HASTAC 2023 – Critical Making & Social Justice

The 2023 HASTAC conference invites our community to engage with creative and design-based approaches to technology and education, particularly around issues of social justice and allied movements of design justice, data justice and data feminism, algorithmic accountability, (digital) literacies, open knowledge, and accessibility in all its forms.

The conference will be hosted at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NYC from June 8–10, 2023. The conference is planned as an in-person experience, with some opportunities for online participation.

Registration is still available!

AI, so hot right now. There will be several talks

AI, so hot right now. There will be several talks about AI and platforms at #HASTAC2023⁠
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💻 By subverting the utilitarian text form of the consumer review and turning it into a literary form, Maria Baker and Luke Degnan created a narrative universe of interconnected reviews that examines the gap between what can be desired and what can be bought.⁠
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💻 Maureen Engel's paper argues that the actions and interactions of users themselves are an extremely important avenue for investigation by examining the communities of practice (CoPs) that are built around Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator.⁠
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💻 Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo explores what the development of viral deepfakes built from tools like Uberduck AI, which allow users to ventriloquize popular rappers like Jay-Z and Kanye West and use their voices to “perform” any written text within the platform, could mean for the future of hip-hop innovators.⁠
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💻 Michael Mandiberg notes that although Wikipedia has a widely studied gender gap, almost no research has attempted to discover if it has a comparable race and ethnicity gap among its editors or its articles. Mandiberg's paper will reveal how the ontology of whiteness shifts as it enters the database, functioning differently than existing theories of whiteness account for. ⁠
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💻Micah Musheno's paper outlines an analysis of credit scores as an information technology through the lens of America’s racialized economic history. It begins with the history of economic predation against Black Americans, and then expands to a broader intersectional view of groups most vulnerable to current exploitative financial practices linked to credit scoring models and ends with an eye towards future protections and regulations that could create a more equitable financial system in America. ⁠
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Learn more and add this to your schedule at the link in our bio!

A number of talks at #HASTAC2023 will cover how sc

A number of talks at #HASTAC2023 will cover how scholars are mediating the ancient world.⁠
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🏺Itzamna Huerta, Uzma Rizvi, and Mahnoor Fatima will present their paper addressing the multiple ways by which the documentation of colonial work at the Mohenjo-Daro (27° 15’ N, 68° 05’ E) archaeological site violates ethical sensibilities around information, data management, and accessibility.⁠
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🏺Spencer Striker will present 'Plague of Athens,' an XR learning experience designed to enhance student understanding of the role of pandemics in world history. ⁠
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🏺Rosanna Flouty and Craig Kapp will present their paper which explores the design and implementation of three student-led and student-created digital modules for visitors with diverse motor, cognitive, sensory, and behavior-emotional disabilities for a historic house museum located in Florence, Italy. ⁠
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🏺 lara Bosak-Schroeder's paper invites readers to put the canonical seven wonders, as well as other ancient monuments, in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks that are themselves monumental or engaged with ancient monumentality. ⁠
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Find more information about each of these talks at the link in our bio!

This 90-minute workshop is for designers and artis

This 90-minute workshop is for designers and artists who wish to learn about accessibility and tactile design through hands-on activities. The designers and facilitators of the workshop will be Lauren Race—Accessibility Researcher at New York University and Staff Accessibility Designer at Twitter, Chancey Fleet—Assistive Tech Coordinator at the New York Public Library's Andrew Heiskell Braille & Talking Book Library, and Amy Hurst—Associate Professor at New York University and Director of the NYU Ability Project. All materials will be provided by the facilitators.⁠
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The first 30 minutes will be dedicated to reviewing the best cases in which to make a tactile graphic and the various methods available to designers. The presenters will then detail four tactile design standards (1. Cut off the upper right-hand corner for page orientation; 2. One graphic per page; 3) Hollow is more discernible than solid; 4) Leave about a .25 inch between elements) for producing discernible tactile graphics and encourage participants to consider them throughout the exercises. The remaining 60 minutes will be reserved for gaining hands-on experience with two accessible tactile graphic production methods: 1) Sensational Blackboards; 2) Microcapsule printing. First, we will use Sensational Blackboards for nonvisual figure drawing, finding the “line of action” and hip and shoulder lines using wooden, poseable mannequins. Attendees will swap drawings with a partner and verbally describe their final piece as their partner explores it tactually. Next, the workshop will move on to microcapsule printing, distributing special microcapsule paper and Sharpies. Students will hand-draw a subject matter of their choosing that benefits from tactile transcription. We will then invite attendees to feed their sheet of microcapsule paper through a microcapsule fuser. All the areas with black ink, containing carbon, will puff up creating an instant tactile graphic. ⁠
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For more information or to add this to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

Traditionally, design research centers able-bodied

Traditionally, design research centers able-bodied, thin, white, cis-male experiences as normative. This results in systemic inequity experienced by design professionals, educators, students, and so-called “typical” users. Both the 2021 Queer Design Club and the 2019 AIGA Census document these ongoing racial and gender inequities. Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts documented that at the intersections of design and disability, designers are giving significant attention toward different ways of knowing and existing in space (2021). Framing the expression of embodiment as a form of critical praxis, this workshop will elicit expanded definitions of design education—both who it is for and how it should work. Individually and collectively, we will engage with critical making to generate embodied critiques and undertake collective acts of envisioning to build on emergent disciplinary activities.⁠
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This workshop seeks consensual, #ownvoices stories in the form of visual narratives and visualization of ideas for radical change in the form of collective envisioning and future-focused speculative designs. The workshop invites participation from self-defined individuals with “bodies traditionally excluded from the narratives and pedagogical practices of design education.” Such exclusion may be due to race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, body size, disability status, or intersectional identities (Crenshaw 1989) within or outside of these frameworks. In naming identity-based exclusion, we apply the social disability model (Barnes 2019), which locates inequity as a systemic and structural problem, not an individual circumstance. In the spirit of emancipatory research (Hutton and Heath, 2020) and narrative research (O’Grady, Clandinin and O’Toole 2018; Yazan 2018), this workshop breaks down the knowledge/action binary and makes space for sharing individual experiences in a public-facing research context as a way of recognizing silenced knowledges and dismantling existing power structures.⁠
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For more information or to add this to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

Footwear is a vital component in everyday dress, a

Footwear is a vital component in everyday dress, and in many contexts, wearing shoes is often a sociocultural necessity. What you wear on your feet can be physically liberating and visually leveraged as a tool for self-expression. However, footwear can also marginalize those who do not fit into hegemonic ideas of the ‘perfect body’. For many people with disabilities, finding appropriate, comfortable, and stylish footwear is a significant challenge. Systemic issues such as exclusive sizing charts and uncomfortable fit are primary barriers for people who use assistive devices such as ankle-foot orthotics or those with non-standard foot shapes or gait patterns. There are also a variety of design details that should be addressed to create more inclusive products. For example, for people with limited dexterity or physical mobility, such as those living with cerebral palsy or arthritis, fastening choice, access points, and material use are crucial elements to consider for ease when donning/doffing shoes. This workshop is an extension of @openstylelab’s previous work with the disability community to identify challenges in style accessibility and propose solutions to make shoes more inclusive using participatory design methods.⁠
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This workshop aims to examine the design process as well as the end product to question who has been systematically excluded and what effect it has on their daily lives. The session will be run by disabled and non-disabled designers, academics, and healthcare professionals. Overall, this research is an excellent opportunity to further test Open Style Lab’s co-design methodology, using footwear as a case study to think through and with materials.⁠
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For more information or to add this session to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023⁠

A number of talks at #HASTAC2023 will center the t

A number of talks at #HASTAC2023 will center the topic of (Re)Making the University ⁠
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🎓Chelsea Kopp's paper will argue that when global literary texts in English, like Helon Habila’s 2011 novel Oil On Water, are taught in solidarity with grassroots movements locally, they demystify the connections of neoliberal policies in our current age of global capitalism and climate collapse.⁠
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🎓Cyd Cipolla's paper urges those who are venturing into the world of hands-on learning to be deliberate in the spaces you create and the activities you cultivate, and to use these opportunities to help build resilient, inclusive communities. ⁠
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🎓Shaza Jendi will present on the Ya Salaam initiative. Situated at the intersection of design, education, and Arab migration, Jendi explores how to foster opportunities for Arab immigrant mothers (AIMs) to more fully participate in their children’s public school education.⁠
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🎓 Samira Shiridevich and Shaza Jendi reflect on using Horizontal Design and Co-design methodologies in the classroom. They will reflect on their teaching pedagogies as two female creatives and educators from two different parts of the Middle East. ⁠
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Find detailed information about each of these talks at the link in our bio!

This 90-minute workshop will explore AR as a tool

This 90-minute workshop will explore AR as a tool to promote engagement and support access to physical spaces for visitors with disabilities using multisensory tools in small historic houses. Participants will gain a greater understanding of digitally-based accessibility practices in historic houses. Our focus will be on software that has free tiers for hobbyists alongside a simplified drag-and-drop interface designed for non-programmers.⁠
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In addition to hands-on experience in building a working prototype, this workshop will also outline some of the obstacles in building digital experiences that are also accessible for small cultural non-profits, along with possible solutions to develop a new framework for collaboration. This workshop includes a short (10-minute) demonstration of three working prototypes built by students in a Museum Studies Graduate Program and a Computer Science Undergraduate Program over a six-month collaboration: 1) a grounds tour to digitally integrate historical and archival photography of Villa La Pietra built in Augmented Reality (AR), 2) a digital pop-up book of a 20th-century guest book as a relational database that serves as a historical record of relationships and social connections for visitors over seven decades, and 3) a 3D printed object that includes historical information and visual descriptions for a pair of 13th-century polychrome wooden saint figures on view at the Villa. The prototypes will be used in the workshop to demonstrate proof-of-concept for interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary student-led teams across the Humanities and Computer Science. Focus is placed on design and implementation to provide beyond the bounded regions of a visual field for visitors that are blind or have low vision.⁠
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No prior technology experience is required for this workshop. Care will be given to define terms and parameters for creating an AR-based project that participants can use as a proof-of-concept, especially to assist historic houses, small museums and other cultural heritage sites around the world in launching or funding more complex AR initiatives in the future.⁠
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More information at the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

Fawn is a movement workshop rooted in somatic inve

Fawn is a movement workshop rooted in somatic investigation of the 'fawn' trauma response.⁠
In contrast to the more commonly known trauma responses of 'fight', 'flight', or 'freeze', in the fawn response, when danger is perceived, we make ourselves physically smaller, act to appease the source of threat, or lose sight of personal needs and wants.⁠
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Combining movement and skills in self-defense and with a class structure rooted in somatic dance practices, this workshop will lead participants through a progressive series of individual, partnered, and group exercises that aim to help them explore ways to identify and assert personal boundaries. Creating a safe container for exploring psychological and embodied patterns, the workshop creates a container for participants to explore finding a sense of safety and agency within the body — as individuals, and relationally.⁠
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Alternating between movement exercises, brief writing prompts, and partnered / group verbal share outs, participants will be led through a safe container in which to explore embodied and emotional patterns and reflect on what safety and agency means to them.⁠
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The precedent for conversation will be framed by pointing out that we cannot control our safety, and how we live in an inherently unsafe world. Taking an intersectional lens, we will consider how at the same time, the world is more unsafe for certain confluences racial, sexual, gender identities than others.⁠
Dance experience is not required from participants. Individuals with self-identified movement practices as well as those without are welcome – one of the aims of the workshop is to expand the accessibility of somatic, movement based practices to outside of the dance world, where participants who have not been exposed to such modalities will likely benefit most.⁠
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For more information or to add this workshop to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

In speculative design, the focus is on experimenti

In speculative design, the focus is on experimenting with different methods to understand possibilities outside of the probabilistic narratives afforded by the self-fulfilling prophecies of cultural production and consumption.

The goal of this roundtable will be to overview and discuss the concept of speculative education, which we posit as an alternative to neo/liberal arts education that occupies the intellectual space between traditional humanities and entrepreneurial design-focused professional training. Speculative education can be viewed as a set of ideas that informs critical cultural and material production of public humanities in higher education through program development, and the curricular design of individual classes. The theoretical underpinning of speculative education is, we argue, posthumanism.

Guided by the question of “What could have been?” speculative education embeds the heterogeneous relationships between past, present, and future in critical engaged pedagogy to not only seek for inclusion and belonging, but more profoundly, radical relationalities between marginalized ways of being and knowing.

Katheryn Wright will present a first-year course called “First Year Inquiry: Making, Doing…” This is a general education course that positions critical making practices in the digital humanities as essential skills for all majors/programs of study across the college. Her particular section focuses on alternate reality games.

Jonathan Banfill will present a second-year course that focuses on introducing students to theory. Jonathan’s specific section focused on theorizing the relationship between borders (political, economic, and social barriers that divide us) and common spaces (designed to overcome material and invisible borders and foster community).

Weiling Deng will present a third-year digital research method course titled “Bodies in the Surveillance State.” The course adopts a feminist/queer approach to understand and interrogate new forms of digital surveillance technologies that subject human bodies to the punitive state power worldwide.

For more info or to add this to your schedule, head to the link in our bio. #HASTAC2023

This roundtable considers how experimental, innova

This roundtable considers how experimental, innovative, and emerging approaches for social justice-oriented teaching with games, gaming, and game design provide pedagogical opportunities for students to engage critically with the complexities of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, and other interlocking oppressive systems and ideologies of power. ⁠
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Games have been and continue to be important cultural sites for negotiating the politics of representation, inclusion, and equity, including exploitative labor injustices in the industry, issues of misrepresentation and underrepresentation of marginalized groups in gaming content, and online harassment and toxicity, to name a few concerns. Thus, games offer a compelling flashpoint for exploring issues related to social justice, particularly as questions concerning the ethics of various technology industries take center stage. ⁠
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Pragmatically, because games have become one of the most widely consumed and discussed media forms in contemporary culture, they offer advantages for teaching social justice by drawing on student engagement, familiarity, and interest with gaming. Additionally, games–as technologies built to enact interlocking processes–provide a medium for critical engagement with systemic and structural thinking.⁠
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The conversations featured here in this roundtable discuss both teaching game studies and game design for social justice in non-games-focused classes as well as social justice for the game studies and game design classroom. Through discussion of their experiences teaching with assignments, activities, and engagements with games–from game playing and game streaming to game studies, game design, and gaming events–the speakers explore how gaming can be used for developing and honing critical thinking, critical making, and critical world building toward social justice and equity.⁠
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For more information or to add this roundtable to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

The Creative Arts and the Contemplative Practices

The Creative Arts and the Contemplative Practices have existed for thousands of years and by incorporating them to storytelling (which has also existed since the dawn of time) allows storytellers to express themselves in interdisciplinary ways. In this hour and a half webinar, attendees will explore storytelling through the creative arts and learn skills of contemplative exercises that can have a positive impact not only during this pandemic (COVID-19, Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation Inequities) but throughout one’s life.⁠
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Participants in this workshop will:⁠
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☁️ Understand the possibilities and impact that storytelling has when incorporating the Arts, Creativity, and Contemplative Practices. Having the tools to allow people to authentically share their stories by healing and empowering the body, mind, and spirit, while at the same time cultivating an artistic, expressive, and ethical way of life.⁠
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☁️ Unite practice and theory, where the arts, creativity, and the contemplative practices can be explored and researched to not only fulfill conventional academic/clinical aspirations, but also point toward entirely new models of expression and learning within internal, relational, and societal development.⁠
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☁️ Excavate one’s personal, autobiographical experiences through storytelling while incorporating and promoting the arts, creativity, and the contemplative practices.⁠
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☁️ Explore and pursue personal, professional and artistic development by incorporating storytelling through creativity, art-making, and the contemplative practices.⁠
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☁️ Experience the therapeutic effects (medicine/healing) of storytelling, through the artistic, creative, contemplative practices, and the benefits it has on one’s physical body, mental health, and well-being.⁠
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For more information or to add this workshop to your sched, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

In this workshop, participants will work together

In this workshop, participants will work together to produce an interactive, virtual 3D environment composed of photographic fragments, drawn sketches, audio recordings and phone-based 3D scans of participants' immediate shared, embodied surroundings. Over the course of the workshop, participants will use their phones to capture audio, 2D and 3D scan-based source material and work together to compose this material into a 3D scene using the Unity game engine and the Community Game Development Toolkit. Participants will take a collage-based approach, composing a collection of audio-visual traces of participants bodies, clothing, belongings, and the shared, physical surroundings into a visually abstract scene that presents a hybrid embodied / disembodied experience of collective social, cultural and physical space.⁠
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Participants will then explore the resulting environment, charting a network of chance encounters with these artifacts, and a path of social and material connectivity. Each play-through of the scene will yield a unique journey through this collaboratively produced collage, representing a unique, virtual composition of participants’ physical, social and cultural togetherness.⁠
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For more information about this session or to add it to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

“He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom

“He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower.” —poet Mary Howitt (1800s)⁠
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Becoming a Flower is an interactive activity-based workshop that seeks to center other life forms in our making as a way of knowing differently. Such an endeavor explores how to bridge the disconnect between regenerative ecology and design, historically understood as a human-centered project. The workshop methodology is informed by participatory design as a practice.⁠
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Considering that the flowers around us are not only flowers but carriers of information, participants are invited to take a short sensory amble through the garden to relish in the bountiful presence of vegetal beings. June is the month for rose blossoms! While moving around, Brennan and Echeverria will explain the role of flowers as the reproductive organs of plants and how bees, crucial in the pollinator role, encounter them. Bees who see in ultraviolet wavelengths perceive UV patterns around the mouth of the flower. The patterns act as a guide, steering bees toward the nectar and pollen. More commonly, these visual signs, rather than scent, direct the bee’s pollination. These markings signal a message, shaping the bee’s behavior.⁠
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It is within this context that participants embark on the ‘flowers/posters’ exercise, using markers and scissors to collage found text and images from a random collection of current magazines and newspapers. One might consider the following as you work and in the final discussion: Like the flower, what signals will you circulate? What types of attraction might your message inspire? And, how might nature herself act as a guide in the development of metaphors or provocations in the fliers we make?⁠
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Participants are invited to create six copies of their individual posters to post around campus, nearby utility poles, and beyond, and/or to exchange with other contributors. The workshop will employ low-fi graphic design methods to ‘pollinate’ your ideas throughout the local community.⁠
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For more information and to add this to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

Based on different case studies using the Resilien

Based on different case studies using the Resilient Thinking Design tool, the goal of this participative action-research workshop will be a brainstorming session for the Pratt Public Sphere (PPS) communities' vision by capacity building through transdisciplinary and multi-governance processes. This collective participative workshop will focus on the Pratt Public Sphere as a pop-up counter institutional hub of creativity at the Pratt Institute Campus. The goal of this workshop is to facilitate a voice for the PPS community by giving them more tools and resources for building capacities and developing new cooperative visions. This workshop will converge in speculative narratives that will provide a vision to transition into a future PPS desired scenario for social and transformative change.⁠
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The workshop will engage the participants in two activities and be achieved by two intersecting processes: ⁠
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First, they will be given tools and resources for mapping the Prat Public Sphere ecosystem environment where they operate, being able to better understand the complexities and potentialities of those contexts, and will engage in a process of situating themselves. ⁠
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In the second part, participants will be invited to collaborate in creating speculative scenarios (what if?) and defining futures pluriverse (Escobar, 2018) that ‘give form’ to proposed visions to trigger systemic transitions; these short narratives will be made in the preferred media of the group’s participants (ideas, performances, drawings, hagstags, social media, etc.) and using the resilience thinking approach (De Balanzo and Rodriguez, 2018; Saez Ujaque et al, 2021). ⁠
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To join or learn more, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

With agency and citizenship in mind, this workshop

With agency and citizenship in mind, this workshop aims to create multidimensional critique experiences by interrogating traditional criticism methods rooted in canonical design knowledge and providing space for more decolonial, inclusive, and context-based design discourse. ⁠
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Framing the workshop as a forum for social engagement, the Dajana Nedic and Piper Schuerman aim to facilitate conversations and activities where participants can discuss the connection between current social issues and social justice movements, along with their personal and collective work. As a shared space for collaboration rather than assessment, they intend for this workshop to provide room for generative discussions that inspire action. They plan to utilize writing utensils, sticky notes, wall surfaces, mobile devices, and virtual collaborative platforms during the workshop to activate discussion and produce designed outcomes. By interrogating critiques, participants are invited to "shift away from the traditional convention where they are subjects" (Thompson, 2020) and empower them to become engaged citizens. Participants are also encouraged to develop an awareness for analyzing how critique structures align with their identity, personality, communication, cognitive needs, and ways of learning. By facilitating an active conversation focused on deconstructing traditional modes of critique, Nedic and Shcuerman strive to engage participants in co-creating and applying new formative and multidimensional critique methods based on their lived experiences.⁠
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For more information or to add this workshop to your schedule, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023⁠

The Ethical Designer Workshop and accompanying act

The Ethical Designer Workshop and accompanying activities is an approach that we use to introduce students to ethical and socially conscious design practices. The workshop was originally formulated in response to Ken Garland’s 1964 First Things First Manifesto (Garland, 1964) and Meredith Davis’ AIGA Design Futures Trend #4: Core Values Matter (Davis, 2018). Following the structure and sentiment of Garland’s manifesto, the Ethical Designer Workshop creates a collaborative space for a group of design students to develop a manifesto. The manifesto expresses the ideas, core values, and pledges of students, as individuals and a collective group, that they consider important to uphold as designers.⁠
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The intended participants of our workshop are designers and design educators who are interested in implementing strategies or structures for ethical design practice in their classrooms and workplaces. The workshop will provide a space for participants to engage in critical making through reflective practice and equip them with tools and approaches they can leverage to develop socially conscious and reflective designers and practices. While we’ve received valuable feedback from our students, we are looking to disseminate these strategies to educators, professionals, and practitioners to receive feedback that will help us to continue building upon the workshop and related activities.⁠
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The workshop participants will:⁠
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💭 Explore personal and collective ethics and values⁠
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💭 Engage in discussion and negotiation with other designers on ethics and values⁠
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💭Analyze the ethical implications of real world projects⁠
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💭Practice crafting statements that help them understand the importance of choosing words to communicate intended meaning⁠
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💭 Develop a manifesto that can be used as a reflective guide for their practice⁠
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💭Add to a shared collective resource hub⁠
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Learn more or add this workshop to your schedule at the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023⁠
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Donna Leishman will facilitate a face-to-face desi

Donna Leishman will facilitate a face-to-face design fiction workshop with a group of between 5-15 participants. Participants will use empathy mapping, role-play and participatory printmaking during the session and work collaboratively in groups of 5 with up to three pieces of English folklore as key sources, these offer a variety of perspectives on the affective ideals of ‘marriage,’ bringing together fascinating and obscured tales of hope, self-sacrifice and embodied female power whilst also considering a past where gender inequality and injustices were more acute.⁠
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The workshop will have three goals: to critically explore what is gained and by whom by the existence of these tales, to elicit and articulate the participants feelings towards cipher-like historical characters, and to explore our personal and collective relationship to rituals through experiencing first hand some ritual-play. The workshop will have two stages, the first Empathy Mapping Ghosts of the Past will last for 30 mins in which Leishman will share the key texts as the primary “semiotic resource” (Leeuwen, 2005: 285).⁠
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Participants will then play/speculate with the traditional function of the “empathy map” (Gray, 2010). An empathy map is a widely used tool within the field of UX and HCI practice, used to foster a deeper insight into the customer or service user's motivations. However, in this workshop participants will repurpose the mapping quadrants: Says? Thinks? Does? Feels? towards imagining the fictional characters inside their narrative frame. The group(s) will be invited to establish some visual drivers and map cultural associations (i.e. images, words, referents, emotions). Once the group(s) have externalised their thoughts, all will come together and discuss any patterns that have emerged and attempt to consider the function (goal) of these narratives in terms of what may be gained and by whom by their existence as folklore.⁠
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To join or learn more, head to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

This 90-minute workshop will consider the limits a

This 90-minute workshop will consider the limits and opportunities of professional standards and, collaborating across fields, explore approaches such as critical design and avant-garde art movements, and ultimately challenge conventionality by posing troublesome problems that encourage reflection and prompt consideration of alternative futures in education.⁠
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The workshop will begin with an introduction to the ACRL Framework, critical information literacy, and manifestos and principles created by art and design organizations such as Design Justice Network, BlackSpace, design studio Dunne & Raby, and the Fluxus movement. A review of critical design and the Situationist International idea of the dérive will position our workshop practice as a disruption to information literacy. Participants will then work in small groups to discuss the Framework through their disciplinary perspectives and according to their own pedagogical practices.⁠
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Inspired by the futurities envisioned by these manifestos, designers, and artists, the groups will engage in ideation and serious play through the creation of a card deck. A classic example is the deck Oblique Strategies, designed and originally published in 1975 by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt. Each card in the Oblique Strategies deck offers suggestions such as “Ask your body,” “Try faking it!,” and “Use an old idea” that are intended to help users break through a creative dilemma. In the introduction to the 5th edition (2001), Eno and Schmidt explain, “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.”⁠
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At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will share their card prompts with the facilitators, who will collate them into a Speculative Information Literacy deck that will be shared digitally. ⁠
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Learn more and sign up for the waitlist at the link in our bio!

This holistic and interactive workshop will focus

This holistic and interactive workshop will focus on student-centered pedagogical practices, and how they are applied when working with diverse undergraduate students, many of whom are from marginalized and underserved communities. It will spotlight a leadership and mentorship program entitled “The CUNY Peer Leaders Program,” in which the founding principles center on non-hierarchical learning structures that emphasize peer learning, and embedded components of social justice, student agency, and emotional wellness.⁠
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Next, the workshop will transition into a brief framework and then hands-on activity used in this program that has and can be adapted for many different areas of study and disciplines. This activity is entitled “Body-Mind Mapping,” which is an indigenous based/inspired practice of understanding the experiences of communities and peoples. Body-Mind Mapping aims to have participants ask themselves what their bodies are experiencing in forms of pain, pleasure, anxiety, and self-acknowledgement. This practice began within the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange in Edmonton and Psychosocial Support Initiative in South Africa. ⁠
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Participants are encouraged to use mixed media materials and tools to demonstrate their answers to the guiding questions in the exercise. Scrap pieces of paper, magazine clippings, ribbons, colorful construction paper, beads, feathers, and thread are among the materials that can be used. This practice offers hands-on expression often lost in the collegiate academic setting, and connects strongly to the conference theme of critical making. At the end of the workshop, participants may place their body maps against a wall for others to see in a “gallery walk style,” where they may engage with viewers and provide context to their maps or leave it up to artistic interpretation. ⁠
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For more information or to add this workshop to your schedule, go to the link in our bio! #HASTAC2023

We have several talks about social platforms and t

We have several talks about social platforms and their relationships to things like identity, politics, and digital culture taking place during #HASTAC2023.⁠
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🌐 Zhiwei Wang's Being Chinese Online: Discursive (Re)production of Internet-Mediated Chinese National Identity is a further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are (re)shaped online on an everyday basis by diverse socio-political actors (especially ordinary users) can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Chinese national sentiments on China’s Internet but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world.⁠
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🌐 Corinne Jones's “Content is King”: Content Moderators in an Information Economy asks: what rhetorical strategies naturalize the harm that content moderators often experience?⁠
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🌐 Ayushi Khemka's and Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman's paper Citational Politics and Positionality: Analyzing Ethics of Social Media Research works to understand the ethics of social media research in Digital Humanities by reviewing papers about social media research ethics that employed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis Protocol.⁠
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🌐 Lavanya Dahiya's What’s the #realdeal with #boycottism?: A Critical Analysis of Online Activism To Study Social Movement on digital platforms explores online activism leading to cancel culture and woke culture in and on digital spaces to highlight the existing power dimensions of networked societies.⁠
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