Lisa Nakamura
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. Lisa has been writing about digital media, race, and gender since 1994. She has written books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies. Lisa is also the founder of the Digital Inequality Lab. Visit her website to learn more about Lisa’s work.
Jasmine An
Jasmine An is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan with research interests in contemporary Asian American literatures, digital media studies, queer of color critique, and Thai diaspora studies. She is also a Poetry Editor at Agape Editions and the author of Naming the No-Name Woman (Two Sylvias Press) and Monkey Was Here (Porkbelly Press). Other creative works can be found or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review’s Boyfriend Village, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nat. Brut and Waxwing, among others. Access Jasmine’s two poems in Stirring here and her poems in Boyfriend Village: Sports Science, Food Chain, and Diagenesis.
Jasmine Ehrhardt
Jasmine is a PhD student in the American Culture department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Their research interests lie at the intersections of digital and carceral studies, with an emphasis on the digital technology sector of the prison-industrial complex.
Jasmine will have a guest appearance on an episode of Rustbelt Abolition Radio titled Crimmigration and Internationalist Abolition.
Megan Rim
Megan Rim is a PhD Candidate in Digital Studies in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is interested in race and digital technologies, algorithmic bias, infrastructure, and surveillance. Her current dissertation project examines the impact of face recognition technologies on communities of color, focusing on their reification of the “human” and the racial logics involved. She is currently a Program Assistant at UM’s Digital Studies Institute.
Cengiz Salman
Cengiz Salman (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Culture (Digital Studies) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is broadly interested in theories of race and capitalism and the relationship between unemployment, statistics, and computer systems. His dissertation research uses ethnographic methods to investigate the consequences of the state of Michigan’s use of a computer system (MiDAS) to manage unemployment insurance applications and benefits, which wrongfully accused tens of thousands of Michigan residents of committing unemployment insurance fraud. Salman is a recipient of a Fulbright IIE Award. He co-authors the book Technoprecarious with the University of Michigan’s Precarity Lab.
Peer-reviewed/Academic:
Precarity Lab. Technoprecarious. Goldsmiths Press: Cambridge, MA, 2020.
Joque, Justin and Cengiz Salman. “Automated Abstractions and Alienation.” In Infidel Mathematics: Algorithms, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism, Justin Joque. New York, NY: Verso, forthcoming.
Public Facing Publications:
Salman, Cengiz and Anna Watkins Fisher. “Nothing to Spare: What Coronavirus Reveals About the Economic Model That Shapes Our Lives.” Medium, April 8, 2020. Read here.
Cengiz will present at the Technoprecarious round table at ASA 2020 (if it happens) with Lisa Nakamura, Meryem Kamil, Iván Chaar Lopez, and Kristin Hass.
Rae Moors
Rae Moors is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. She studies the complex relationships between media storytelling, industries, technology, and politics in digital environments, especially as they intersect ideologies of nationalism, populism, race, and gender. Her current projects focus on the video game industry, tracing shifts in industry, tech, gamer culture(s), and the impact of internet distribution and sociality on the communicative and political dimensions of gaming, with an express interest in understanding the proliferation of far-right ideologies in these spaces.
Digital Inequality Lab 