The UCHRI Working Group is hosting a symposium on “War, Security, and Digital Media” on the weekend of October 14-15 to be held in the Hart Hall Conference Room 3201 on Saturday the 14th and in ModLab in 234 Cruess Hall on Sunday the 15th. Lunch will be provided on both days.

This two-day symposium, co-sponsored by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the UC Davis Science and Technology Studies program, ModLab, and the Mellon Initiative in Digital Cultures, will bring together graduate students and faculty from across the UC system to critically investigate the interrelations of war, security, and digital technologies. Across these forms of knowledge production and circulation, we hope this symposium will begin to analyze how contemporary instantiations of violence and targeting are manifesting domestically and globally. Our approach will broadly conceptualize the mediations of warfare and security as dynamic, contingent processes that occur between vectors such as institutions, topographies, architectures, and bodies. Consequently, our multifaceted approach and array of community and campus engagements will strive to address the corporeal, affective, political, and spatial ramifications of these unfolding enactments. We will also think about digital technologies that are simultaneously deployed as weapons of militarization and surveillance, and as instruments of tactical resistance and social critique.

In service of these goals, we have brought together a range of academics, thinkers, doers, activists, and artists to engage in a series of interdisciplinary events, from tinkering with digital technologies with ModLab, to playing with and creating robust theoretical concepts during a graduate student writing session. We hope this symposium will put pressure on the often strict boundaries drawn between activism and academic work, while simultaneously opening up space for those across disciplines to engage one another in ways that are often foreclosed within the university system.