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 PhD 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 Poetry Editor at Agape Editions and 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’s upcoming conferences are as a participant of a panel at MLA 2021 titled “Authoritarianism and Southeast Asia”. And she will be a co-organizer and moderator of a panel at AWP 2021 titled “Asian Diasporic Poets Writing Into Mythology.”
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.
Megan will be presenting excerpts from her research at 4S 2020 and AoIR 2020.
Casidy Campbell
Casidy Campbell is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Culture with certificates in Women and Gender Studies and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Her research is focused on fullness of black girls’ personhood and seeks to understand how black girls use the same digital technologies that often efface them to assert their quotidian perspectives. She is a 2021 Community of Scholars Fellow at the Institute of Research on Women and Gender, a DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network Graduate Scholar, and current member of the Digital Inequality Lab. She formerly chaired the African American Caucus and was a co-founder of the Black Research Roundtable. Campbell was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at Emory University where she completed her B.A. in African American Studies and Sociology.
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 is co-author on the book Technoprecarious with 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 PhD 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 proliferations of far-right ideologies in these spaces.
Sarah Snyder
Sarah Snyder is a graduate from the University of Michigan with a degree in American Culture and a focus in Digital Studies. Her interests lie in the segregated spaces of digital enclosures and studying how power works through both software and hardware, specifically in the realms of race and class.
Publications
Valluri, Monica, Price-Whelan, Adrian M.; Snyder, Sarah J. “Detecting the Figure Rotation of Dark Matter Halos with Tidal Streams” Cornell University, September, 2020.
Amy Dawson-Andoh
Amy is a PhD student in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research examines Japanese to English-speaking video game localization as a liminal process. Localization is a process that a cultural product undergoes when moving from one locale to another. While sometimes used interchangeably with the term translation, localization requires far more than transferring text from one language to another. Localization also addresses cultural differences, such as the positioning of games and game genres within the wider context of a target market’s media environment.
Joseph DeLeon
Joseph DeLeon is a PhD Candidate in Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation is a history of social media before the web, spanning from public computing terminals in the early-1970s to queer zine networks in the late-1980s. His research interests include queer media studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. He holds an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and a B.A. in French and Comparative Cultures and Politics from Michigan State University.
Publications:
DeLeon, Joseph. “Nelson Sullivan’s Video Memories: YouTube Nostalgia and the Queer Archive Effect.” The Velvet Light Trap 86 (9/2020): 16–26. doi:10.7560/VLT8603. https://www.utexaspressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.7560/VLT8603.
Book chapter: “‘A Vital Human Place’ for the Counterculture: Fifth Estate and Amateur Film Culture in Detroit, 1965-1967.” In the edited volume: Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (January 2021).
Joseph presented at SCMS Chicago in March 2021. His presentation was tittled: “Making Queer Media Memories with The American Music Show,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Chicago, Illinois.
Chloe Perry
Chloe Perry is a PhD student in American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on how people learn in online forums, especially in digital spaces where participants spread racist and sexist narratives. She is broadly interested in digital studies, the digital humanities, media studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies. She holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University.
Previous projects:
Topic Modeling Subreddits
MARXdown
Hanah Stiverson
Hanah Stiverson is a PhD candidate in the department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the James A. Winn Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. Her research focuses on the mainstreaming of white nationalism, male supremacism, and militancy in the U.S. Hanah’s work traces the networks that support and spread extremist ideologies through media content on digital platforms. She is a co-author of Racist Zoombombing published by Routledge (2021).
Digital Inequality Lab 