Dear Colleagues, If you're in Aarhus, Denmark, this week, drop by to hear this talk by Terri! Also, thanks for distributing this announcement to those who might find it relevant. *** The STS group and Department of Information Studies invites you to attend a talk by Theresa Senft, PhD, New York University. This Week! Wednesday, June 25 10 (:15) - 12:00 Nygård 2nd floor Lunchroom Aarhus University *Title:* From Gazing to Grabbing: Feeling One’s Way through Data that Moves" *Speaker:* Theresa Senft, Ph.D., New York University *Abstract: *What does it mean to write about data that moves us emotionally, data that moves through a range of actors and networks online, or both of these? I have long argued that rather than solely theorizing social media transactions through filmic conceptions like “the gaze” or even televisual language like “the glance,” internet scholars might be better served by the tactile notion of “the grab.” I chose the word because of its relation to skin: grab means to grasp, to seize for a moment, to capture (an object, attention), and, of course, to leave open for interpretation, as in the saying “up for grabs.” From a materialist perspective, the grab interests me because it tends toward commodity fetishism, rather than scopophilia (the psychic modality of the gaze.) From a feminist and anti-racist perspective, the politics of the grab certainly matter: it’s difficult to argue with the fact that historically, some bodies have been grabbed more than others In this talk, I focus on “grabbing” as a both theoretical construct and concrete practice of investigation, feeling, and writing. To do this, I combine Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rythymanalysis as method, Roland Barthes’s thoughts on writing spectatorship as “wound,” Susanna Passonen’s arguments about working through sensation as ethical praxis, and my own research, in which I consider the relationship between online “selfie culture” and recent developments in biometric and racial profiling practices, worldwide. *Bio:* Theresa M. Senft’s is an internationally recognized scholar of digital media. Her work explores the impact of digital media technologies on cultural conceptions of the private, the public, the pornographic, and the pedagogic in global society. Her most recent book is Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks (Lang: 2008.) She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Social Media (with Jeremy Hunsinger, Routledge: 2014) and working on a book tentatively titled, Fame to Fifteen: Social Media and the Micro-Celebrity Moment. Senft is on the faculty at the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University, where she teaches classes on media, writing, and aesthetic theory. Prior to that, she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London’s Media Studies Program in the U.K..She most recently founded the international Selfie Research Network and is editing a special issue on the topic of Selfies for the International Journal of Communication. ***************************************************** Annette N. Markham, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics & Communication, Aarhus University Guest Professor, Department of Informatics, Umeå University, Sweden Affiliate Professor, School of Communication, Loyola University, Chicago amarkham@gmail.com http://markham.internetinquiry.org/ Twitter: annettemarkham