Digital Humanities in the Age of Empire & Authoritarianism

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Bringing together authors of three recently published books, this roundtable considers why and how digital technologies contribute to and reflect “late-stage American empire” – with its voracious innovations in hetetrocolonial white supremacy and authoritarianism – and what we might learn from the digital labours, pleasures and protocols emerging from its oppositions. Anita Say Chan’s book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (Jan. 2025), “explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today” (Chan 2025). T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault’s book, Heavy Processing (Nov. 2024), is grounded in the long and proud lesbian-leaning trans- feminist queer tradition of making a mountain out of a molehill, drawing together activist, artistic, and scholarly work that is both about and not about digital materials to critically reorient digital research methods calibrated for accountability and relationship-building. The DISCO Network brings us Technoskepticism (Feb. 2025), “a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies.” (DISCO 2025).

Our relationship with technology is often transactional or exploitative, and this is especially true for marginalised users. In Technoskepticism (Stanford University Press, 2025) we question our position as co-producers – those who make with technologies – as opposed to fungible datasets, exploited in the production of technology. The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first, on disability, creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second, on digital nostalgia and users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third, on the violence inherent in A.I.-generation of Black bodies and styles. Finally, we reconfigure the process of academic knowledge-making, from individual to collective practice.

Heavy Processing (punctum books, 2024) takes the joke of “lesbian processing” seriously as a research method and traces the multi-directional genealogies and vast affinities of processing-heavy methods as innovations in information technologies (operating systems, central processing units, network designs). Part methods handbook, manifesto, and survival guide, this book opens up the fields of information studies, data studies, digital media studies, and digital humanities to critical digital methods, information technologies, and infrastructures: trans- feminist and queer cultural protocols and ways of working.

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, January 7, 2025) draws a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's violent and extractive "big data" regimes. But it also illuminates feminist and immigrant solidarities from over a century ago that resisted dominant institutional research norms and led in developing alternative data practices - and whose legacy continues in global justice-based data initiatives today.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Rianna Walcott, University of Maryland

Panelists

• T.L. Cowan, University of Toronto

• David Adelman, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Kevin C. Winstead, University of Florida

• Jas Rault, University of Toronto

• Rianna Walcott, University of Maryland

Biographical Information

Organizer / Chair :

Rianna Walcott

Presenter Bios:

The DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network is an intergenerational collective of 14 researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners. With funding support from the Mellon Foundation, the DISCO Network convenes a national network of scholars who conduct cutting-edge research, offer critical analysis, and develop optimistic solutions about the cultural implications of technology, racial inequality, histories of exclusion, disability justice, techno-ableism, and digital racial politics.

T.L. Cowan (she/they) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as a cabaret and video artist. Her “GLITTERfesto: An Open Call in Trinity Formation for a Revolutionary Movement of Activist Performance Based on the Premise That Social Justice is Fabulous,” is featured in the exhibition GLITTER, at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (28 February to 12 October 2025). T.L. frequently collaborates with Jas Rault. They are co-authors of the book Heavy Processing, about trans- feminist and queer digital (and more) research matters, methods, and ethics (open access, punctum books, 2024).

Jas Rault (they/them) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture, Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Jas’s research focuses on trans- feminist and queer digital praxes and protocols; media histories of settler coloniality, white supremacy and sexuality; aesthetics and affects of social movements. Jas frequently collaborates with T.L. Cowan. They are co-authors of the book Heavy Processing, about trans- feminist and queer digital (and more) research matters, methods, and ethics (open access, punctum books, 2024).

Anita Say Chan (she/her) is a scholar and educator dedicated to feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. She is an Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media, and founder of the Community Data Clinic at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism (MIT Press 2014) and Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech & Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press 2025).