologies, and decisively influence their development into the next stage for the decades to come. Critical Code Studies, as a field within the digital humanities, provide an intervention that can potentially highlight the gendered, racial and class ideological foundations of affective AI technology, code writing and its amplifying discrimination mechanisms, and demonstrate its imbalanced impact across populations. Based on this code-centered interpretive methodological framework, my presentation will take a ‘friendship’ chatbot, Replika AI, as a case study of neural network architecture machine-learning programming, its history and imaginations, and the multiplicity of sites that researching it can occupy. To early mythological imaginations of such affective technology and the contested territory that constitutes its training data body, the question of affect, rather than feelings or emotions, offers an emerging space of action for humanities research and activism. This is because its modern exclusion from bodies of knowledge has allowed it to thrive within underepresented in technological spaces groups, but also because its transmission and translation still constitute equally unpredictable as market-valued spaces with ambivalent practical implications.
