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Digital X Climate


Week One (Virtual): Monday 6/17/2024 - Friday 6/21/2024
Week Two (In Person/Hybrid): Monday 6/24/2023 - Friday 6/28/2023
Week Two Location: UM Campus, Ann Arbor, MI

Position Description

The Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan is excited to host its third annual Digital IDEAS Summer Institute. Drawing on the acronym Inclusion-Diversity-Equity-Access-Success, each year’s program focuses on a new pressing issue at the intersection of technology and social justice.

With this year’s theme, Digital X Climate, we welcome intensive inquiry into the relationship between digital culture and climate, broadly defined. The terms “digital” and “climate” form a timely, even urgent, pairing for critical interrogation. More and more, problems of climate pose an existential crisis for the future of our digital culture, as our reliance on digital technologies poses an existential crisis for our climate. We invite broad interpretations of what the X stands for in Digital X Climate.

Guided by our keynote lectures, panel respondents, and each other, we’ll explore these and other charged sites of convergence between digital and climate and ponder novel creative, theoretical, and practice-based modes for addressing and responding to them. What new recognitions spark at the meeting of digital studies and climate (social, political, affective, environmental)? What new modes of inquiry become possible when questions of the digital are brought to bear on life conditions online and off, and how they help us address issues of environmental justice, algorithmic harm, mutual aid, fake news and misinformation, mental health and social media, or political resistance? How does the concept of “climate” productively expand the purview of digital media studies (its objects, questions, methods) by challenging our traditional understandings of what constitutes digital media?

We’ll ask how we might conceive, reimagine, and contest the lived conditions and probable futures produced by digital technologies and the extent to which the digital itself can function as a tool of remediation, redress, and collective action.

 

Qualifications

Digital IDEAS is open to a broad cohort, including advanced graduate students from campuses in the US and abroad, early career scholars, and alt-ac practitioners, artists, and activists. Over the course of two weeks, attendees will participate in keynote lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and group discussions. The institute will be held in a hybrid format: one week entirely online and one week with an option to attend in person or online.


Cost of Attendance

$1,500 - Registration Fee

$2,000 - Registration Fee including UM Dorm Housing Accommodations (lodging only)

There will be scholarships available to assist with the cost of attendance. Scholarships will be awarded based on need. Please complete the scholarship section in the application to be considered. In this section of the application you will be asked to indicate the scholarship amount you are requesting. 


Application Process & Timeline

Applications are due by February 23, 2024. All applicants will be notified of their acceptance status (including financial support) by March 2024.

The application can be found here. 

 

Please contact Sarah Torsch at dsi-studentservices@umich.edu if you have any questions about the application or need additional assistance.