Łukasz Szulc: Feminist and Queer Manifestos for Digital Utopias
Digital Good Network: Keynote lecture
22 June 2023, 1:00PM – 2:45PM
The Wave, Lecture Theatre 2, University of Sheffield and online
The Digital Good Network is delighted to host Łukasz Szulc for a keynote lecture on Feminist and Queer Manifestos for Digital Utopias at the University of Sheffield.
When it comes to digital technology, academics in social sciences and humanities are often playing catch-up. The rapid acceleration of technological change, the black-box nature of major digital technologies and academics’ hindered access to Big Tech’s data force us to provide a largely belated or reactive critique. Critique alone is not enough to shape better digital futures. In this talk, Łukasz Szulc will build on the idea of utopia to think about the digital good in a radical and revolutionary way.
His focus will be on feminist and queer manifestos, which foreground the perspectives of marginalised actors in demanding utopic digital futures. From Donna Haraway’s classic Cyborg Manifesto to the Xenofeminist Manifesto and the Technoqueer Manifesto. From Glitch Feminism and Queer OS to Full-On Fully Automated Luxury Green Diffabled Trans* Feminist Queer Inter-Species Space Communism of Colour. Artists, activists and academics are reimagining digital technologies in creative and rebellious ways. What kind of digital utopias do they call for? What risks do they ask us to take? And how can we turn our research into manifestos for better digital futures?
About the speaker:
Łukasz Szulc (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester. He specializes in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Łukasz sat on the board of directors at the International Communication Association (ICA) and was a co-chair of ICA’s LGBTQ Studies interest group between 2017 and 2021. He is a member of editorial boards at the International Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, and Communication, Culture & Critique.