Events

The cardboard box has long been regarded as the imaginative plaything par excellence. In 2005, the box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Toy Industry Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of play in Rochester, NY—institutionalizing a decades-old association between cardboard and children’s creative play. On the page and onscreen, in museum galleries, schools, toy aisles, and at home, today cardboard occupies a privileged position within children’s material culture where the promises of environmental and STEAM education coalesce.…

Sasha Crawford-Holland Media Studies, Vanderbilt University In 2008, the Inupiaq community of Kivalina filed a lawsuit against the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the United States, seeking damages for the rising temperatures destroying their island home. After years of litigation, courts dismissed Kivalina’s claims on evidentiary grounds: their injuries were not “traceable” to the defendants’ actions. Although irrefutable scientific research links emissions to heat to harm, plaintiffs could not conclusively attribute specific impacts to discrete perpetrators. Heat’s nebulous, atmospheric mediation…

Pujita Guha, PhD First Place, Graduate Student Writing Award, Media, Science, and Technology SIG Counting Carbon in the Forest In the late 2000s, AIPP (Asia’s Indigenous People’s Pact), an Indigenous NGO body operating across south and southeast Asia, produced a series of training manuals, excel sheets and workshop materials, to train Indigenous activists and organizers on carbon trading and climate change. I call this body of carbon-related media AIPP’s carbon toolkit. AIPP’s carbon toolkit, while being cautious and wary of…

How much in your life is preprogrammed? Presets, or default settings on technology that condition their use, are everywhere, from microwave popcorn buttons to predictive text and Instagram filters. But while presets facilitate the quick, efficient production of tasks or art, they simultaneously reinforce economic, political, and social norms. In this talk, interdisciplinary scholar Amy Skjerseth asks what presets allow and deny in media, music, and technology. She explores several case studies across media history to show how artists re-program…